American Politics Journal

Timothy McVeigh, the Trick-Faced People of Oklahoma, and the Government
Hate, retribution and "closure" in the age of televised executions
by Mac MacArthur

Friday, April 20, 2001 -- Washington, D.C. (APJP) -- I just can’t take anymore of CNN. I'm completely fed up with the sick little weasels who run it -- and the even sicker anchors and guests who are so busy these days unreservedly and industriously setting the stage for America and the world to rejoice in the death of Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh.

Shades of Gary Gilmore.

Now don’t get me wrong -- McVeigh, under our laws at least, may be long past due to die, but I do not agree with the death penalty. That’s just me. And I do not dislike or dishonor those who fault me for that belief or call for the death penalty to be applied more often than not. They know not what they do.

All I know is that Jesus and God would glower at the practice because of its contemptuous cruelty and irreversible disposition.

“I want to see Tim McVeigh die,” said one angry Okie yokel being interviewed on the boob tube yesterday afternoon. Another somewhat more refined-sounding Oklahoma denizen told a CNN talking head that she intends to sip champagne with her family at the moment of McVeigh's death.

And yet another told the world she thinks she’ll have “closure” when the Murrah Building bomber is executed.

Closure?

Is she delusional?

Why haven’t any warmhearted connoisseurs of truth told her the truth: there is no "closure." Nothing can change or end the inconsolable parent of a child, or a confused, horrified child longing for his mom.

The people that understand these things recognize that closure is just another debonair fairy story -- a myth confirmed by the best of the best psychologists and psychiatrists at our nation’s major universities.

If there were closure there would not be grief.

Just how uncritical are these people in Oklahoma City -- and the rest of this country? Haven’t we yet absorbed the truth that the death penalty is not preclusion to slaughter; that most murders are consigned against brothers, sisters, mothers and fathers and, most of all, friends; or that murder is an act of transitory madness?

Yes, perhaps there are two types of murder that need a punishment to take your breath away -- heartless, pointless murder or assassination, and, of course, murder for hire.

These crimes -- at minimum the last -- are not done in piques of passion. They are thoroughly and carefully planned. Yet one cannot help tumble in the laps of the families of the dead women, children and men who were torn asunder by Tim McVeigh’s bombing. The families of those dead don’t see the passing of their loved ones as a madman's political revenge against the government -- they see it as a personal attack on their raison d’ètre. They are wide of the mark, and someone should have convened them for as long as it would have taken to convince them not to focus on McVeigh. The reason: he is simply a weapon of a greater evil brought into being by political leaders whom the majority of our people loathe but recognize as an inevitable part of modern life.

This simulated Carnivale de Morte is ironically both disheartening and sidesplitting. Since when do two wrongs make a right? Since when does our government succumb to madness brought of wretchedness and fury -- and simply bow to wishes of a horde drenched in hatred rather than led away from their antipathy and toward a Judeo-Christian ethos?

How many of you remember Gunsmoke? I don’t know how many times Matt Dillon stood on the steps of the Dodge City Jail and stopped a bloodthirsty pack of ranchers from lynching a killer. Even the people who wrote those scripts knew that it was iniquitous to abet or glorify the death of those already trapped. And death itself – when did death stop the next killer?

Never.

Do these people think that putting McVeigh to death will stop others of his ilk from doing the same as him -- or even larger and more self-important crimes? Do they think that the moment his heart stops that Satan will simply shudder in terror and vanish from existence ? Do they truly believe that McVeigh had no coherent -- if insane -- reason to do what he did?

Have we forgotten how we murdered, slaughtered and destroyed a civilization created first by the Dutch and nurtured by the British because we were too damned greedy to pay taxes on tea to some fat double-sexed king -- taxes at a rate we’d kill or die for today?

Have we forgotten how Southern thugs murdered tens of thousands of righteous men on a single day for the sole purpose of preserving a treasonous slaver nation amongst no others?

Do we forget how we foam at the mouth to overthrow foreign nations because they threaten our ability to drive Range Rovers at a buck for a gallon of gas?

McVeigh did have political beliefs. They were warped, distorted by his own stupidity and steeped in a misunderstanding of tradition. But they were his beliefs and he acted on them -- in a most horrific way.

His beliefs were largely based on mendacity, ignorance, and the inability to change things from within. He and his cohort murderers (and there were unnamed others in this plot -- you can count on it) got together one day and decided to "start a revolution" by blowing up a large building owned by the “Feds” -- just as Arab terrorists decided to "topple" the World
Trade Center in Manhattan on much the same kind of day for much the same kind of reason.

McVeigh now seems to be saying that the death of children -- tiny angels -- in the Murrah Building day care center that day was justified. Did Tim McVeigh really know these children were there? Or did the real planner or planners neglect to tell him? Or is it heinous, hate-filled hindsight that presses him to speak now as a devil and rub the parents' face in the horror he unleashed in some sort of perverse retribution for his own fear and anguish? Is he "getting even" with the constant challenges to his own sanity that he witnesses on television each day?

The networks unanimously agree (without saying it explicitly, of course) that we are all fully justified in seeing the monster die, in watching his last gulp of air, in witnessing his horrible death throes at the end.

Did you spy our new Attorney General on television last week -- and the overkill coverage he received as he announced that
not only would he beef up the available seating in the McVeigh “death studio,” but that he would also set up some kind of Theater Macabre for the families of the dead, the real victims in this tragedy -- a sort of playhouse coffin lined with the satin of retribution.

