Word: oklahomas
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...have been ego that triggered the Unabomber's latest attack. Says Michael Rustigan, professor of criminology at San Francisco State University: "I think all the publicity given to the Oklahoma City bombing has stirred him up. It would be reasonable to say he feels upstaged and a little bit jealous...
That is an ominous statement coming after the destruction of the Murrah building in Oklahoma City. The authorities' greatest fear is that the Unabomber may want to prove his prowess. If he felt inspired and challenged by the Oklahoma bombing, the search for the serial killer has become all the more urgent. --Reported by Jordan Bonfante/Sacramento, J. Howard Green/ San Francisco, Jenifer Mattos/New York and Elaine Shannon/Washington
...Albuquerque, New Mexico, a live grenade is found in a newspaper-vending box; a day later, police discover an 8-in. pipe bomb on a bridge. These incidents, which happened last week and caused no injuries, may seem almost mundane compared to tragedy on the scale of the Oklahoma City blast and the notoriety of the Unabomber. Yet they represent a far more insidious danger: America's growing fascination and familiarity with bombs. In real life and in the movies, exploding devices have become commonplace. Joseph Grubisic, the commander of the Chicago police department's bomb squad, has seen...
Some have interpreted Oklahoma City as a kind of Reichstag fire, the rube militias being the embryos of an American Nazism. That is overheated; anyway, why go abroad for bad news? The real precedents are homegrown. Years ago, D.H. Lawrence, making his way through American literature, fell upon Fenimore Cooper's Natty Bumppo and pronounced, "The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer." A fancy line, but true only of a certain whip-mean conscienceless strain in the American character. It is not a bad description of the Oklahoma City suspect's eyes...
...sight of dead children opens an abyss in the mind, of course. The wound may heal better if we not only sift through rubble and the mystery of evil, but also look out at the horizon. A helpful exercise is to study Oklahoma City and the 1990s through the prism of a new book called Walt Whitman's America (Knopf). Here, David S. Reynolds, professor of American Literature and American Studies at New York City's Baruch College, splendidly examines the culture that formed the greatest American poet and the greatest American poem, Leaves of Grass, which was first published...