4/20
The Times, They Have a-Changed
Ten years ago this week, the world changed. Or so we thought.
One hundred sixty-eight people died when the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City was brought down by people we initially thought were Middle Eastern terrorists in the first few panicky hours after the destruction. Ten years ago, in this column, I tore into a local radio shock jock who started up a drumbeat of anti-Middle Eastern rhetoric—the usual “nuke them until they glow” threats—until it became apparent that it wasn’t Muslim fanatics, but our own homegrown nutjobs that did it. And up until 2001, it was the biggest example of terrorism on our native soil in history.
But back then we didn’t drastically curtail civil rights. We didn’t declare war on a scapegoat who had nothing to do with it. And we methodically and legally tracked down, prosecuted, and convicted the criminals who perpetrated the crime.
I note this in order to point out that I am not the same columnist that I was 10 years ago. I’m more shrill, more biting, and more impatient of the ridiculousness I see in public life than I was a decade ago. Back then I saw it as a game.
Nowadays, it’s still a game. But the stakes are far higher, the scope is larger, and the terms are far uglier than they ever were, not that the loss of 168 lives is anything to sneeze at. But let’s look at it in context:
In 10 years, a concerted effort has been made by a hard-right conservative minority to drive an elected president from office over a lie about a consensual sex act. A president was installed, via the Supreme Court, after a contested state election whose apparatus was run questionably at best by his brother.
The largest terrorist attack on U.S. soil occurred after a clear-cut warning was issued to the president, who remained on his vacation after receiving this warning. A president and his vice, who maintain ties to the energy industry, succeeded in hiding their policy apparatus from the public, while their main campaign contributors gamed the energy system in the largest Democratic state in the union, thereby causing the ejection of its governor and the election of a Republican actor to the job. The illegal shenanigans of that same energy company caused one of the largest public bankruptcies in U.S. history.
More:
http://www.citypaper.com/columns/story.asp?id=9865
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