The Last Empire (53 page)

The army and McVeigh parted once the war was done. He took odd jobs. He got interested in the far right’s paranoid theories and in what Joel Dyer calls “The Religion of Conspiracy.” An army buddy, Terry Nichols, acted as his guide. Together they obtained a book called
Privacy
, on how to vanish from the government’s view, go underground, make weapons. Others had done the same, including the Weaver family, who had moved to remote Ruby Ridge in Idaho. Randy Weaver was a cranky white separatist with Christian Identity beliefs. He wanted to live with his family apart from the rest of America. This was a challenge to the FBI. When Weaver did not show up in court to settle a minor firearms charge, they staked him out August 21, 1992. When the Weaver dog barked, they shot him; when the Weavers’ fourteen-year-old son fired in their direction, they shot him in the back and killed him. When Mrs. Weaver, holding a baby, came to the door, FBI sniper Lon Horiuchi shot her head off. The next year
the Feds took out the Branch Davidians.

For Timothy McVeigh, the ATF became the symbol of oppression and murder. Since he was now suffering from an exaggerated sense of justice, not a common American trait, he went to war pretty much on his own and ended up slaughtering more innocents than the Feds had at Waco. Did he know what he was doing when he blew up the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City because it contained the hated bureau? McVeigh remained silent throughout his trial. Finally, as he was about to be sentenced, the court asked him if he would like to speak. He did. He rose and said. “I wish to use the words of Justice Brandeis dissenting in
Olmstead
to speak for me. He wrote, ‘Our government is the potent, the omnipresent teacher. For good or ill, it teaches the whole people by its example.’ ” Then McVeigh was sentenced to death by the government.

Those present were deeply confused by McVeigh’s quotation. How could the Devil quote so saintly a justice? I suspect that he did it in the same spirit that Iago answered Othello when asked why he had done what he had done: “Demand me nothing: what you know, you know: from this time forth I never will speak word.” Now we know, too: or as my grandfather used to say back in Oklahoma, “Every pancake has two sides.”

Vanity Fair

November 1998

* 
T
HE
N
EW
T
HEOCRATS

June 18, 1997, proved to be yet another day that will live in infamy in the history of
The Wall Street Journal
, or t.w.m.i.p., “the world’s most important publication,” as it bills itself—blissfully unaware of just how unknown this cheery neofascist paper is to the majority of Americans, not to mention those many billions who dwell in darkness where the sulfurous flashes of Wall Street’s little paper are no more than marsh gas from the distant marches of the loony empire. June 18 was the day that t.w.m.i.p. took an ad in
The New York Times
, the paper that prints only the news that will fit its not-dissimilar mindset. The ad reprinted a t.w.m.i.p. editorial titled “Modern Morality,” a subject I should have thought alien to the core passions of either paper. But then for Americans morality has nothing at all to do with ethics or right action or who is stealing what money—and liberties—from whom. Morality is
SEX. SEX. SEX.

The edit’s lead is piping hot. “In the same week that an Army general with 147 Vietnam combat missions” (remember the
Really
Good War, for lots of Dow Jones listings?) “ended his career over an adulterous affair 13 years ago” (t.w.m.i.p. is on strong ground here; neither the general nor the lady nor any other warrior should be punished for adulteries not conducted while on watch during enemy attack) “the news broke”—I love that phrase in a journal of powerful opinion and so little numberless news—“that a New Jersey girl gave birth to a baby in the bathroom at her high school prom, put it in the trash and went out to ask the deejay to play a song by Metallica—for her boyfriend. The baby is dead.”

Misled by the word “girl,” I visualized a panicky pubescent tot. But days later, when one Melissa Drexler was indicted for murder, she was correctly identified by the
Times
as a “woman, 18.” In a recently published photograph of her alongside her paramour at the prom, the couple look to be in their early thirties. But it suited t.w.m.i.p. to misrepresent Ms. Drexler as yet another innocent child corrupted by laissez-faire American liberal “values,” so unlike laissez-faire capitalism, the great good.

