Aberration in the Heartland of the Real: The Secret Lives of Timothy McVeigh
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Aberration in the Heartland of the Real: The Secret Lives of Timothy McVeigh
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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781634240048 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Trine Day |
| Publication date: | 04/19/2016 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 720 |
| Sales rank: | 858,741 |
| File size: | 3 MB |
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Aberration in the Heartland of the Real
The Secret Lives of Timothy McVeigh
By Wendy S. Painting
Trine Day LLC
Copyright © 2016 Wendy S. Painting, PhD.All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-63424-004-8
CHAPTER 1
On Becoming John Rambo: An Overview of American Madness
"Rampage" – (verb): a course of violent, riotous, or reckless action or behavior; (noun): violent behavior that is reckless, uncontrolled, or destructive.
The amok man is patently out of his mind, an automaton oblivious to his surroundings and unreachable by appeals or threats. But his rampage is preceded by lengthy brooding over failure and is carefully planned as a means of deliverance from an unbearable situation.
–Steven Pinker, How the Mind Works, 1997
His was an impenetrable darkness. I look at him as you peer down at a man who is lying at the bottom of a precipice where the sun never shines.
–Charles Marlow, protagonist in Joseph Conrad'sHeart of Darkness, 1899
This is the way the world ends. Not with a bang but a whimper.
–T.S. Elliot, "The Hollow Man," 1925
The Many McVeigh's ...
Much has been written about Lee Harvey Oswald who, according to the well-known narrative, on November 22, 1963, at the age of twenty-four, fired three shots from the sixth story of the Texas School Book Depository in Dallas, wounding Texas Governor John Connolly and killing President John F. Kennedy, after which he escaped the scene, via city bus, taxi and on foot, headed to a movie theatre, and shot and killed Dallas Police officer J.D. Tippet along the way. After a booth attendant called the police to report that a man had entered the theatre without buying a ticket, the police arrived and arrested Oswald. Depending on the account, Oswald either willingly submitted to police or put up a struggle and had to be subdued. Either way, he was charged with the murders of Kennedy and Tippet, but adamantly denied involvement in either of the deaths. During a transfer from the Dallas police headquarters to a county jail, he proclaimed to journalists and television crews, "I didn't shoot anybody! [...] I'm just a patsy!" Two days later, Oswald himself was shot and killed on live television by nightclub owner Jack Ruby. This much we think we know.
Oswald's brief life was marked by complexity and contradiction. His father died before he was born, leaving his mother to raise him and his siblings. His mother moved often (from Louisiana to Texas to New York) and by the time he graduated high school Oswald had attended 12 different schools. Although he read veraciously and had a high IQ, he had great difficulty writing and spelling. Those who knew him at a young age described him as introverted, moody and argumentative. When he was arrested for repeated truancy in the 7th grade, the juvenile psychiatrist who evaluated him reported that Oswald was absorbed within a "vivid fantasy life, turning around the topics of omnipotence and power, through which [he] tries to compensate for his present shortcomings and frustrations." By fifteen years old, he was a self-proclaimed Socialist and Marxist. The next year he joined the Civil Air Patrol in New Orleans, a right-wing-leaning organization, but surely one perceived as patriotic.
At seventeen, Oswald quit school and joined the U.S. Marine Corp because, according to his older brother, he hoped "to get out and under ... the yoke of oppression [of our] mother." While in the Marines, he was trained as a radar operator, obtained a security clearance, qualified as a sharpshooter and took (but did poorly on) a Russian language exam. Although one of his commanding officers described him as a "very competent" crew chief and "brighter than most people," Oswald expressed pro-Soviet sentiments and on a number of occasions was court-martialed, once for accidently shooting himself in the elbow with a handgun he was not authorized to possess and another time for fighting with a sergeant. His various court-martials led to imprisonment and demotion.
