Oklahoma City Looks Mighty Pretty

The idea that Timothy McVeigh was a dittohead driven to violence by "hate filled rhetoric" is not new, but the evident hysteria of tea-party America has revived the notion in certain segments of liberal America. McVeigh was in reality as far from the Fox News demographic as an American can get, a veteran of the Gulf War who forswore American imperialism in the starkest possible terms, a man of extraordinary dispassion--some would say sociopathy, although I'd disagree--and extreme seriousness of purpose, a man whose grievances against the federal government were far more similar to those held by America's left than by conservative tax complainers. Of course, the left is still largely unable to admit that their political leaders are equally culpable when it comes to the crafting of an overseas hegemon, less yet laying the foundations of a domestic surveillance state. Waco is a tragic accident, and those who see in that Gaza-style assault the creeping of a militarized security apparatus are taken to be mere gun nuts. Bill Clinton, the man who held that you cannot love your country and hate its government, is still revered by the rump left that forms the motivated primary base of the Democratic Party, who don't seem to appreciate the irony of holding up Clinton, a southern conservative, as an exemplar of the popular liberal president.

Now. I have promised, full of fear and trembling, not to say mean things about Digby during these days of awe, so let me offer some modest praise instead. She has plainly recognized that however abhorrent you find the actions of al Qaeda et alia, dismissing Islamic militants and anti-American insurgents as plain "evildoers" without recognizing their full bank of legitimate and illegitimate grievances, without acknowledging a commensurable history of Western violence, is folly and propaganda. They have their reasons. She understands that they aren't motivated by blind hatred, by disdain for "our freedoms," or by anger at "our way of life." Indeed, I suspect she knows as well that many militants, including most suicide bombers, are drawn from the ranks of the educated, from the ranks of professionals . . . that they are, in other words, people able to appreciate the consequences and moment of their actions, not merely brainwashed trash from the slums.

And so I suggest to Digby and to everyone that Timothy McVeigh likewise cannot be understood except by allowing for an understanding of his motives, which were not so-called "eliminationism" nor yet some tawdry mixture of talk-radio vitriol, but rather a serious and evolutionary process whereby a young man of unusual intellectual sensitivity came to believe, not without reason, that the United States Government so traduced that ideals of freedom and liberty, was so violent and unaccountable, that he quite literally went to war against it. It is not to condone his acts to admit as much, and it is a tawdry act of political propaganda to pretend otherwise.