TERROR IN OKLAHOMA CITY : Hope Makes Entrance in Heartland, but Good Feelings Go Only So Far

The rain came hard and cold Saturday. It spilled from downspouts and ran fast through the streets. It pounded on the fractured remains of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building and flooded the basement. This was the building where crews spent another day picking through rubble, looking for bodies and hoping for survivors. Across the emergency radio bands calls went out for scuba gear and portable heaters and steel-toed boots, sizes 9 through 13.

Winds pushed against the weakened structure, blowing away loose concrete and tarpaulins and who knows what else. Lightning flashed in bursts, each jagged strike followed by thunder. The lightning sometimes would bounce off exposed steel beams in the structure, forcing rescue workers to retreat. The thunder, of course, could be heard all across town, and little children would flinch at the rumble, unsure of its source.

Camera crews and reporters, soaked through their slickers, gathered behind the police lines and waited for news. There was not much. An assistant fire chief wandered over, clutching a toy firetruck. He said the toy was evidence the workers were burrowing ever closer to what was left of the second-floor day-care center. He spoke of “voids” in the wreckage, where it seemed most bodies remained. He said he would return when there was more to report.

Predictably, tensions flared between the townspeople and the vast army of news gatherers. Asked too many times about how it “feels” to take a knife and amputate the leg of a trapped woman, any doctor will become testy. And yet, ghoulish as the task might seem, the news tribe has a part to play in these spectacles. Its task is to turn unfathomable horror into a mere television show, with thematic titles, artful cutaway shots and familiar faces and voices. Thus, reduced to but the latest installment, atrocity loses its bite.

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The theme for Saturday appeared to be “hope.” On one television station, the running “Terror in the Heartland” logo now was alternated with a new one: “Hope in the Heartland.” A local anchor choked up as she reported fresh donations of wheelbarrows and diet Pepsi. “Oklahomans,” she said proudly, “are taking care of Oklahomans.” Later in the segment, a Red Cross worker turned his back and showed the camera a slogan scrawled in red ink across his raincoat: “Hope Springs Eternal.” This made the anchor smile.

The good vibes did not extend to the young ex-soldier who late Friday became the first accused of the crime. Talk radio callers made comparisons to Lee Harvey Oswald and, more to the point, Jack Ruby. At a press conference, the fire chief told how the arrest of Timothy James McVeigh had bucked up his crews. “And quite a number of them,” he said, “would like to have the ability to determine his justice.” Here he chuckled.

McVeigh’s arrest ran counter to the initial script, producing some uncertain responses. Everyone had assumed the bomb was the dastardly work of Arab terrorists, easily hated. No one counted on a gangling kid with a flattop who, as one resident put it, “looks like about a million guys I know. Every town in Oklahoma has a guy who looks like him.”

The suspect’s politics also were problematic. McVeigh, asserted an FBI affidavit, held “extreme right-wing views” and hated the “federal government,” not exactly unusual these days here in the heartland. He was said to be particularly upset with the assault by federal agents on the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Tex. For the more strident opponents of gun control laws, that attack by federal agents represented a frontal assault on the Second Amendment.

Whatever its motivation, the bombing represents, ironically enough, a bit of poison for those who make political careers attacking demon government and its faceless bureaucracy. That popular sport could not seem so inviting Saturday, when confronted with the array of victims profiled in The Daily Oklahoman newspaper.

On Page 19, for instance, Carrol Fields, who worked on the ninth floor: “There wasn’t,” her husband, Ron, is quoted as saying, “a person in the world she didn’t like.”

Two pages over, Nancy Ingram, shown with hospital tubes running into both arms and her nose: “Your other problems,” the 63-year-old grandmother tells the reporter, “seem so minimal when you are alive.”

The same page, two toddlers who attended the day-care center: “What do you say,” their mother, Edye Smith implores, “when people ask, ‘Do you have children?’ I don’t have any answers.” And so on.

What most of the victims had in common was employment with the federal government--HUD, DOT, DEA, IRS, the whole can of soup. Also, all were, well, people, a fact that, given the hard, cold rhetoric of the day, might have escaped a bomber intent on the ultimate in gu-mint bashing.