Some may recall a curio in 2001's sleepy late-summer news season, equal parts shark attack and trade with Mexico: a lengthy article Gore Vidal wrote for the September Vanity Fair in the wake of Timothy McVeigh's execution. Since McVeigh was no longer with us, Vidal believed the time was right for a retrospective on the Oklahoma City bombing.
The reasons for the bombing were readily available. Turns out McVeigh, like the Unabomber, had a manifesto: a series of letters he exchanged with Vidal after reading an earlier article Vidal had written on civil liberties. The right-wing extremist McVeigh felt much the same as his left-wing expatriate correspondent: something had gone terribly wrong with what was passing for "liberty" in the United States. Where one railed against this with the published written word, the other spoke in violence, using it as a perverse kind of emphasis, a punctuation mark.
When Vidal's article went to press in the September Vanity Fair, the Oklahoma City bombing was the worst terrorist attack in history on American soil. It was worth understanding why it happened. Particularly since, as Vidal explains, four years before the bombing McVeigh was a patriotic Army man, a model soldier in the Gulf War. This seems like a contradiction. But McVeigh's war service was part of the reason his anti-government fervor was eventually to grow so formidable. The experience allowed McVeigh to say of Waco and Ruby Ridge that "[f]or all intents and purposes, federal agents had become 'soldiers' (using military language, tactics, techniques, equipment, language, dress, organization and mindset) and they were escalating their behavior."
McVeigh's specialized knowledge certainly made it likely he would be among the first to register any looming mobilization of the American army against the nation's citizens. His sensitivity to the implications of his own conduct, though, seems much less keen. In appropriating military tactics to mount his assault on Oklahoma City, McVeigh inflicted on the American people exactly what he claimed to be most upset about. He became for all intents and purposes a soldier acting on U.S. soil, directing the nightmarish violence of the U.S. war machine against his fellow citizens.
Although he never explains why his act doesn't merit the same derision he casts on U.S. foreign policy, McVeigh does at least try to justify himself: "Bombing the Murrah Federal Building was morally and strategically equivalent to the U.S. hitting a government building in Serbia, Iraq, or other nations," he explains. "Based on observations of my own government, I viewed this action as an acceptable option."
But if bombing Iraq is "morally" "acceptable," one wants to reply, whence the outrage that led to the destruction of the Murrah Building in the first place? If, on the other hand, bombarding populations is morally unacceptable, shouldn't other means be used to combat it? The apparent difference for McVeigh is that the violence at Waco was directed against Americans. The war, as he perceived it, was between the country's government and its citizens.
The murder of government employees was unfortunate but necessary in his mind, because it could make the government stop attacking the people. But it wasn't possible to destroy the government or force it into submission with a single strike. Instead, McVeigh's point with Oklahoma City was to send a message. "He committed the act mostly out of revenge because of the Waco assault," Vidal quotes McVeigh's psychiatrist as saying, "but also because he wanted to make a political statement about the role of the federal government and protest the use of force against the citizens."
A man who plainly knew a great deal about violence, McVeigh seems to have had a much poorer grasp of effective communication strategies. He demonstrates both in a letter to Mr. Vidal, in which he says that Waco was all the evidence he needed to prove that a war was underway on U.S. soil, and that therefore:
" . . . (S)hould not the OKC bombing be considered a "counter-attack" rather than a self-declared war? Would it not be more akin to Hiroshima than Pearl Harbor? (I'm sure the Japanese were just as shocked and surprised at Hiroshima in fact, was that anticipated effect not part and parcel of the overall strategy of that bombing?)"The message of Hiroshima, as parsed by President Truman in the days following in a statement to the Japanese, was: "surrender, or face complete destruction." By this logic, presumably, the federal government would capitulate following the shock and surprise of Oklahoma City? Hardly. Instead they passed an anti-terrorism law far more injurious to American civil liberties than to terrorists thus compounding the problem that led to Oklahoma City in the first place. The message McVeigh hoped to send appears not to have gotten across. Chalk this up to poor communication.
And yet McVeigh's grasp of the language of violence appears quite excellent. Notice how closely Oklahoma City's intended message, shock and surprise, echoes the intended message of the Baghdad bombing McVeigh did not survive to see: the already too-often quoted "shock and awe." This ferocious assault on a civilian population was purportedly intended to convey to the Iraqi people the necessity of overthrowing the Hussein regime or, alternately, to convey to Hussein the futility of any action save surrender.
Notice also how closely McVeigh's methods approximate those of shock and awe's architects, who hoped to create a "Hiroshima effect" with the bombardment. And observe McVeigh's affinity with that other terrorist practitioner, Osama bin Laden who famously sought to visit a "Hiroshima" on the United States on September 11.
How thoroughly have all these messages failed to come across? Presumably, in the wake of "shock and awe" Hussein's subjects would rage at his palace gates even as Hussein, stunned with fear, fled the country rather than face annihilation. Instead, even the military has had to admit that resistance to the American ground offensive in Iraq has been surprisingly "stubborn," expatriated Iraqis moved back home to fight to the death, and Hussein dug in his heels, promising the Americans a "quagmire" in Baghdad.
