Now might be a good time for everyone to pause and read or re-read the brilliant essay Adam Gopnik wrote for the New Yorker after the bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma City in 1995. Two relevant quotes...
Fifty years from now historians are unlikely to write, âIn the mid-nineties, politicians and talk-show radio hosts created an atmosphere of poisonous hatred against the national government. Also, in a completely unrelated development, somebody blew up the federal office building in Oklahoma City.â...
The point, of course, isnât that Limbaugh or Pat Robertson or G. Gordon Liddy caused the killing. It is that they seemed never to give a momentâs thought, as they addressed their audiences, to the consequences of stuffing so much flammable resentment into such tiny bottles. Conservatives are generally clearheaded about the connection between rhetoric and action when it comes to people who are not conservativesâŚ. And when it comes to Leonard Jeffries or Louis Farrakhan today, it is not hard for George Will or Murdochâs Post to insist, against the grain of liberal indulgence, that if you daily inject hatred into the bloodstream someone might get sick.
So here we are, 14 years later, and once again figures on the rightâsome of the same figures on the rightâhave created an atmosphere of poisonous hatred against the national government. You might not want to put your kids in any day care centers located in federal buildings for the time being.