the rhetoric of violence and the Oklahoma City bombing (fwd)

[David Farber <farber () central cis upenn edu>]

Date: Sun, 23 Apr 1995 16:21:31 -0700
From: Phil Agre <pagre () weber ucsd edu>




   Pathologists and forensic experts are relying heavily on medical
   records that might mention special conditions, like deviated septums,
   that might distinguish people.


   "I've always preferred to work with bones because they're so much
   neater", [forensic anthropologist] Dr. [Clyde Collins] Snow once said.


   But the remains of the bombing victims that arrive at the morgue
   include much more than bones.  There are fragments of disembodied
   flesh that may never be reunited with the bodies from which they were
   ripped by the explosion yesterday at the Alfred P. Murrah Federal
   Building here.




   So far, no rescue workers have been harmed.  But they seem to emerge
   from the blast site changed and sobered by what they have seen.


   The worst scene, perhaps, is the day-care center that crumpled on the
   second floor.  "There is nothing in there that anyone would ever want
   to see," [construction manager] Mr. [Rex D.] Paine said.  "I don't
   even want to think about it."




    -- New York Times, April 22nd




But we have to think about it.


When I learned this morning that the bombing in Oklahoma City was the
work of conservative extremists opposed to gun controls, my only surprise
was how accurate my original guess had been.  I had kept my guess quiet
because the world did not need any more irresponsible speculation.  But
it made all kinds of sense to me because I take these folks seriously and
believe that they mean the things they say.


The initial suspicions, reverberated through the national sounding-chamber
of CNN during the initial hours after the explosion, centered on Muslims,
given the similarity in methods between the Oklahoma City bombing and the
bombing at the World Trade Center.  Even aside from the complete lack of
evidence for it, though, that hypothesis did not make sense because the
Egyptian terrorists who tried toppling the World Trade Center were clearly
after targets that symbolize the United States as a nation -- which the
federal office building in Oklahoma City surely does not.  This did not
prevent the local Muslim center in San Diego from receiving a whole series
of death threats, nor the publication in newspapers of a veritable census
of Muslims living anywhere near Oklahoma.  Nor did it prevent immediate
assertions in Congress that legislation to (among many other unreasonable
things) deprive immigrants of their Constitutional due process protections
would now certainly become hard to stop.


Some speculation also settled on the survivors of the government's assault
on the Branch Davidians in Waco, Texas precisely two years earlier.  But
this did not make sense, either, given that the surviving Davidians have
far too high a profile to be able to carry out such a large-scale attack.


The informational vacuum after a sudden mysterious event is a social ink
blot, just as telling for the fantasies it does not produce as the ones
it does.  Nobody, for example, made the link between this bombing and
the industrial agriculture system that makes dangerous chemicals widely
available in very large amounts.  Nor did anyone associate it with the
recent Washington "discovery" of CIA death squad activities in Guatemala.
Connecting the Oklahoma bombing to these other things would not have made
much less sense than the speculations that did arise.


What was harder to imagine than any of these possibilities, apparently,
was the reality: home-grown terrorism from within the now extensive
subculture that believes that gun-control laws are the opening round
in a violent government war against the citizens of the country.  These
people have not kept their beliefs or their organizing a secret.  Dozens
of self-styled "militias" now recruit across the country, openly training
with a wide variety of weapons and communicating amongst themselves with
an array of desktop-published newsletters, fax trees, and electronic
mail.  They have asserted plainly that the government's criminally idiotic
assault on the Branch Davidians in Texas portends a generalized pattern
of repression that requires preparation for large-scale armed conflict.
These people are not a joke.  Yet until now I have seen little comment on
them in the mainstream press.


It is easy and tempting to denounce the people who blew up the federal
office building in Oklahoma City as lunatics.  It is also easy and
tempting to dismiss them as sui generis products of a culturally alien
radical fringe.  But the truth is that they are acting on beliefs
that large numbers of Americans hold.  And the really frightening thing
is that little separates these beliefs from the rhetoric of influential
talk radio stars whose language is riddled with metaphors of violence and
death.  When conservative rhetors refer to the President's health care
proposals as "forced collectivization", or when Rush Limbaugh encourages
House Republican freshmen to keep a few liberals alive so everyone
will know what they were like, these extravagantly hyperbolic metaphors
of mass political murder go wholly unremarked -- they have become a
taken-for-granted feature of the American political landscape.  And have
you actually *read* the writings of Pat Robertson -- the leader of the
largest organized bloc within the Congressional majority party -- on the
"new world order"?  I think you should.  Disclaimers notwithstanding, the
Oklahoma City bombers act as though they believe literally the things that
these folks say.


