An Ordinary Boy’s Extraordinary Rage
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In deeply disturbing ways, he is a prototype of his generation. He lived the divorce revolution, age 10 when his parents split in 1978 for that increasingly familiar reason: They were just too different. He was an underachiever in high school, uninterested in college. He hit the job market in the mid-1980s as it ran out of room for young men with blue-collar skills. Aware of affirmative action for women and minorities, he began to feel shortchanged as a white male. He worked dead-end jobs, voiced fears of going nowhere, tried a well-trod escape route — the Army — but bailed out as the military downsized with the fall of communism. Like millions in his generation, he ended up back home as an adult, a man sleeping in a boy’s room, headed exactly where he’d feared: nowhere. When he was charged with blowing up the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, everyone who knew TimothyJames McVeigh in his formative years blamed this monumental madness on the Army, on Desert Storm, on places and people far from the wholesome community where he came of age with an American flag flying over his front yard. He was so indistinguishable from everyone else, they said. Even the problems in his life — his parents’ divorce, his alienated ennui as a young man — were average. No set of experiences would predict — or explain — an act as catastrophic as the Oklahoma bombing. Yet the roots of McVeigh’s extremism are clearly traceable to his youth in pastoral western New York. By the time he was in junior high school, an early interest in guns had become an obsession; by high school, when he ran track and sold fast food, he was arming himself to fight alone in an apocalyptic war; by age 20, he was making and exploding bombs and shooting guns on a wooded lot that he described to Army buddies as a survivalist bunker. Americans were shocked to learn that the prime suspects in the Oklahoma City bombing were not foreign terrorists but men from the nation’s heartland. The plot was not hatched in Beirut or Baghdad but possibly in the backwoods of northeast Michigan by a paramilitary cell that investigators allege McVeigh formed with accused conspirator Terry Lynn Nichols and Nichols’s brother James. Both Tim McVeigh and Terry Nichols are products of Middle America, and their lives raise troubling questions about the strength of the social fabric there. This two-part series of articles will explore their experiences against the backdrop of their times. For the most part, any aberrations in Tim McVeigh’s life were hidden under an exterior so bland as to be nondescript. Many acquaintances had to struggle to think of something — anything — to relate about him. His interest in firearms was known only to friends who also liked them; a good friend from the track team never even knew McVeigh owned a BB gun. In retrospect, merely appearing regular seems to have been a lifelong pursuit. Even today, as the case against him grows ever tighter, a person who has seen and talked to McVeigh in prison near Oklahoma City saw in him a normalcy that rendered him “the scariest man in the world.” “There’s nothing alarming about him — nothing,” this person said. “He’s respectful of his elders, he’s polite. When he expresses political views, for most of what he says, Rush Limbaugh is scarier. That’s what’s incredibly frightening. If he is what he appears to be, there must be other people out there like him. You look at him and you think: This isn’t the end of something; this is the beginning of something.” Psychologists have warned for years that young people like McVeigh born in the late 1960s, whose families fractured in record numbers, whose economic frustrations far exceed those of their parents, are unusually alienated and vulnerable to fringe movements. In this view, the social and economic upheavals of the last 20 years have planted a virus in American society with still unrealized capacity for damage. “A kid from the heart of America who feels the society has let him down can be very dangerous if he has underlying emotional quirks,” said Charles Bahn, a forensic psychologist from John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York who studies the psyche of terrorists. “In urban America, gangs fill this void. In the Midwest, it’s cults, the macho gun world, militias, belonging to fringe groups.” McVeigh’s mother, Mildred Fraser, remarried and living in Florida, recently wrote of her son to the local Fort Pierce Tribune: “Sounds like he could be any of our children, right? People who live in glass houses should not throw stones. It could happen to your family just as it has to this one.” |