The Greatest Terrorist Act in American History?

The more I hear the mantra about Timothy McVeigh's dastardly deed as "the greatest terrorist act in American history", the more nervous I become. The American public, surfing as it does along the increasingly myopic wave of television news, learns less and less about our real history of internal violence, just as scholars and activists have discovered more and more about what has actually transpired in our country in the last two centuries. This mantra's manic repetition amounts to involuntary brainwashing. But the Big Picture is slowly filling in.

For example, last month as I made a nostalgic golden jubilee tour of the Michigan I grew up in, a stop in Duluth, MN found that city preparing for an 80th anniversary act of reparation for the lynching of several blacks out of the local jail--a community act of repentance organized by the first black mayor of that city. Though I experienced the 1943 and 1967 Detroit riots firsthand, I thought they were cooler up on the Iron Range, with its hard compassionate core of Farmer/Labor social democrats.

I had just recently also learned of the Tulsa riots of 1920 where many Negroes were killed as their neighborhood was laid waste. Both outbreaks of violence apparently stemmed from the whites' defensively reacting to "uppity Nigger" soldiers lately returned from World War I. And we are only recently discovering as well on HBO that hundreds of black soldiers were massacred in Mississippi during World War II.

The usual reaction of whites challenged in their oppressive roles has been to lynch. It is my judgment that the disproportionate incarceration for crack/cocaine use is a not so subtle form of virtual lynching. I'm not even referring to black slavery and Amerind genocide. I'm talking about the blood lust of the American people as a quick fix for racial injustice. Amnesty International is not joking when they chide the U.S. for pervasive civil rights abuses. Even the recent Florida election displayed egregious differences between and white and black voting access.

But I come not to exculpate McVeigh, but to try to learn from the horrors he set in train. Let us not forget that it was the FBI/ATF massacre at Waco that set him hating. And Ruby Ridge. I am much more worried about the long term impunity our military industrial complexities. It appalled me when Madeline Albright was complacent about the hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children who died because of our Gulf War sanctions.

Talk about collateral damages. And the commander of PR flacking submarine which snuffed about Japanese school children lives, just to give a cheap thrill to oil rich campaign contributors. And the slap on the wrist to the hotdogging Marine pilots who sent almost a dozen skiers to their deaths when they sliced through the gondola cables showinng off to each other. And the marines on Okinawa molesting school age children. A pattern emerges of impunity. Both at home and abroad. This hubris will surely lead us into further disasters.

I happen to be against capital punishment. And last night WYBE-TV aired a luminous biography of the late great bishop of Chicago, Joseph Cardinal Bernardin, whose "seamless garment" pro-life philosophy was very cogently explained--no abortion, no capital punishment, no unjust wars. Americans tend to dismiss European unanimity against capital punishment as weak Euro-wimpiness.

As a historian of American culture I used to explain to my students the schizophrenic nature of our politics caused by our idealistic superegos pretending we lived in an unfallen Eden whilst our ids were living l00% in a materialistic Eldorado. Until we heal this split in the national psyche, we will be a threat to the rest of the world as well as to ourselves. The tragedy of Oklahoma City is another "last chance" to heal ourselves by understanding our violent nature rather than obsessing about McVeigh's. In a very real sense, that mad bomber was as American as apple pie.