The Ultimate Hate Crime : THE CITY : The Heartland? Sure--But Don’t Expect Leniency

On TV and in the newspapers, the phrases repeat themselves. Terrorism has struck the heartland of America. People living in Oklahoma will never be the same. We have lost our innocence.

Don’t bet on it. We were never innocent to begin with. This part of the country, at least as much as any other, is steeped in blood and lawlessness, which, for better or worse, have helped to shape the character of the place.

Until Oklahoma became a state in 1907, this was Indian Territory, where the only a law was either tribal or in the federal court of a hanging judge across the border in Arkansas. We call ourselves the “Sooner State” in celebration of outlaws with the cleverness and guts to beat the starting time of the chaotic land rush of 1889. When the great oil boom began at the turn of the century, it was neither the timid nor the overly scrupulous who came out covered in crude and money. Today, the only Oklahomans I know who don’t keep a loaded gun handy are academics--a few of them.

We even have a law, passed 10 years ago, in honor of “Dirty Harry.” Called the “Make My Day” law, it gives you the right to shoot anyone intruding on your property, armed or not--unless he’s running away. Shooting someone in the back remains frowned upon.

The night of the bombing, I watched a woman who feared her two children and her husband were dead. Her head was bandaged; her right ear had just been sewn back on. She was not in shock, not yet. She was angry. “Whoever did that act, I hope you’re happy,” she spat out the words. You knew if the bombers were brought before her, she would gladly pull the trigger. Hers is the proud, defiant spirit of this state. This is, after all, the Bible Belt, where ideas of the noble savage or the perfectibility of humankind have never cut much ice. People here may pray to Jesus, but they believe in the God of wrath.

And they still believe in America, which, above all else, means liberty--something never to be surrendered without a fight, to the death if necessary. At the moment, the most popular official here is U.S. Atty Gen. Janet Reno, because she announced that against the terrorists she will seek the death penalty.

Yet, compared to Los Angeles or Boston or New York, Oklahoma is not considered a violent place. The homicide rate here is a fraction of that in supposedly more sophisticated cities on either coast. I have come to cherish the friendly, peaceful life, on a street where I not only know my neighbors, but enjoy their company. The night of the bombing, we all gathered to discuss the carnage. We’ll stick together, we’ll be here for each other was the unspoken message. There was no panic, just sadness and outrage--and deep anger.

However, the quality of life has degenerated here, too. We do have our occasional drive-by shootings; there are drugs here, and the gangs that come with them--Bloods, Crips and skinheads, or whatever the savages call themselves.

Every house on my block has an alarm system, along with the handy shotguns and pistols. I have had three cars stolen out of my driveway in the past 10 years; my sister-in-law’s house nearly burned down last year when some creep torched her carport. But, for the most part, Oklahoma communities, including Oklahoma City and Tulsa, are more in control of crime than victimized by it.

We feel, relatively speaking, in control of our lives--if less so during tornado season. For that reason, the current horrors do seem an unusual kind of reality and threat. Certainly, they have shaken a certain complacency and even smugness hereabouts, of the kind that makes people pity those who live elsewhere, even as they look down on us as culturally deprived.

But this disaster will not change the basic character of the place, which, with its predominant mix of red and white and black people, represents an older, perhaps anachronistic America. Ethnically, our roots are overwhelmingly European, Native American and African, in that order. We feel more unity than diversity among ourselves; the Balkanization that divides the sundry ethnic communities of, say, Los Angeles, is unknown here. English remains the language of choice; even recent immigrants learn it at once.

Eighty-five years ago, on the night of Oct. 1, 1910, anarchists bombed the Los Angeles Times building, killing 21 work men. The issue then was the resistance of the paper’s owners, along with most of the city’s business community, to organized labor. The bombing did not soften the paper’s hostility toward unions, nor did it change a whit Southern California’s reputation as an anti-labor place, controlled by strong, white, mostly Protestant men who equated unions with communism.

It took two world wars, Vietnam, political upheavals in Central and South America, economic desperation in Mexico, and the recent and continuing waves of immigration to change the face and character of Los Angeles. No mere bombing could accomplish that, and it would take demographic and cultural shifts of equal magnitude to transform the temperament of Okies--a term of abuse coined by Californians during the Great Depression but now worn by Oklahomans as a badge of pride. They are among the peoples of the Earth who cannot be insulted or bombed into submission.

The L.A. bombers of 1910, brothers named McNamara, who were defended by Clarence Darrow, ended up confessing and receiving prison sentences. As these latest terrorists will find out, such leniency will not satisfy an Oklahoma jury.