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Five Days That
Shook The World:
Seattle and Beyond
By
Alexander Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
with Photos
by Allan Sekula
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Published on April 11
THE CARPENTER'S SPLIT
McCarron Takes
The Carpenters Union
Out of the AFL-CIO
THE FAKE FIGHT ON CAMPAIGN
FINANCE REFORM
McCain and Feingold
Sit Still as Their Bill
is Ravaged
US BULLIES JUDGES TO FALSE
VERDICT IN LOCKERBIE TRIAL
Published on March 11
"THE RICH ARE TREMBLING"
CounterPunch Reports From
Mexico
City on the Arrival of
the Zapatistas
"TIFFANY'S ON WINGS"
The Madness of the
F-22 Fighter Plane
WAR CRIMINAL!
Confronting
Elliott Abrams
Published on February 28
THE PARDONER'S TALE
Liberals Kick Bill,
Dance with Bush
TED TURNER'S
GOLDEN SHOWERS
America's Land Lord
Locks Out Poor and
Electroshocks Wolves
THAT'S NOT JAZZ!
The Aesthetic Crimes of
Ken Burns
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Whiteout:
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April 18,
2001
Oklahoma City
and Timothy McVeigh
Drive along Interstate 40 through Oklahoma
City, as a CounterPunch editor did in late March, and one is
encouraged to make a detour into downtown, to whose renewal as
a tourist destination McVeigh has made an ironic contribution.
From Interstate 40 signs alert travellers to the correct route
to the Oklahoma City National Memorial, the only feature of the
city deemed worthy of such advertisement. There were maybe a
couple of hundred visitors in an otherwise entirely empty downtown.
Cockburn parked not so far from where Timothy McVeigh left his
Ryder truck packed with 4,800 pounds of ammonium nitrate and
fuel oil on April 19, 1995, lit the fuse and was driving out
of town when the truck went up at 9.02 am, killing 168 people.
There's a chain link fence with various memorabilia stuck to
it, poems by kids, and several irritating statements encased
in plastic, written by Dr Paul Heath, self-described bombing
"survivor", who was in the VA on the fifth floor. A
typical Heath-gram: "The bombing was surely an evil act
that should not have happened. Because of this evil a white statue
of Jesus now stands off-site with its back turned away from the
site and facing 168 empty spaces in a black stone wall."
The acreage previously occupied by the Alfred P. Murrah federal
building now holds a vast reflecting pool bracketed by two modernist
"gates of time", respectively labelled 9.01 and 9.03.
South of the pool there are 168 odd looking chairs, with high
bronze backs and plastic seats which light up at night, each
displaying a name. On a wall nearby there are the names of "survivors".
There's also a "survivor tree" from the 1920s, an elm
that beat not only McVeigh but Dutch elm disease.
The old Journal Record building next door is now a memorial center,
also housing an Institute for the Prevention of Terrorism. In
the shop you can buy a K-9 poster, featuring Bella (L.A. Search
Dogs), Butch (Vancouver Fire and Rescue), Bethany (Oklahoma Bureau
of Narcotics), Keli (Woof Search and Rescue Unit) plus about
45 other dogs who had distinguished themselves in the post-bombing
hours.
There's audio-visual evocation of the news noises on April 19,
1995, plus an effective tape of a fellow trying to get his permit
to bottle and sell water. This proceeding was going on across
the street and on the tape you hear the bomb go off and a sententious
voice adds that the permit seeker was using government correctly
for peaceful ends, unlike McVeigh. This is a theme sounded throughout
the exhibition in many different ways, none more vigorously that
when lauding the Oklahoma citizens and survivors who rushed to
Washington DC to press (successfully) for rapid passage of the
Effective Death Penalty Act.
The memorial is supposed to educate us about terror and about
the bombing, yet an uninformed person could spend several hours
in it and leave without knowing anything more about the perpetrator
of the Oklahoma bombing, beyond the fact that he was white and
his name was McVeigh. Certainly not that he was a veteran of
the US Army, well trained to kill by Uncle Sam and actually quite
vocal on his motives, which on his various accounts derived from
government tyranny, the federal onslaughts at Ruby Ridge and
Waco plus the attack on Iraq.