At the age of twenty, Oswald defected to the Soviet Union where he lived for three years and met and married his wife Marina before returning to the U.S., claiming he became disillusioned with life in the USSR. In March 1963, Oswald allegedly purchased a rifle and revolver through the mail, using the alias "A. Hidell" and purportedly used the revolver in an attempt to shoot U.S. Major General Edwin Walker, a rabid right-wing anti-communist segregationist. The next month, he moved to New Orleans where he began propagating Pro-Castro literature but, paradoxically, associated with a number of notable right-wing individuals who had very rabid and vocal anti-communist and anti-Castro political beliefs. These individuals included, among others, former FBI agent GuyBannister, CIA asset David Ferrie and local businessman Clay Shaw.
In New Orleans, Oswald briefly worked at a coffee company until July 1963, when he was fired for reading rifle and hunting magazines while on the job and for loitering in general. That September, he is reported to have visited the Cuban Embassy in Mexico seeking a visa that would allow entry into Cuba where he planned to stay before traveling on to the Soviet Union. Facing a delay in processing the visa, Oswald headed to Dallas where he rented a room under the name "O.H. Oswald," had some contact with FBI agents, and got a job at the Texas School Book Depository.
Despite numerous official and citizen investigations and the many theories surrounding it, the JFK assassination and Oswald's subsequent murder ushered in, not only an era of televised death spectacles via politically motivated assassinations and random public shootings (with no apparent political motivation) committed by "lone nuts" but also the age of rapidly proliferating conspiracy theories, the formation of "conspiracy cultures," and a deep cynicism and distrust in the official stories about any one of these incidents and the creation of alternate counter-narratives.
Within a few years of Oswald's appearance on the public stage, a number of other equally frustrated and listless lone nuts emerged. These included twenty-five year old Charles Whitman who, in August 1966, killed his wife and mother in their home and then commenced a sniping spree from a tower at the University of Texas, killing sixteen people and wounding thirty-two others before being shot and killed by an Austin police officer. Whitman, like Oswald, reportedly grew up in a physically and psychologically abusive home and went on to join the U.S. Marine Corp. Two years later, in April 1968, James Earl Ray allegedly assassinated Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and a little over two months after that, in June 1968, twenty-four year old Sirhan Sirhan purportedly killed Presidential nominee, Robert F. Kennedy.
Arthur Bremer
Included among this growing family of Lone Nuts was twenty-two year old Arthur Bremer whose attempt to assassinate Democratic presidential candidate George Wallace with a .38 revolver during a campaign rally, left Wallace paralyzed from the waist down and critically wounded three others. Members of the crowd tackled Bremer and he was arrested.
Bremer grew up in an abusive and highly dysfunctional home. He later explained that as a child, "I would escape my ugly reality by pretending that I was living with a television family, and there was no yelling at home or no one to hit me." Although Bremer was gifted with a high IQ, he consistently received low grades, had trouble making friends and found school to be a lonely and torturous experience filled with bullies who scorned and ridiculed him. After graduating high school, he enrolled in college, where he was remembered as a "strange, aloof and argumentative" fellow who "rarely talked to anybody." Bremmer dropped out after one semester and got a job as a busboy, but after customers complained about his bizarre mannerisms, including talking to himself out loud, he was demoted. When he demanded his demotion be reversed, an evaluator reported that Bremer, although a "conscientious" worker, "border(e)d on the paranoid." He quit his job and for the next few years worked as an elementary school janitor during which time he became increasingly suicidal. In October 1971, Bremer was arrested for carrying a concealed weapon and was pronounced mentally ill by a court-appointed psychiatrist. Soon after, Bremer purchased a .38 revolver.
On March 2, 1972, Bremer wrote in his diary, "It is my personal plan to assassinate by pistol either Richard Nixon or George Wallace," and that his purpose was "to do SOMETHING BOLD AND DRAMATIC, FORCEFUL & DYNAMIC, A STATEMENT of my manhood for the world to see." He then began to stalk Wallace, following him throughout the country. More attracted to the idea of killing Nixon, on April 11 of that year, Bremer traveled to Ottawa, Canada where Nixon was making a public appearance but decided against killing him due to the high level of security there.
