The Unfinished Bombing: Oklahoma City in American Memory. . - Books - book review

THE UNFINISHED BOMBING: Oklahoma City in American Memory BY EDWARD T. LINENTHAL OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS 2001, 325 PAGES, $30.00

Sept. 11, 2001, changed much in America, including what and how we read. Not long after commercial airliners were flown into the World Traae Center and the Pentagon, books on Islam, Afghanistan, and Osama bin Laden fairly flew off the shelves, as did the works of Nostradamus, the 16th-century French astrologer said to have divined the recent devastation. However, the stars did not seem to favor Edward T. Linenthal, a professor of religion and American culture at the University of Wisconsin, Oshkosh, when Oxford University Press began over the summer to set type for his new book. A study of how American culture has absorbed the 1995 terrorist attack on the Alfred R Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, The Unfinished Bombing now seems outdated. "The bombing in Oklahoma City killed 168 people, more people than any other single act of domestic terror in American history" states Linenthal, inaccurately, alas.

Yet, readers still reeling from thousands of deaths in New York City, Washington, and Pennsylvania have much to learn from Linenthars patient account of the aftermath of another recent national trauma. More a large town than a city, Oklahoma City is worlds away from the coastal cosmopolis that is New York, and even a calamity could not transform Mayor Ronald Norick into the international celebrity that affliction made Gotham's Rudolph Giuliani. The Oklahoma City bombing was an assault on the American heartland, all the more shocking to a nation that felt secure within its own vast spaces.

Unlike the Al Qaeda cabal, the 1995 mass murderers, Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols, were as American as apple pie, home-grown sociopaths so alienated from their compatriots they plotted to exterminate them. Nevertheless, the immediate reaction to the Oklahoma City bombing, with even less justification than in the aftermath to Sept. 11, was to stigmatize, scapegoat, and persecute people who appeared Arab or Muslim. Both of the attacks aroused widespread displays of patriotism, even as they raised questions of American identity. What had we done wrong to beget such monsters? Each seemed an end to American "innocence," a quality that seems continuously expunged (by the Civil War, the Depression, Vietnam, the Kennedy assassination, and Watergate, among other collective shocks) and continuously restored.

We put pain behind us by assigning it to history. Linenthal, who supplements his archival research with visits to Oklahoma City and conversations with dozens of survivors, relatives, and civic leaders, finds three kinds of histories told about the community's ordeal. What he calls "the progressive narrative" acknowledges the horror of the bombing, but, emphasizing the courage and generosity it inspired, emphasizes reconstruction and renewal. "The redemptive narrative" acknowledges a crisis of meaning, but looks beyond the horror to spiritual transformation. By contrast, "the toxic narrative" recognizes extraordinary acts of compassion, but rejects glib talk of "closure" Linenthal endorses the view of Pam Whicher, widow of a Secret Service agent murdered in the bombing, that "This was nothing more than a damn waste of lives." As his title suggests, The Unfinished Bombing contends that the wounds that cause the gravest pain never can be healed.

Linenthal's strongest section examines how Oklahoma City developed a public memorial which includes 168 empty chairs. He recounts the often-contentious process by which professional designers, politicians, survivors, and family members confronted the question of whether the plot of the Murrah Building should be treated as sacred space, off-limits to ordinary activities, or whether it is precisely by resuming business at the site of the ruins that we deny the terrorists their victory. Should the living as well as the dead be honored? If so, how, and who exactly qualifies as a "survivor"? These are the questions that, on a larger scale, now face New Yorkers. The final chapter on atrocity can, and should, not be written.

Reviewed by
STEVEN G. KELLMAN
Literary Scene Editor

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