The Nation. - Department of Government at Cornell University

784 The Nation. June 5, 1995SUBJECT TO DEBATE.Iwas feeling pretty burned up at the government theother day, so I loaded a truck full of marijuana andparked it in front of my local federal office building,waited for the parents to drop off their toddlers at thedaycare center and got the heck out of there as fast as I could.Do you know what happened? Nothing! Once again, it appearsthat I had been misled by media pundits, who in thewake of the Oklahoma City bombing have rushed to blamethe nineties right on the sixties left. “An Unlikely Legacy ofthe 60s: The Violent Right,” a New York Times front-pagerumination by Peter Applebome, quoted assorted academicson the “libertarian strain” connecting Vietnam-era hippiesand peaceniks with today’s bandoliered milltiamen. “To the60s left it might have meant the right to smoke pot, while tothe 90s right it might mean the right to own guns, but the instinctis similar.”Oh, really? My own pot-smoking Instinct, albeit not a drivingpasslon, has never raised in me the slightest urge to owna gun. This equation of left and right is political science atthe high school honor-code level, in whlch all infractionsare treated as more or less equallygrave, regardless of intent orconsequence or scale, because thereal Infraction is rule-breakingitself. “What happened in the1960s was that the governmentwas successfully ‘delegitimated,’” the sociologist Gerald Marwellsaid to the Times. “We weretold in the 1960s that the emper-or has no clothes and peopleshouldn’t accept what they’retold.” I like that “we were told,”as tf nothing actually happened in the stxties except massbramwashing from some unspecified source-Country Joeand the Fish? The way I remember it, the government delegitimateditself, with phony body counts, lights at the end ofever-lengthening tunnels, destroying villages in order tosave them, children in flames on the evening news and soon-not to speak of the F.B.I. harassment of Martin LutherKing Jr. and sundry other semi-cnmlnal domestic activltles.Doesn’t the question of whether people should “accept whatthey’re told” depend on what’s being said? Resistlng an unjustwar that even Robert McNamara has finally publlcly admittedwas misconceived and deceptively presented doesn’t strike meas bearing a close resemblance to organizmg a private armyof fellow gun nuts to fight the Anttchrist and Its earthly rep-resentatives in the Clinton Administratlon and the Britishroyal family.Timothy McVeigh is not some libertarian free splrit goneastray. He felt at home in the Army, hardly a counterculturaloutpost, and wanted to be a career soldier; he won medals forhis Gulf War service, In whlch his main task was to bury Iraqisoldiers alive. If we’re serlously interested In understandinghow a young man could blow up a building full of hundredsKATHA POLLITTof people, why not start by acknowledging that the state henow claims to oppose gave him his first lessons in killing?When it comes to understanding American history, thosein charge of Its official version are like Hera, who renewedher virgmity each year by bathing in a magic spring. Becausethey are committed to a vision of America as forever young,Innocent, fresh off the farm in what politicians and editorialwriters love, repellently, to call the “heartland,” the existenceIn our economic and cultural structures of conflict, alienationand violence-both freelance and organized-comes as a perpetualsurprise. But why reach for the left to explain the farright? The far rtght’s been around forever. It has quite a historyof its own. Why not talk, for example, about the Ku KluxKlan-a violent, white supremacist, paramilitary anti-federalgovernmentorganlzation that’s been murdering innocentpeople for more than a hundred years? As for the personalantiauthoritarianism exemplified by the sixties pot-smokers,the obvlous historical analogy is Prohibition, another unrealisticlegal interference with private pleasure that was openlymocked and flouted by millions of otherwise solid citizens.Indeed, one could argue that the “libertarian strain” ofAmerican culture would not exist without the Puritan strain,for which we are equally famous.I’m still waiting for someone besides Frank Rich and thismagazine to point out that the Oklahoma City bombing,which seemed so out of key with American values that Islamicterrorists were immediately blamed for it, in actual fact colncideswith an ongoing wave of home-grown violence againstabortion clinlcs: bombings, arson, death threats, murders. Noreal political will has been applied to combating thisoutrage-“Christian terrorism”?-or to probing its possibleconnectlon with the far-right milittas. Curiously, the F.B.I.,which has dragged its feet on clinic violence, nonetheless,according to documents released May 15 by the Center forConstitutional Rights, has been closely following the doingsof ACT UP and other AIDS and gay groups. The bureauclaims It was worried that activists would throw AIDS-infectedblood at people.Now that’s paranoid!***Family Values Watch. “But [Pete] Wilson does have ‘corevalues,’ and they can be summarized in one word: fatherhood.Only fathers, he says, can fully teach old veritiesorder,hard work, self-dlscipllne-that wlll save America. Hehas convened a ‘Fathers Summit’ to ‘address the crisis of absentfathers that is unraveling the very fabric of our society.’Ironically, Wilson’s own experience at fatherhood is limited.He has been married twlce, to women with teenage childrenfrom first marriages.”-Newsweek, May 22.How come those whose abandonment of chlldren is supposedlyunravelmg soctety are the ones held to be solely quallfiedto teach traditional morality? If you’re looking for instructlonin self-sacrifice, hard work, deferred gratification,why not go to the people who actually practice them-singlemothers?