All this is “moral chaos,” keens the writer. I should say that all this is just plain old-fashioned American stupidity where a religion-besotted majority is cynically egged on by a ruling establishment whose most rabid voice is
The Wall Street Journal
.

“We have no good advice on how the country might extricate itself anytime soon from a swamp of sexual confusion. . . .” You can say that again and, of course, you will. So, rather than give bad advice, cease and desist from taking out ads to blame something called The Liberals. In a country evenly divided between political reactionaries and religious maniacs, I see hardly a liberal like a tree—or even a burning bush—walking. But the writer does make it clear that the proscribed general was treated unfairly while the “girl” with baby is a statistic to be exploited by right-wing journalists, themselves often not too far removed from the odious Metallica-listening orders who drop babies in johns, a bad situation that might have been prevented by the use, let us say, of a rubber when “girl” and “boy” had sex.

But, no. We are assured that the moral chaos is the result of sexual education and “littering,” as the ad puts it, “the swamp” with “condoms that for about the past five years have been dispensed by adults running our high schools . . . or by machines located in, by coincidence, the bathroom.” Presumably, the confessional would be a better venue, if allowed. So, on the one hand, it is bad, as we all agree, for a woman to give birth and then abandon a baby; but then too, it’s wrong, for some metaphysical reason, to help prevent such a birth from taking place. There is no sense of cause/effect when these geese start honking. Of course, t.w.m.i.p. has its own agendum: Outside marriage, no sex of any kind for the lower classes and a policing of everyone, including generals and truly valuable people, thanks to the same liberals who now “forbid nothing and punish anything.” This is spaceship-back-of-the-comet reasoning.

The sensible code observed by all the world (except for certain fundamentalist monotheistic Jews, Christians, and Muslims) is that “consensual” relations in sexual matters are no concern of the state. The United States has always been backward in these matters, partly because of its Puritan origins and partly because of the social arrangements arrived at during several millennia of family-intensive agrarian life, rudely challenged a mere century ago by the Industrial Revolution and the rise of the cities and, lately, by the postindustrial work-world of services in which “safe” prostitution should have been, by now, a bright jewel.

Although the “screed” (a favorite right-wing word) in the
Times
ad is mostly rant and not to be taken seriously, the spirit behind all this blather is interestingly hypocritical. T.w.m.i.p. is not interested in morality. In fact, any company that can increase quarterly profits through the poisoning of a river is to be treasured. But the piece does reflect a certain unease that the people at large, most visibly through sex, may be trying to free themselves from their masters, who grow ever more insolent and exigent in their prohibitions—one strike and you’re out is their dirty little secret. In mid-screed, the paper almost comes to the point: “Very simply [
sic
], what we’re suggesting here is that the code of sexual behavior formerly set down by established religion in the U.S. more or less kept society healthy, unlike the current manifest catastrophe.” There it is. Where is Norman Lear, creator of
Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman
, now that we need him? Visualize on the screen
gray clapboard, slate-colored sky, om
ni
-ous (as Darryl Zanuck used to say) music. Then a woman’s plaintive voice calling “Hester Prynne, Hester Prynne!” as the screen fills with a pulsing scarlet “A.”

So arrière-garde that it is often avant-garde, t.w.m.i.p. is actually on to something. Although I shouldn’t think anyone on its premises has heard of the eighteenth-century Neapolitan scholar Vico, our readers will recall that Vico, working from Plato, established various organic phases in human society. First, Chaos. Then Theocracy. Then Aristocracy. Then Democracy—but as republics tend to become imperial and tyrannous, they collapse and we’re back to Chaos and to its child Theocracy, and a new cycle. Currently, the United States is a mildly chaotic imperial republic headed for the exit, no bad thing unless there is a serious outbreak of Chaos, in which case a new age of religion will be upon us. Anyone who ever cared for our old Republic, no matter how flawed it always was with religious exuberance, cannot
not
prefer Chaos to the harsh rule of Theocrats. Today, one sees them at their savage worst in Israel and in certain Islamic countries, like Afghanistan, etc. Fortunately, thus far
their social regimentation is still no match for the universal lust for consumer goods, that brave new world at the edge of democracy. As for Americans, we can still hold the fort against our very own praying mantises—for the most part, fundamentalist Christians abetted by a fierce, decadent capitalism in thrall to totalitarianism as proclaimed so saucily in
The New York Times
of June 18, 1997.