After returning to his home state of Wisconsin, Bremer took two books about Sirhan Sirhan out of the library and wrote in his diary, "I am as important as the start of WWI. I just need the little opening and a second of time." He then turned his full attention to Wallace, although somewhat less enthusiastically, as Wallace was not as well-known as Nixon and his death "won't get more than three minutes on the network T.V. news." Still, on May 9, Bremer visited Wallace's local campaign headquarters and continued to follow him and attend his rallies. The day he set out for Laurel, Maryland, where Wallace was to appear next, Bremer wrote, "My cry upon firing will be 'A penny for your thoughts.' Copyright 1972. All rights reserved. Arthur H. Bremer." On May 15, 1972, Bremer, wearing dark glasses, red, white and blue clothing and a "Wallace in 72" campaign button, attended a campaign rally for Wallace. As many in the crowd jeered Wallace and even threw tomatoes at him, Bremer feigned support for him by loudly cheering and applauding. Due to the crowd's harsh reception of him, the candidate did not interact with the crowd after his speech and Bremer found no opportunity to enact his plan, but succeeded later that day at another rally just a few miles away.
When police searched his apartment they found shell boxes, a Confederate flag, pornography, Black Panther literature, newspaper clippings, Wallace campaign buttons, a book entitled 101 Things To Do In Jail and a number of diary entries including ones that read "My country tis of thee land of sweet bigotry," "Cheer up Oswald," and "White collar, conservative, middle class, Republican, conservative robot."
In his car, which investigators described as a "hotel on wheels," were pillows, blankets, a tape recorder, a radio with police band, binoculars, a .9mm automatic pistol and the 1972 edition of Writer's Yearbook.
During his trial, his defense attorneys argued that Bremer was schizophrenic, legally insane and had "no emotional capacity to understand anything;" but prosecutors argued otherwise and said that, while perhaps the man was disturbed, he knew what he was doing when he attempted to kill Wallace and had done so to get attention, even calculating his arrest and subsequent media coverage of his trial. After a jury found him guilty, at the conclusion of his sentencing hearing,Bremer was given the opportunity to speak and said, "[The Prosecutor] said that he would like society to be protected from someone like me. Looking back on my life, I would have liked it if society had protected me from myself. That's all I have to say at this time."
He was sentenced to serve sixty-three years in prison but the sentence was appealed and reduced to fifty-three years. In 2007, after serving 35 years, at the age of fifty-seven, Bremer was released from prison and placed on probation until 2025.
In their 1977 book, Snapping: America's Epidemic of Sudden Personality Change, Flo Conway and Jim Siegelman proclaimed that a rapidly growing "epidemic of sudden personality change" existed in America, a cultural phenomenon they dubbed "snapping," wherein normal individuals undergo startling personal transformations that sometimes lead them to engage in acts of random violence. To help understand the emergent phenomenon, the authors introduced their theory of "communication disorders" and a particular subset of these that they termed "Information Diseases" (IDs). They described ID's as "alterations in a person's information-processing capacities" that, unlike momentary, episodic and individualized snapping, results in a prolonged and "marked [change] of awareness, diminished conscious control [and] persisting impairments [of a person's] everyday powers of thinking, feeling, perception, memory, imagination and conscious choice."
Writing long before the emergence of the World Wide Web, the authors attributed America's ID epidemic to the unique stresses of modern life, especially information overload, as well as other isolated or ongoing traumatic experiences that, in combination, "lead to the physical breakdown of a person's entire ability to make sense of his experience," making them more suggestible to outside influences and rendering them "prone to uncontrollable urges and sudden outbursts of violence."
One such trauma, called 'Information Stress,' resulted from "obsessive absorption" with computers, television or other modern-day hobbies, noting that recent generations "have been molded, not by rich real-life experiences [but] information imparted electronically via television, film, computers and other advances in communication technologies" that convey "narrow, shallow and violent" images and messages, lead to crises of identity (at best) and actual violence (at worst) and render people mere "holograms of the society they inhabit." While the most common IDs led to "ongoing altered states of awareness," when in a "more advanced" and extreme stage, 'the delusional stage,' an individual's ability to distinguish reality, fantasy and illusion is impaired, causing them to suffer "vivid delusions" and confusion about whether they are actually awake or dreaming.