McVeigh's role is advertised
by just one photograph, the familiar one of the US Army vet being
marched along in orange jumpsuit and handcuffs by FBI men. You
wouldn't know anything about the man who parked the Ryder truck
in front of the Murrah building, beyond the fact that he was
white. You wouldn't know he was born in Pendleton, near Buffalo,
that his father was a working man, employed by GM, that McVeigh
was an okay student but couldn't get a job in the Reagan recession
of the Eighties that laid waste the old industrial north-east.
He did briefly work as a security guard in a warehouse in the
awful racist, upstate town of Cheektowaga. Decorated veteran
of the Iraqi war? There's no mention of McVeigh's military career.
The photographs of McVeigh
outside the Branch Davidian compound near Waco during the siege
are also nowhere to be found, though they advertise McVeigh's
prime stated motivation, to strike back at the federal government
that killed over 80 civilians including 24 children. There is
a large map of the United States in the exhibit rooms.
McVeigh, scheduled to meet the Reaper this coming May, is certainly
more coherent than the memorialists in Oklahoma City, who have
produced a self-congratulatory mishmash of kitsch. Here's a couple
of paragraphs from his handwritten submission to Media By-Pass
in 1998: "Remember Dresden? How about Hanoi? Tripoli? Baghdad?
What about the big ones - Hiroshima and Nagasaki? (At these two
locations, the US killed at least 150,000 noncombatants - mostly
women and children - in the blink of an eye. Thousands more took
hours, days, weeks, or months to die.) If Saddam is such a demon,
and people are calling for war crimes charges against him and
his nation, whey do we not hear the same cry for blood directed
at those responsible for even greater amounts of 'mass destruction'-
like those responsible and involved in dropping bombs on the
cities mentioned above?
"The truth is, the U.S.
has set the standard when it comes to the stockpiling and use
of weapons of mass destruction. Hypocrisy when it comes to the
death of children? In Oklahoma City, it was family convenience
that explained the presence of a day-care center placed between
street level and the law enforcement agencies which occupied
the upper floors of the building. Yet when discussion shifts
to Iraq, any day-care center in a government building instantly
becomes 'a shield.' Think about that. (Actually, there is a difference
here. The administration has admitted to knowledge of the presence
of children in or near Iraqi government buildings, yet they still
proceed with their plans to bomb - saying that they cannot be
held responsible if children die. There is no such proof, however,
that knowledge of the presence of children existed in relation
to the Oklahoma City bombing.)"
Visitors to the Memorial seemed vaguely unsatisfied by the displays.
The Memorial could have offered them so much more, had its organizers
opted to transcend self-congratulation and banality. How about
a weekly drama or even debate in front of the Survivor Tree about
the nature of terrorism, a dissection of McVeigh's professed
motives, a comparison of terrorist acts around the world, perpetrated
by states and by individuals. Would not the tourists, some of
them retired from the military, have relished an event of this
nature?
But the Memorial's organizers have declined all such avenues
of opportunity. Better to sit tight and deal with the onslaught
as a vacuum between 9.01 and 9.03, as a terrible piece of bad
luck when Mom might not have left her kid off at the child care
center on the second floor, when the HUD secretary on the Fifth
Floor might have taken the day off, might have stepped back a
couple of yards just before the floor fell away. Safer to think
of the attack in the Midwestern heartland as a matter involving
senselessness and bad luck rather than political events and historical
circumstances.
McVeigh's American as apple pie too, not least in the media-obsessed
grotesquerie of his (presumptively) final days, trying to have
his "state-assisted suicide" screened on national tv,
wishing he could smuggle out his sperm to female admirers, planning
to cry out "168 to 1" in his final statement. That's
a lousy, evil way to assess the efficacy of political terror,
but after all, look at the outfit that trained him up for his
terrible deed.
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