The battle line is now being drawn. Even as the unfortunate “girl” in New Jersey was instructing the deejay, the Christian right was organizing itself to go after permissiveness in entertainment. On June 18 the Southern Baptists at their annual convention denounced the Disney company and its TV network, ABC, for showing a lesbian as a human being, reveling in
Pulp Fiction
violence, flouting Christian family values. I have not seen the entire bill of particulars (a list of more than 100 “properties” to be boycotted was handed out), but it all sounds like a pretrial deposition from Salem’s glory days. Although I have criticized in these pages the Disney cartel for its media domination, I must now side with the challenged octopus.

This is the moment for Disney to throw the full weight of its wealth at the Baptists, who need a lesson in constitutional law they will not soon forget. They should be brought to court on the usual chilling-of-First-Amendment grounds as well as for restraint of trade. Further, and now let us for once get to the root of the matter. The tax exemptions for the revenues of all the churches from the Baptists to the equally absurd—and equally mischievous—Scientologists must be removed.

The original gentlemen’s agreement between Church and State was that
We the People
(the State) will in no way help or hinder any religion while, absently, observing that as religion is “a good thing,” the little church on Elm Street won’t have to pay a property tax. No one envisaged that the most valuable real estate at the heart of most of our old cities would be tax-exempt, as churches and temples and orgone boxes increased their holdings and portfolios. The
quo
for this huge
quid
was that religion would stay out of politics and not impose its superstitions on
Us the People
. The agreement broke down years ago. The scandalous career of the Reverend Presidential Candidate Pat Robertson is a paradigm.

As Congress will never act, this must be a grass-roots movement to amend the Constitution, even though nothing in the original First Amendment says a word about tax exemptions or any other special rights to churches, temples, orgone boxes. This is a useful war for Disney to fight, though I realize that the only thing more cowardly than a movie studio or TV network is a conglomerate forced to act in the open. But if you don’t, Lord Mouse, it will be your rodentian ass 15.7 million Baptists will get, not to mention the asses of all the rest of us.

The Nation

21 July 1997

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C
OUP DE
S
TARR

Like so many observers of the mysterious Starr Ship that President Clinton seemed to sink so gracefully on television, I was mystified by the marauding pirates’ inability to go for any loot other than details of his indecorous sex life, a matter of no great interest to anyone but partisans of the far right and a press gone mad with bogus righteousness. But along with mystification over the pirates’ obsession with whether or not a blow job is sex (neatly finessed by Clinton because the wise judge in the Paula Jones case had forgotten to include lips in her court’s menu of blue-plate delights), I had a sense that I had, somehow, been through something like this once before. Where had I stumbled over the notion that a presidential election could be overthrown because of sexual behavior that is not a crime, at least beyond the city limits of Atlanta, Georgia? Sex as politics. Politics as sex.
Sex Is Politics.
Then I remembered. In January 1979 I had written a piece in
Playboy
with that title, because
something new was happening in American politics back then.

The ERA and gay rights were, at that time, under fire. . . . At that time! Clinton’s support for women and gays, at the beginning of his first term, was more than enough to launch the Starr Ship. But twenty years ago, the right had already vowed that so-called valence issues would be its principal choice of weapon. Or, as a member of the Conservative Caucus put it then, with engaging candor, “We’re going after people on the basis of their hot buttons.” In other words, sex, sex, sex. Save the Family and Save Our Children were the slogans of that moment, and one Richard Viguerie was the chief money raiser for the powers of darkness. “Viguerie is not just a hustler,” I wrote in
Playboy
. “He is also an ideologue.” He was thinking of creating a new political party. “I have raised millions of dollars for the conservative movement over the years,” he said, “and I am not happy with the result. I decided to become more concerned with how the
money is spent.” Viguerie was working with a group called Gun Owners of America.