Meanwhile, has the U.S. addressed any of bin Laden's stated concerns, which September 11 was intended to underscore? Has the government withdrawn its military presence from Saudi Arabia or stemmed its aid for Israel? Has godless Hollywood invited fundamentalist Muslim clerics to join the MPAA? Are any of these things even up for discussion? Hardly.
We can only conclude that the problem is not with the messages violence is used to convey, but with the use of violence as a medium to convey messages at all. Violence communicates nothing to the victims who perish as a result of it, by definition. To the rest the wounded, the maimed and mutilated, the emotionally and spiritually traumatized, the horrified onlookers and the grieving widows, widowers, and orphans the message violence communicates is unpredictable. History has shown, however, that abject capitulation is rarely the result of it.
Consider, for example, a shooting in late March 2003 of a van full of civilians at a military post in Iraq. Among the horrors: an injured woman in the back of the van, cradling the mangled bodies of her dead children. She tried to protect them, one imagines, only to have the bullets that killed them pass through her arms.
Such nightmares sabotage communication; they traumatize those involved to the point that rational message reception isn't possible. The woman in the van was frozen with physical agony, anguish, and disbelief. Sgt. Mario Manzano, an American soldier who witnessed the shooting, described it as "the most horrible thing I have ever seen," and that "I hope I never see it again."
Good and Evil
Despite the poor track record of violence as a tool for making points, it is regularly first out of the toolbox whenever a problem confounds those who pretend to govern. Reasoned argument is rarely provided to justify this.
The most recent plague of violence, the Bush administration's hostile annexation of Iraq, has been justified in any number of misleading and contradictory ways. Has the U.S. military slaughtered Iraqi soldiers and civilians alike in order to win them a liberation they haven't asked for? Did the administration attack Iraq to prevent it from infecting the U.S. with anthrax, even though precedent demonstrates we have more to fear from Fort Detrick than Saddam Hussein in this regard? Why has it taken 20 years for the administration to react with outrage to Hussein's use of chemical weapons? Did the U.S. act outside the authority of the U.N. in order to uphold its resolutions? Or is the administration trying to stave off arms proliferation, even as its war prompts huge demonstrations in nuclear-armed Pakistan and our own military refuses to rule out using weapons of mass destruction?
One might expect that, given the money invested in public relations and perception management to sell the war domestically, the military spokespeople and reactionary media pundits would have these contradictions thoroughly ironed out by now. The argument for war according to the cable news networks would be a polished thing, firmly logical and strictly consistent even as it drew a patently absurd conclusion: that the world's current problems call, more than anything else, for a massive military campaign costing tens of thousands of lives.
But the pro-war argument is not consistent. Instead, broadly speaking, it goes down like a Hollywood blockbuster: with a lousy, ill-thought-out script, but a gazillion dollars in special effects. The glitzy and not-so-subtly war-embracing culture of cable news (MSNBC's theme for its round-the-clock coverage of the Bush invasion was a fancy on-screen graphic reading, "Target: Iraq") covers up these contradictions instead of trying to sort them out and explain them. Violence does not communicate; it captivates.
Vidal puts this a little differently. "The function, alas, of Corporate Media," he says, is "keeping information from the public." One key way of doing this is to submerge questions of "good and evil" or, more precisely, the question of whether any particular exercise of state power is just under a fog of editing, production and rhetorical tricks that reinforce readily available presuppositions about who's "good" and who's "evil." These presuppositions are grounded more in idealistic myths of American exceptionalism than on any sober discussion of fact. The process lends itself to highlighting a television-friendly question who will win, us or them? but does so by expunging even the most basic information.
Take Jeremy Glick, the Sept. 11 family member who, on February 4, 2003, mentioned on the O'Reilly Factor that throughout the 1980s, the CIA propped up the same Islamic fundamentalist groups George W. Bush supposedly launched Operation Anaconda in Afghanistan to eradicate. A vocal and public war supporter, O'Reilly would presumably be more familiar than most with the arguments in favor of going to war. Did he respond by clarifying the government's relationship with the mujahedin for Glick and for the audience, to demonstrate that there was nothing to the rumor or that war was justified regardless? Actually, he repeatedly told Glick to shut up, had his guest's microphone turned off and, after the cameras stopped rolling, reportedly threatened to tear Glick "to fucking pieces."
According to O'Reilly, apparently, any exercise of state power is just. Challenging its exercise is prima facie unjust, and particularly, challenges to the definitions of "good" and "evil" that underlie the exercise of power make one eligible for the "evil" category. This even though all the while the formal reasons for the definitions are never made clear. You're either with Bill and W. and America, or you're with the terrorists and don't ask any embarrassing questions, or we'll assume you're with the terrorists.
