Americans Have Met the Enemy, and He Is Us : Fear: Post-Cold War and Oklahoma City, we no longer have the luxury of easy labels that tell us who to fear.

From the Indian Wars to the Cold War, the enemy, whether red-skinned or red-starred, was “out there”--savage, implacable and a powerful organizing force for American consciousness. Whatever the fears and panics of the moment, in the stories Americans told themselves the stigma of enemy-ness was always obvious.

Now, 20 years after a defeat in Vietnam in which Americans couldn’t agree on what had defeated us, and three years after the final, anti-climactic collapse of the Soviet Union, the response to the Oklahoma City bombing shows how completely the idea of the Enemy has fragmented. An initial fury over Arab terrorists subsided with the arrest of Timothy McVeigh, but this left Americans in a new relationship to the Enemy. Where the Enemy once stood as an organizing principle, there are now only innumerable mix-and-match pods of enemy-like traits, ready to be combined into endless possible mini-sagas about good and evil.

The fragmentation (and proliferation) of the Enemy reflects a deeper fragmentation of an American consensus. Individually, many of the fantasies and fears about the Arab, the Jew, the black, the recent immigrant or even the government on today’s menu of enemies have roots deep in America’s past. But the phenomenon of enemies a la carte, of a choose-your-own-enemy nation, does not.

No longer is there the luxury of projecting an image of enemyness “out there,” far away. In the wake of Oklahoma City, the enemy is in our shadow, and the experience of feeling like an outsider is spreading. Many Americans may soon know what it’s like to look in on someone else’s eerie set of enemies. Many may need their own experts to help them understand who those other enemies are and how the world works with them at its center. Nowhere will the nature of the enemy be simple and evident to all.

Just look at children’s culture, where good and evil have traditionally been highlighted with special clarity. Today, whether you examine a comic book like Spawn or a TV cartoon like “Gargoyles,” the striking thing is that there is no obvious way to sort us from the enemy. To an adult, the good guys now are as likely to look like alien monsters from hell as the bad ones.

For the government, the much-denounced “rogue” or “outlaw” states of the world seem but puny substitutes for the Soviet empire; as for the Air Force and veterans associations, the “revisionist” historians who put together the original Enola Gay exhibit for the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum are but a pathetic replacement for the Japanese of World War II; as for various culture warriors, the National History Standards and the National Endowment for the Arts are weak fill-ins for the good old days of Communist subversion; as for paramilitarists in states like Michigan, Montana and Arizona, a tale about a Zionist government takeover has few of the satisfactions of old-time frontier stories.

The further fragmentation of American identity seems likely to lead to an ever more desperate search for partial enemies that explain little and organize less. What is not questioned, however, is the necessity for enemies; what is not explored is what beside enemy-ness might satisfactorily organize our worlds.

In the meantime, the enemy might be anywhere or anyone. It’s up to you to put together the pieces, fill in the blanks. Will the enemy be a dark-skinned terrorist blending into the growing immigrant populations of any city, an abortion doctor in the local women’s clinic or a Middle American driving his car down the open road, heading for your day-care center? Whoever you are, whatever commonplace or obscure group you think you belong to, you are, potentially, someone’s enemy, and today in America, someone is potentially yours as well.