BuzzFlash Guest Contribution

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Inherit the Wind - and the Windbags

A BUZZFLASH GUEST CONTRIBUTION
by Michael Winship

A little less than a year after the 1995 bombing of the Murrah Federal Office Building -- the tenth anniversary of which is this week -- I flew to Oklahoma City to attend an awards event at the National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum.

My friend Sonny, a producer and cameraman who had covered the disaster, took some of us to the bombsite. This was before the memorial that's now there was built. Nonetheless, the experience was powerful.

What we saw was a block-sized vacant lot covered with grass and surrounded by storm fencing. In the weave of the fence were entwined handwritten cards and notes, stuffed animals, photos and flowers.

Sonny told us what it had been like, stories that would take on renewed resonance a few years later, after 9/11. I remember him talking about the K-9 teams brought in to search for survivors in the rubble and how they were only effective for short periods of time - their handlers said that when the dogs failed to find anyone alive they soon seemed too distraught to work.

Off to the side, volunteers manned a card table, raising money for the families of the 168 dead, selling tee shirts. The OJ trial was in full swing and the front of the shirts showed an orange tree. On the back, they read, "Thank God, Timothy McVeigh won't be tried in California." Meaning that, unlike Simpson, McVeigh could receive the death penalty.

I recall thinking that the desire for revenge that authored the words on the shirt was not entirely different from the self-righteous hatred that infected McVeigh and his co-conspirator Terry Nichols.

The 10th anniversary comes just days after Eric Rudolph's guilty plea to four terror attacks, including fatal bombings at the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta and an abortion clinic in Alabama.

In an eleven-page "manifesto," Rudolph said he was "bloodied but emphatically unbowed" in his violent opposition to abortion and gay rights. "Abortion is murder," he wrote. "There is no more legitimate reason, to my knowledge, for renouncing allegiance to and, if necessary, using force to drag this monstrosity of a government down to the dust."

It would be easy to dismiss Rudolph or Oklahoma City as aberrant incidents, especially when so much attention is on al Qaeda and the global war on terrorism. But as ABC News reported Monday night, right now, there are 338 ongoing FBI field investigations of 22 domestic terror organizations, including the Aryan Nations and the National Alliance. According to Brian Levin, director of California State University's Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism, any of them "have the capacity, skill and hatred to carry out acts worse than what Timothy McVeigh carried out."

Yet, in the days since Rudolph's guilty plea, where has there been any official outrage over his actions? Two people died, more than 120 were wounded. Where's condemnation from those in government and religious organizations that preach "the culture of life?" Only one group, the Sanctity of Life Ministries, denounced "the use of violence to overcome the violence of abortion."

As an editorial in the Berkshire (Mass.) Eagle noted, "The rest of the 'right to life' movement is as quiet as it has been on such issues of life and death as capital punishment, the war in Iraq and the U.S. infant mortality rate, highest in the developed world. Where are the holy men who rushed to Terri Schiavo's bedside, Randall Terry and the rest, and the priests who lecture us on the sanctity of all life, even stem cells? Where is the president?"

If anything, the religious right's intemperate words and reckless attacks -- especially against judicial independence -- are on the increase. Tom DeLay has apologized for his "inartful" comment post-Schiavo that, "The time will come for the men responsible for this to answer for their behavior, but not today." Unfortunately, as one blogger wrote, "that's like saying he isn't sorry for the crime, only that he got caught."

Just a couple of days later, there was DeLay keynoting the NRA's annual convention, brandishing a rifle over his head like - dare I say it? - Saddam Hussein. "When a man is in trouble or in a good fight, you want to have your friends around, preferably armed. So I feel really good," DeLay announced.

The congressman's warm-up act was rocker qua wing nut Ted Nugent, who shouted to the applauding crowd, "Remember the Alamo! Shoot 'em! ... I want the bad guys dead. No court case. No parole. No early release. I want 'em dead. Get a gun and when they attack you, shoot 'em."

On his April 11 radio show, James Dobson, founder of Focus on the Family, insidiously compared federal judges to the KKK: "I heard a minister the other day talking about the great injustice and evil of the men in white robes, the Ku Klux Klan, that roamed the country in the South and they did great wrong to civil rights and to morality and now we have black-robed men."

And at the Confronting the Judicial War on Faith conference in Washington two weeks ago, as Salon.com reported, "Christian right leaders denounced separation of church and state and prayed for a judge's deliverance to Satan."

One of the participants, constitutional lawyer Edwin Vieria, attacked Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy, a Reagan appointee, and said, "I draw on the wisdom of Stalin -- He had a slogan, and it worked very well for him whenever he ran into difficulty. 'No man, no problem.'" As the Washington Post noted, Stalin's exact, murderous quote was, "Death solves all problems: no man, no problem."

In the days immediately after 9/11, presidential spokesman Ari Fleischer famously warned Americans that they "need to watch what they say, watch what they do." The Republicans and their right wing allies would do well to heed their own warning. He that troubleth his own house shall inherit the wind, and the fool shall be servant to the wise of heart. Proverbs 11:29.

A BUZZFLASH GUEST CONTRIBUTION

Michael Winship, Writers Guild of America Award winner and former writer with Bill Moyers, writes this weekly column for the Messenger Post Newspapers in upstate New York.

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