This Attorney General, the law "enforcing" whore for the Bush Crime Family, made certain that he created a smoke screen to cover his Hitlerian announcement as the rest of the world, with no death penalty and far fewer murders, cringed. He brought out some woman who takes charge of these mercy-filled deaths-by-injection, and a telecom geek who said he would “make certain,” mind you, that no tape, errant computer code, or latent television signal can be picked up by a television network.

All the time, I sat there wondering when George W. would get his copy of that tape for his nightly poker games -- and from whom -- and how much the Fox News Channel would pay some prison guard to get them a clean copy as well. The Attorney General -- who was anointed with Crisco oil on his knees in the Very Naaaaame of Jaaaay-zus just before he was sworn into the Senate years ago -- stood before the world and declared he was about to order the murder of another human being and insure that it would be televised to placate the swarm streaming out of Miss Kitty’s bar onto the streets of Dodge City.

Then followed an hour of gory details of the variety most of us do not care to hear -- because the majority of Americans are ashamed that we murder murderers instead of learning from them or leaving them to rot in rusting cells in southern Georgia or Louisiana prisons, eating vermin and lying in their excrement.

Of course, the government has a stake in making a circus of this execution. The government has been increasingly screeching the chalk of totalitarianism on the blackboard of Neo-Nazis like Tim McVeigh who, although claiming to be abhorrent of absolute power, practice it themselves.

The Government is terrified of Tim McVeighs, but not because the present generation of "patriot" terrorists are effective. With the exception of McVeigh, they are not. They are too brainless to carry on their weak little war against the power elite. The government does, however, fear the next generation of neo-McVeighs -- angry, college-educated young adults who, because of abysmal disappointment, are coming soon -- if not sooner -- to demonstrate against government policies such as killing McVeigh on a closed-circuit feed strictly for the vengeance and “closure” of hundreds of ill-directed souls.

It wasn’t long after throwing criminals to the lions before the Roman Empire imploded from the hypocrisy and evil it practiced in the name of validity. And like the flower children of the later 20th century, others will rise -- first with signs, but then with hatchets and maybe even guns. They will have the history of the 60s and 70s to teach them that Dr. Martin Luther King might sadly have been wrong -- peaceful protest may quell but does not eradicate racism or wholesale hatred in the heart of any person not like you. Their eventual rallying point is inconsequential -- it might be $15-a-gallon gasoline, or the imbecilic Baby Bush drilling for oil off the Treasure Coast of Florida and killing a million flamingos, or Dick "Big Time" Cheney helping to prop up slave-owning, rapacious, Jew-hating sheiks in Arab kingdoms merely to feed his friends at Halliburton Inc et al.

Whatever it is, whatever sets alight the next flame of upheaval under an angry people hungry for justice and change, the government wants to make damn certain that perhaps yet-unborn "hippies" of the 21st century won’t get even the scintilla of an idea that they can blow things up and get away with it.

No No. This isn’t November 22, 1963, or 1964, or 1968.

No No. This isn’t the campus of Kent State University, where agents of the federal government under the Governor of Ohio’s command murdered a gaggle of unarmed students -- one of them my friend Jeff Miller -- for no good reason at all.

No No. This isn’t Ruby Ridge, where the government did much the same, but this time with real children. This isn't Waco, Texas, with young children huddled in an old rusting bus against what to many appeared to be federal "storm troopers" drove tanks into the home of a group of religious zealots led by an unstable madman as it burned to the ground.

I detest Tim McVeigh. He is a contemptible, miserable pretext of a human being, not qualified at all to be referred to as a man. He is a wimp. He is a coward. He is a momma’s boy who executed hundreds without rationale and reduced to rubble the lives of thousands.

I loathe him more than any parent of any tot who was mutilated beyond recognition by McVeigh’s destruction. I know about hate -- I learned it well in the 1960s. I learned it again from the likes of Kenneth Winston Starr, Henry Hyde, and Bob Barr -- who is now treated as a hero by MSNBC.

I know about hate – the kind of hate I've seen up close in Palm Beach County, Florida, the kind that fixes national elections. The kind of hate that mocks a genuine war hero for being “out of touch” with Southern bigots because he opposes mounting state flags that stand for hatred of “niggers,” the "rights" of bloodthirsty racists from the South, and their “honored and honorable” treasonous ancestors. The kind of hate hiding behind the preposterous rationale that "Southern heritage" nonsense is some sort of historical birthright -- even as every day of every week of every year a black child born from the loins of slaves goes home weeping for the hatred that the traitorous slaver confederate flag breeds and keeps alive. The kind of "respectable" hate that has replaced the hood and white sheet of the pre-Civil-Rights era.

And to tell you the truth, I think I would kill McVeigh myself if I had the good fortune.

But that isn’t the point, is it. The point is that our government is killing him, in front of an audience -- and calculating all the time that tapes of that death will leak and then engulf our consciousness until we equate the government itself with the horror of murder.

Our government is cleansing and purifying retributive death, preparing us for the worst I imagine.

Mythical “closure” might come quicker if the victims, the relatives of the dead, were allowed to torture and beat McVeigh -- to shout in his ears en masse, to throw rocks at his body or cut him with razors and pour sea salt in his wounds. “Closure” might come if they could bury him in red ants and coat him with honey, or crush his more sensitive parts with vises, or pull out his hair with their bare hands.

Yes, closure might imaginably come then, when -- squinting through their blood frenzy -- these men and women are so stunned and inebriated with an adrenalin rush of detestation that they awake to what they truly are: a bloodthirsty lynch mob gathering in front of Marshall Matt Dillon’s jail ready to kill the killer.

And why?

For nothing much more than the reason he might have killed them.



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