The effect of this, rhetorically, is to marginalize the whole question of "good" and "evil." If every time it is raised, the person raising it is harangued until he or she shuts up, it eventually comes to seem obsolete an unacknowledged nothing, vaguely recalled for a time and then utterly forgotten. When criticism of the use of state power is curtailed, such amnesia the curious, vacant inability to ask basic moral or ethical questions, or even to acknowledge their existence, the amnesia George Orwell describes so well in "1984" is the usual result.
In America this process did not begin on September 11, but, as Vidal points out, has been underway for quite some time. How else to explain the absence of public outrage at ex-CIA director William Colby's remarks to Nebraska senator John DeCamp, an exchange Vidal quotes at length in "The Meaning of Timothy McVeigh"? Not long before Oklahoma City, Colby confided that the "militia movement's" main threat is its size and popularity. He used oddly populist terms that describe the militia not so much as dissenters in general. "Things get dangerous," he said, when "you have a true movement millions of citizens believing something, particularly when the movement is made up of society's average, successful citizens."
What about political movements that are not so widely accepted? Colby's perfectly clear on this. "A few nuts or dissidents," he says, "can be dealt with, justly or otherwise so that they do not pose a danger to the system." The emphasis is Vidal's, and mine in turn. To propose so blithely that state power may be routinely exercised without paying attention to whether the exercise is just, is to refer obliquely to the uncoupling of one from the other. State power is used, instead, in the interest of the "system" (whatever that might be), and the "good" and "evil" categories needed to justify that use of power are defined haphazardly after the fact.
Absent any sense of clarity regarding who constitutes "good" and who constitutes "evil" in the Great Game of war and terrorism, violence now registers as an act of nature state-sponsored violence much more apocalyptically so. It swoops over, down, and upon the unsuspecting, it wipes out the lives and livelihoods of those who wish nothing more than a sustainable existence for themselves and their families. Because it is prohibited to ask why this must be so, state-sponsored violence comes to seem as arbitrary as the downhill flow of magma from an exploding volcano, and leaves similarly blighted wastelands in its wake.
Witnesses to the aftermath of state-sponsored war testify mostly to its indescribability. Defense of an economic system leads to the systematic use of force, an all-erasing rain of metal, heat and poison. If "freelance" terrorism creates blanks in which society reconstructs and memorializes the lots where the Murrah building, the World Trade Center and part of the Pentagon once stood state-sponsored terrorism often wipes out virtually the entire culture it targets. The question of whether the assault at Waco was just has always been hard to answer. So few Branch Davidians survived to give their version of the story; for good or ill, their faith no longer exists.
So too is it with the seemingly boundless killing fields of the 1991 Gulf war. In his best-selling memoir "Jarhead," Anthony Swofford describes a landscape of burned-out vehicles and cooked corpses that spans for miles, testifying to little except that some manner of human society once existed there. Such obliteration is a characteristic of violent state power, amply manifest in the ongoing shift in the archive from recollections of culture to recollections of wreckage. The holocaust that transformed mid-century European Judaism into vast pits of ruined bodies. The A-bomb that obliterated Hiroshima, transforming its markets and homes and networks of streets into a forensic study of blast effects. Today the IDF is gradually paving over the occupied territories of Palestine, exacting a price not only in lives but in forgotten ways of life. Baghdad museums become rooms full of broken clutter, effacing much of a history that spanned five millennia.
Testifying on McVeigh's behalf during his trial, fellow soldier William Dilly alludes to the killing fields that Anthony Swofford was later to describe in such detail. Dilly affirms that of his platoon in the 1991 war, only McVeigh and one other soldier left the Persian Gulf with a photographic record of what had happened. "[McVeigh] and Rodriguez were the only people that thought to bring cameras before [the assault]," he says. "We all got them after the battles, and the first four days was the only time we saw the bodies. They cleaned them up real quick. So[McVeigh] and Lieutenant Rodriguez were the only ones that got pictures of any dead Iraqis."
In his days as a model soldier, McVeigh showed "compassion" for the "locals" in Iraq, according to his stateside friend Vicki Hodge. "He wanted to help them out," she testified in McVeigh's trial, because "he felt bad for the situation they were in." One can only speculate on how McVeigh must have felt when he witnessed the fields of the dead in the Iraqi desert. But it could only have seemed like an act of nature until the aftermath itself was swept away. This cover-up was a kind of confession, and surely helped spur McVeigh's tragic and misguided effort, four years later, to retrieve "good and evil" through the exercise of violent force.
The mass extermination of "Desert Storm" was a woefully predictable entry in the sad annals of state-sponsored warfare. But for those who witnessed the wholesale massacre perpetuated in the Gulf desert, the ensuing cleanup of these killing fields was a blank declaration that the slaughter was not the result of some ill-defined "fog of war." Someone was behind what had happened there. No longer do we need to struggle for definitions: to see the burned-out landscape of the vast Iraqi battlefield, and then watch as all trace of it outside human memory was erased, was, one imagines, honestly to witness evil.
Mike Ward is a PopMatters Columnist and Film Critic.