I had a revelation this morning. I was enervated by the cold sea breeze and a hangover. I was the only passenger sitting on the deck of the ferry, the rest were inside, probably trading stories. I was distractedly reading Ovid and listening to Madvillain on my iPod. A fogbank had silently and swiftly rolled in around the boat ensconcing it in a cottony mist; I could just discern the early-morning lights of coastal houses and it occurred to me just how massive this human experiment is, the sheer vastness of it, each person carrying around their limited framework of character and memory, interpenetrating and reacting to one another in an infinitely convoluted dynamism; far more complex than determining the forces of refraction at play in the waves upon which we were borne. It was revealed to me that this world is fucking insane.

Remember the Nineties?

Today, on May 31st 2009 a man was shot and slain in cold blood while acting as usher in the vestibule of his church in Wichita, Kansas. His name was George Tiller, he was a doctor who performed abortions and he had been the subject of numerous sit-in demonstrations, death threats, bombings and shootings at the hands of radical evangelicals and pro-life hate groups such as Operation Rescue, the Society for Truth and Justice and others of their ilk. During the nineties when their pro-life ideologies were in the minority, the American south was replete with senseless and sanguinary acts of violence. This was the way that they communicated their agendas, through disobedience that was far from civil, through assassination and terrorism. History may be repeating itself.

In 1993, with Bill Clinton recently elected to the White House and congress predominantly left-wing, the southern United States was subjected to a rash of God-motivated killings. In Pensacola, Florida on March 10, 1993 Dr David Gunn, a provider of OB/GYN services, was instructed to ‘stop killing babies’ before being shot in the back three times by Michael Griffin. Rachelle Shannon, a disgruntled abortion opponent who shot George Tiller in either arm later in the year, wrote devoted letters to Griffin commending his work prior to commencing on her own. A year later Dr John Britton, another abortion provider from Pensacola was murdered with a shotgun by yet another disenfranchised, debased and demented evangelical fanatic. Other doctors were killed. Other families were left with holes that cannot be filled.

But let’s return to 1993, when in February a psychotic, pedophiliac Christian cult leader named David Koresh refused the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms entry to his Branch Dividian compound in Waco, Texas and a two month siege ensued, memorably culminating in a sickening denouement of smoke, flames and needless death. This, along with the Ruby Ridge incident, served as the inspiration for Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols’ insidious truck bomb machinations that resulted in the end of 168 burgeoning lives and the injury and mutilation of nearly a thousand American citizens. This was the most abhorrent and wholesale murder in America during the 1990s but it was not an isolated incident.

Scott Roeder, the man who was arrested in connection with today’s sad events, was apprehended by the police in Shawnee County, Kansas in 1996 with the ingredients for a homegrown bomb in the trunk of his car and convicted and charged for Criminal Use of Explosives. Bombing has always been the touchstone of terrorists. However, the United States government didn’t suspend his habeas corpus and extradite him for an indefinite residency at Torture Island, we respected his rights and released him from prison when his sentence was finished and allowed him to leave George Tiller’s four children fatherless. It’s so regrettably stupid that people are so willing to ruin their own lives as well as the lives of their victims, achieving new zeniths of hypocrisy by labeling themselves pro-life and then nonchalantly dispatching it. What a stupid bloody paradox.

We see this again and again. There is a reason behind it. Like young children attempting to get attention from their parents by slamming their siblings in the head, the far-right will distract public attention from substantive issues like, I don’t know, our faltering economy or unprecedented climate change or diminishing sources of energy, by assassinating controversial figures. Along with being horrible it is petty and small and altogether effective. I hope that, as a country, we have the strength to not focus on the traditionally divisive and polarizing issues of the eighties and nineties (abortion, euthanasia, the sanctity of marriage), the stronghold of hatespeak and Manichean typecasting, to address the sickness of a subculture that kill when they feel threatened or outnumbered, and to continue to attend to what matters (vis-a-vis our faltering economy and unprecedented climate change and diminishing sources of energy). Let’s not retrogress; we can’t afford to.

Introduction