In 1978, the year following the publication of Snapping, Theodore "Ted" Kaczynski began targeting individuals in some way connected to modern technology through planting or mailing home-made bombs that, from 1978 until 1995, killed three people and injured twenty-three others. His bombing campaign ceased when he was apprehended in April 1996, after his brother tipped off the FBI to Kaczynski's whereabouts in Lincoln, Montana, where he lived a hermetic life in a cabin without electricity or running water. After pleading guilty, he was sentenced to life without the possibility of parole.
As a child, Kaczynski was often sick and frequently hospitalized for various ailments including recurring hives. He feared other children and refused to interact with them, leading his mother to seek help for what she believed to be autism. He was, however, highly intelligent, and completed high school by the age of fifteen. At sixteen, he began attending undergraduate classes at Harvard University. While there, he, along with several other undergraduate students, became a subject for psychological tests conducted by a former interrogator for the WWII intelligence agency, the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) – Henry Murray. The tests, which lasted several months, sought to measure reactions to extreme stress and distress. Students wrote essays about themselves, were taken into a room and placed in a seat facing bright lights and a two-way mirror, hooked up to electrodes and then berated, belittled and subjected to brutal verbal attacks directed at their egos and beliefs. The experience and their reactions to it were filmed, and then played back to them repeatedly throughout the course of the study. Kaczynski's brother said that, prior to his participation in the test, his brother had been emotionally stable.
In 1962, at the age of twenty, Kaczynski graduated from Harvard and enrolled in a doctoral program at the University of Michigan, where he earned a PhD in mathematics. While there, he taught courses and published a number of papers. In 1967, he graduated and was recognized by the school for writing the best dissertation in his field that year. That same year, he began teaching geometry and calculus courses at the University of California, Berkeley. Students complained about his teaching style, told administrators that he was very nervous in a teaching environment and said he sometimes stuttered and mumbled during lectures. Two years later, he resigned from his teaching position and moved to his cabin in Montana where, in 1978 he began his bombing campaign.
In 1995, he sent a number of letters to his victims and packages to media outlets. The packages contained his 35,000-word manifesto entitled Industrial Society and Its Future, commonly referred to as the "Unabomber Manifesto." He demanded that outlets publish the manifesto and promised to cease the bombings if they did. Eventually, in September 1995, after he threatened to kill more people because outlets had delayed publishing his writings, the New York Times and Washington Post complied with his demands. The writing advocated world revolution against modern society and its "industrial-technological system" which he said (among other things) had destroyed human autonomy, degraded their relationship to nature and caused them to "behave in ways that are increasingly remote from the natural pattern of human behavior." This system, unless it was destroyed, would evolve until human freedom was destroyed altogether. He railed against the system for causing individuals to become overly socialized and expressed his belief that modern psychological problems were the result of individuals having to live in physical and social environments and behave in conforming ways that are radically different from those in which humans had originally evolved to exist.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Aberration in the Heartland of the Real by Wendy S. Painting. Copyright © 2016 Wendy S. Painting, PhD.. Excerpted by permission of Trine Day LLC.
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Table of Contents
Contents
cover,Title Page,
Aberration in the Heartland of the Real: The Secret Lives of Tim McVeigh,
Dedication,
Acknowledgments,
Preface,
Timeline Of Events,
Constructing The Face Of Terror – A Historical Overview,
Narrative Types & Recurring Depictions,
On Becoming John Rambo: An Overview of American Madness,
The Following Records Do Not Exist,
Amerinoid,
McVeigh's Imperceptibly Binding Chains,
Wearing The Wolf's Head,
Notes,
Select Bibliography,
Stephen Jones Oklahoma City Bombing Archive,
Select List Of Internal Jones Team Memorandum and Reports,
Select List Of Jones Team Letters,
Select List Of Additional Jones Team Documents,
Select List of FBI 302 Database Forms,
American Terrorist Collection,
Other Sources Select List of FBI 302 Investigatory Reports,
Select Military Records,
Index,