American Terrorist by Lou Michel & Dan Herbeck

From The Week of August 27, 2012 In light of the vigor with which we have studied civilization, its benefits and its costs, its surprises and its wonders, we know worryingly little about how best to sustain it. Yes,the old standards of a common education, a shared sense of community, and a market by which to trade and do work are certainly vital cogs in this particular wheel, but not even these powerful platforms can keep our disaffected from falling through the cracks, tumbling down into the nihilism of despair and hatred. These individuals, sufficiently marinated in these negative emotions, care nothing for civilization. On the contrary, they are willing to wound it, to savage it, to try to bring it to its knees.

Why? Why do they desire to lash out at what we have all together made? Moreover, what differentiates them from the rest of us? What critical element distinguishes a man who responds to being fired by applying for new jobs from a man who responds by using a shotgun to revenge himself upon those who wronged him? Normally, these would be questions for psychologists, not journalists. And yet, in this mesmerizing biography of timothy McVeigh, Misters Michel and Herbeck have captured an insight that helps answer both these important questions.

Born in Western New York in 1970, Timothy McVeigh enjoyed an ordinary youth. Enamored with sports and Star Trek, friends and family, he exhibited virtually no signs of the cold, calculating extremist he would later become. Sure, he bent the rules, falling in love with fast cars and powerful guns, but such are the thrills of male adolescence. All of this would change, however, in the 1980s when the dissolution of his parents' marriage and the humdrum nature of civilian life would steer him into the arms of the military where, within a year of enlisting, he would find himself in the oil-stained sands of the Middle East, participating in the United States' crushing defeat of Iraq in the First Gulf War. Bullied as a youth, McVeigh harbored a life-long disgust for the strong who took advantage of the weak. And so, unlike his country, he could not revel in their victory. For he had seen, first-hand, how overmatched the Iraqis had been. To him, it was not a victory; it was a slaughter.

Over the next few years, McVeigh would nurse his grudges into a cold, hard anger. Submerging himself in a world of gun shows and sovereign citizens, he would eventually fix his rage upon his federal government, blaming them for jeopardizing the value of the Dollar, for harboring imperialist inventions abroad, and for wanting to implement a nanny state at home. Every slight, every small infringement upon his liberty, fuelled his outrage until the desire to hit back consumed him. On April 19th, 1995, he would do just that, detonating a 7,000 pound truck bomb just outside the federal building in downtown Oklahoma city, Oklahoma, killing 168 people in what was then the deadliest act of terrorism on American soil. He would consider it a legitimate military action, payback for the overuse of American power and a rallying cry to patriots. His countrymen would consider it a heinous crime for which death was the only punishment.

American Terrorist is captivating work. Misters Michel and Herbeck, both American journalists, gained extensive access to McVeigh and his family, allowing them to sketch vivid portraits of the terrorist, his shy father, his angry sister and his selfish mother. They paint lavish portraits of western New York during the 1970s and 1980s, decades of white flight and economic depression that would continue to torment the area for years to come. They chronicle, in startling detail, McVeigh's three-year journey to Oklahoma City, traveling through the hard-right world of militiamen and sovereignists, survivalists and white supremacists, to finally arrive at McVeigh's destructive destiny. But for as much as Misters Michel and Herbeck do a wonderful job illuminating the many worlds Timothy McVeigh inhabited, this work is at its most potent when making the case that we can only understand McVeigh's radicalism by comprehending how little the man had to lose. Through a combination of circumstance and his own haplessness with women, McVeigh separated himself from virtually all human attachment. He had no partner to provide for. He had no children to live for. He was a man without ties, a man who saw the world through the lens of his loneliness.

His star had been rising. He was an accomplished soldier with a bright future. And then it ended. And without anyone around him to remind him of the truth, he revised his own history, finding something else to blame for his failures. The government became his jihad, the gestalt of all his frustration. And without anyone to live for, he was free to attack his enemy with all the training at his disposal.

Some might consider this to be a sympathetic biography. Some will likely argue that McVeigh shouldn't be studied at all, that he and his darkness should be confined to history. But these are empty claims. We can only understand the flaws in our society through the study of those who find flaw in it. For even in all their tortured radicalism, they can still hold up a mirror for us to view ourselves, how we make the voiceless feel and how important it is to keep them in our thoughts when we act. For it is they who will try to punish us for ignoring them. And when we allow them to do that, we all lose. (5/5 Stars)