Bombers Row

With an act of violence the person of whom I speak killed an abstract world and gave it blood.

—Clarice Lispector1

For a military commander, “the line is life.”2 In any violent conflict, the supreme thing that must be defended, for the map and for the territory, is the supply line. The supply line provides information, food, ammunition. You have to trust whoever feeds the line because they have to trust you. The line will keep you alive and keep the grass wet with blood so the grass will grow. Revolutionary action means breaking the opponent’s line. In the civilian world, we talk about lines of heredity, we talk about influence, and we talk about lineage of study—your thesis advisor studied with someone who studied with Guattari so now you have to read Capitalism and Schizophrenia even if you don’t want to. But there is another through line that starts at the 1992 Ruby Ridge standoff between federal agents and a rural family in a region known for survivalism and white supremacism. And the line ends in Oklahoma City, or in Washington, DC, or at the sad clown–themed fireworks stand in rural Kentucky.

I was born in a hippie hamlet in northwest Arkansas on the Missouri border, sandwiched between the global headquarters of the KKK and of Walmart, between the University of Arkansas and some ur-Ruby Ridge compounds.3 I knew early on, well before menarche, that white boys were going to be a problem. I knew that I was the only non-white-girl creature any of them had ever seen or would ever see. Even then I could sense that their attention was laced with hazard. Trying their boy tricks on me was awkward because they weren’t sure if I was like the other girls. And I wasn’t—I was beautiful and strange, strong and tall. I could beat them at physical games and jump off cliffs with them without flinching. Those who understood this as the precursor to being cool were eager to be my friends while others were more wary and distant. Some were both, and those were the most dangerous. They would put a hand on my knee to show me a knife or say things like, “Hitler was a vegetarian and was good to his dogs,” not because they cared or thought I cared as much as to test the contours of the trespass I would allow. Boys I liked more could cross farther across my territory. There was no pattern or type beyond that they were all white. They were a little reactionary, a little pushy, a little weird, a little skinny, broke, bored, creative, good with weapons (to the point of sexual fetishism), raised by single mothers, resourceful in the rural way, and definitely going nowhere.

USMS surveillance photo showing Sammy Weaver (right), Kevin Harris (center), Sara Weaver (left) at Ruby Ridge. 21. August 1992. License: Public Domain.

As time passed and I saw the world, it seemed that the special factors of my girlhood (impoverished, rural, heartland, shifting racial identity) had tuned me to the frequency of a specific kind of American male. It meant that the boys I would find attractive or become friends with would, no matter where I found them, all be shades of these first options presented to me in Arkansas. It was my own United States of Timothy McVeighs—a man who wasn’t familiar to me growing up, even though I was only a few hours’ drive away from the Oklahoma City bombing when it happened. My radical interracial parents didn’t raise their girls with television, and news moves slower the closer you are to the earth.

Aside from this year being the thirtieth anniversary of the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing—still the deadliest act of US domestic terrorism—it’s never been a better time for Timothy McVeigh, whose incoherence, ambivalence, rage, illegibility, and opaqueness have become the hallmarks of modern American masculinity. Slender white men who are all mad at the same thing (capitalism) and who can’t figure out what to do about it. When McVeigh was on Bombers Row with Ted Kaczynski and Ramzi Yousef, his neighbors told him that our problems were due to technology (Kaczynski) and loss of faith (Yousef), not just the federal government, which was Tim’s own bête noire and the target of his traumatic response to the economic and social violence wrought by deregulation and senseless wars.4

From today’s perspective, it would appear that all of these men succeeded in bringing our world closer to theirs. Kaczynski’s ideas are widely accepted without any wink-nod irony, especially when facing the AI nightmare. Yousef’s fundamentalism is easily refracted in the sex-trafficking Opus Dei fundamentalists of the current US government. But McVeigh, probably the most successful American terrorist of our time (if not the past century), remains unacknowledged despite being everywhere. He’s in the inchoate right-wing violence targeting judges, politicians, and civic leaders around the country. He’s in Luigi Mangione (allegedly) calmly clearing that jammed weapon on the Avenue of the Americas. And he’s in my friend Elijah in Kentucky.5

Elijah doesn’t look like Timothy McVeigh, but his mom thought he would be a school shooter, so close enough. He’s happy with his sharp little teeth, happy to listen to me complain about having to listen to so much ambient Insane Clown Posse next to the execution chamber in Terre Haute, Indiana, happy with a girl’s name as his nickname, happy with hard seltzers and Zyns. But suddenly he’s telling me about a murder he witnessed since we last saw each other.

He’s drunk, smoking outside a dive bar. The bouncer nods, Ellie nods. Suddenly the bouncer says get the fuck out of here. A homeless guy standing behind Ellie apparently dumpster dove earlier that day and didn’t put the trash back. Ellie backs up. On your left! A guy comes out of nowhere and starts hitting the homeless guy, who falls and hits his head so hard on an old oak tree that Ellie can hear it. Blood is coming out of the guy’s ears, his nose, his mouth, and the other guy won’t stop hitting him. Ellie steps forward to intervene but someone pulls him back, saying no, fuck this, he dies tonight. Someone distracts the man holding Ellie back so Ellie and another bystander can turn the bleeding man onto his side. He seizes and Ellie keeps his head still. Someone tells him that he saw nothing, he won’t say anything. Ellie says nothing. The bouncer is pulling the still-agitated assailant away, screaming you want to go to prison for the rest of your life? Ellie keeps his shaking hands and shaking body still. The ambulance comes and Ellie tells them its bad. The emergency responders know it’s bad. The man who helped him offers him another cigarette after the emergency responders leave and a girl from the bar takes them through the staff entrance to the staff bathroom since they’re both covered in blood. The other man points at Ellie and laughs: hey man, nice shirt! They’re both wearing the same joke T-shirt from the mall that says LIQUOR STORE over a marijuana leaf. Ellie throws up.

By the end of the story I’m laughing so hard I’m almost crying from his enthusiastic hand gestures, his exaggerated voice, his bright blue eyes and thin bird body. In fact, Ellie told me this story to make me laugh, the only story that made sense to entertain, to please, to cheer up his friend stopping by on the drive home from visiting the execution chamber in Terre Haute. And it worked. “You’re my favorite type of white boy,” I gasp. Ellie smiles indulgently and tells me he threatened to kill the person at the DMV who wouldn’t help him get his ID. I don’t laugh at that, but neither do I worry. Ellie would never hurt anyone.

I tell him he should read this giant book I’ve been carrying around since I was in New York for work at the same time as Luigi Mangione, Aberration in the Heartland of the Real, about Timothy McVeigh. Ellie says he can’t be seen reading anything like that. Why not? He gestures to his face, his twig-like body. I think you could really get something out of it. It explains everything that’s happening to us right now, I say. He still shakes his head: I just can’t be seen reading that. And I suddenly remembered the time when Ellie was at a bachelor party in rural Kentucky taking mushrooms and hanging out with the boys. Another cabin down the hill started playing Hitler speeches at full volume until one of the boys took out his gun and shot at the cabin until the speeches stopped. The cabin was empty at dawn.

I didn’t press the point. Perhaps his self-awareness was more developed than I knew, and this was the furthest trespass he would allow across his territory. He had given me a package to distribute to various louts in Atlanta, which I strapped down carefully next to my copy of Aberration in the front seat. We embraced like cousins and he made a mark on my road atlas for a sad clown–themed fireworks stand on my way back right after crossing into Tennessee where I could get the really good stuff. We promised that we would see each other soon, that we were always welcome in each other’s homes, that we were going to look out for one another, that we would see each other somewhere down the line.