Conservatism need not imply this scary stuff.  Most ordinary conservatives
are reasonable people.  Nonetheless, the discourse of the current
generation of conservative polemicists is antidemocratic and dangerous.
It is antidemocratic in its generalized attacks on "government", for which
a democratic government is indistinguishable from a totalitarian one, or
for which regulatory agencies implementing democratically passed laws are
the equivalent of Soviet bureaucracies, or for which people who believe in
the regulation of harmful practices are equivalent to Nazi conspirators.
Ceaseless hyperbolic attacks on "government" as such effectively aim at
making democracy -- that is, legitimate popular control over a government
that pursues legitimately agreed-upon public-policy goals -- unthinkable.
This rhetoric is dangerous when it weaves metaphors of violent attack
into the most routine utterances.  When a wide range of scientists wrote
critical commentaries on the racist tract "The Bell Curve", for example,
Rush Limbaugh declared that liberals "are trying to kill this book".
Conservative writers develop elaborate stereotypes of liberalism as a kind
of mental disorder -- see the introduction to P. J. O'Rourke's "Give War
a Chance" for the contemporary model, with its brilliant "just kidding,
folks" hedges -- and generally give license to a view of liberals and
government bureaucrats as insane creatures who are engaged in a campaign
of evil domination and irrational violence against the "normal" citizens
of the country.  Throughout history this rhetoric of violent attack has
been used to justify all kinds of terrible things.  Its great virtue for
its authors is that these justifications are all deniable.  Conservative
rhetors will certainly claim that their metaphors are simply metaphors,
and they will denounce analyses like this one as defamatory attempts to
implicate them in a terrorist conspiracy, or as accusations that they
condone violence.  (I can already hear them talking in my head: "I suppose
it was inevitable that those pompous ruling-class elites would welcome
this tragedy as an opportunity to try to silence the few voices who
dare to subvert their politically correct orthodoxy by telling the truth
about their hatred of American ...".)  But I would be extremely surprised
if they *were* part of any criminal conspiracies, or if they *did* stay
up late hoping that someone will blow up an office building.  They don't
have to do or want those things.  All they have to do is foment hatred of
their political opponents -- not just disagreement but hatred, portraying
their opponents as evil, insane, and violent -- and whatever happens will
benefit them one way or another.


The exact words keep shuffling and recombining, but the formula never
varies: attack them by declaring that they are attacking us, encourage
hatred against them by suggesting that they hate us, undermine respect
for their right to speak by asserting that they are trying to silence us,
legitimize the most elaborate campaigns against them by revealing their
conspiracies against us, justify our incivility toward them by pouncing
on the least sign of disrespect in their treatment of us, and respond to
charges like these by adducing a few examples to the effect of "they're
really the ones who are doing that to us".  Regardless of the psychology
that might inwardly motivate them, the outward effect of these rhetorical
devices is to project the rhetor's own aggression onto the object of that
aggression, refusing personal responsibility by portraying all of one's
actions as responses necessitated by the aggressive other.  This denial of
responsibility is routinely found in domestic violence cases, for example.
Its most important product is confusion: simply being exposed to it makes
clear thinking difficult, and its absolute genius is that any attempt
to identify it (like my own here) is readily portrayed as precisely an
example of it.  The First Amendment unequivocally protects all of these
irresponsible categories of rhetoric, but it does not prevent concerned
citizens from pointing out their true nature and lamenting their corrosive
effects on society.


Our task today is not to end up like Argentina during its rueful "dirty
war" period, caught in a downward spiral of authoritarian repression.
The Republican House majority had already expressed its willingness
to legislatively repeal the Fourth Amendment, and the op-ed pages today
are ringing with calls to expand the apparatus of domestic surveillance.
Will our own downward spiral take the form of a deadly embrace between
heavily-armed far-right authoritarians and heavily-armed far-right
anarchists?  I have already encountered a first round of urgent
speculation that press descriptions of the Oklahoma case are consciously
preparing a pretext for a massive government attack on the Michigan
Militia.  I have even heard evidence adduced to the effect that the
bombing itself was a set-up.  Do we now have tens of thousands of heavily
armed people on our hands, all of them convinced that they are about to
be attacked, Waco-style, by the government?  It is so bizarre that it
is hard to even think about, but it is all too realistic an indication of
how fast things have changed in the midst of what Noam Chomsky correctly
calls "the virtual collapse of civil society".  I was recently interviewed
by a reporter for an op-ed piece on the potential privacy dangers in
Intelligent Transportation Systems, including law-enforcement uses of
vehicle tracking data, and let me tell you, I was very pleased that
this piece did not show up on the op-ed pages today amidst the articles
about dismembered children.  I do not need the kind of abuse that this
juxtaposition would certainly bring into my life.


Bill Clinton, whose whole personality has clearly been shaped by his own
childhood experiences of violence, accurately pointed out the nature of
the national trauma here:


  The children of America need to know that almost all the adults in
  this country are good people who love their children and love other
  children, and we're going to get through this. (NY Times, page 8)


We're talking here about a basic, basic decomposition of our social order.
Children across the country are terrified that this kind of irrational
violence might visit them as well, and everyone who has known violence
in their lives has surely lost some hours of work or sleep.  I know I
did, after reading the detailed account of the carnage in the Los Angeles
Times (also known as "the liberal media") yesterday.  So I ask, how can
we stop the downward spiral of the culture of violence -- the fragmenting
shouts of "they are attacking us" that multiply the guns, the bombs, the
metaphors of violence, and the real thing?


  Phil Agre
  April 22nd 1995


  This article is my sole responsibility and does not represent the
  position of any organization.