The other day I heard something that literally made my day.
While running some errands, I had my car radio tuned to WGST, the Atlanta station that carries the Rush Limbaugh show. During a break, the station ran a public-service announcement that went, in the absence of a verbatim transcript, more or less like this:
“With so much in the news recently about Timothy Veigh, we here at WGST would like to take a moment to remember his victims.” After a moment of silence, the announcer went on, “At times like this, it helps to be reminded that sometimes the two sides there are to every story, are Right and Wrong.”*
That was a risky thing for a radio station to say in this day of political correctness and the near criminalization of judgmentalness. Yet it seems that McVeigh’s crime is one of those rare birds in post-modern America: something we can all pretty much agree on. There aren’t many things that can even aspire to that status. Slavery is one, and the event of nuclear war another — but not much else. Abortion? The environment? The right to enjoy the fruits of one’s own labor? Some days we can’t even agree on whether the sun rises in the east.
That there is a consensus on McVeigh is all the more curious because the penalty to which he was sentenced is viscerally opposed by a small but vociferous segment of the public — some of whom are conservatives. My own view on the death penalty is that it really isn’t killing — it’s just chlorinating the gene pool. But even a lot of death-penalty opponents are holding their peace when it comes to the Butcher of Oklahoma City. The only controversy seems to be whether he acted as much the lone wolf as he claims, or whether one or more as-yet unidentified persons were more involved than is currently accepted. I still don’t think the whole story has been discovered, and I doubt McVeigh will tell any more of that story than he has. And that’s because Timothy McVeigh seems convinced that his cause is more important than his own life, and that he can still further the cause even as a corpse.
Most people would like to think that the men they send to kill or be killed in their nation’s defense would be willing to lay down their lives for that cause, if necessary. And the cup of military history runneth over with examples of heroism on that scale. But the willful quest for martyrdom is not something Americans are accustomed to. In our age, that mentality is left to Middle Eastern suicide bombers — just as a previous generation associated it with Japanese kamikaze pilots. Americans just can’t get their minds around the idea that someone could actually want to die for his cause even when he doesn’t have to.
Timothy McVeigh is not the first American to display such a level of fanaticism, though. More than 140 years ago there was a man whose devotion to a cause led him to take up arms against his lawful government, years before any Southern state opted for secession and made armed rebellion against the United States a quasi-legitimate exercise. And this man’s cause was one with which Americans today are in 100% agreement: the abolition of slavery. John Brown, late of “Bleeding Kansas,” led a raid on the Army arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia (now West Virginia), was captured, tried, and sentenced to hang. And hang he did, decrying with his last breath the evil that would yet lead to Civil War and a century and a half of hard feelings between North and South, black and white, centralists and de-centralists.
McVeigh insists that he was right to kill 168 innocent men, women and children as punishment against a U.S. government that committed murders under color of authority at Ruby Ridge, Idaho and Waco, Texas, just as John Brown insisted with his last breath that he was right to challenge the lawful authority of the United States over slavery. I don’t say that “McVeigh believes” the government committed murders, because it’s not a matter of belief — any more than John Brown’s condemnation of slavery was a matter of belief. Both men committed their crimes because they were outraged at crimes being committed by, or under the protection of, the government.
Given how popular opinion must have reacted to the raid at Harpers Ferry, you would think that America would have shrunk from the abolitionist cause for some time afterward — but the raid occurred in 1859, only two years before the outbreak of Civil War. Back then, most people could understand the difference between an atrocity, and the belief that led to its occurrence. In all, the effect of Brown’s action seems to have been a wash — slavery was ultimately abolished, after an armed challenge against the U.S. government, but it came neither because of the raid nor in spite of it. Or perhaps it would be better to say both because of and in spite of it.
Whatever reforms may come to our government today in light of the events at Ruby Ridge and Waco, there will probably be elements of both “because of” and “in spite of” when it comes to the relationship to Timothy McVeigh as well. His atrocity helped empower and re-elect a hopelessly corrupt President, whose tenure and departure has nevertheless reintroduced such notions to public discourse as “Right and Wrong.” His prosecution has brought to light yet another in a series of faults in the conduct of the FBI, which bore a share of responsibility for both incidents that McVeigh thought he had a right to avenge. Perhaps this will prove to be the catalyst for such reforms as may restore public trust in federal law enforcement agencies, or perhaps it will serve merely to erode that trust even further.
There are of course major differences between John Brown’s cause and that of Timothy McVeigh. Slavery was an offense on a grand scale compared to the mere incompetence, recklessness and dishonesty that surrounds Waco and Ruby Ridge. Millions were enslaved, compared to the relatively few victims of Elmer Fed whose screams drove McVeigh over the edge. And as shocking as Brown’s raid must have been in 1859, his victims were soldiers — able and willing to fight back — while McVeigh’s victims, civilians and their children, had no such opportunity. Bombing a building full of children is not the act of a heroic would-be martyr, but a display of malicious cowardice for which there is a special place in hell.
It may be, though, that history tailors its shocks for the times. Maybe a society that sanctions infanticide to protect a woman’s standard of living isn’t as easy to shock as one that tolerates slavery. Some will bridle at that suggestion, but a greater proportion of slavery’s victims survived it than do abortion’s victims.
Sometimes the two sides there are to every question, are Right and Wrong. If we as a society needed to be shocked, there are certainly enough reasons.
Editor’s Note: You’ll notice this took place four months, almost to the day, before 9/11.
