SMALL FAVORS
Ivins, Molly
SMALL FAVORS Molly Ivins Fertilizer of Hate Thank God it was white guys," said one liberal to another shortly after the Oklahoma bombing. And if you'd been listening to talk radio when the...
...And babies.* Molly Ivins, a columnist for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, appears in this space every month...
...Do hate speech, hate radio, the constant de-monizing of the federal government have any connection to the bombing...
...You see up there on that hill where they're building...
...Then everything went to hell: We had 700 guys with our firm and they was down to 150 before they fired me...
...Lies and paranoia have been spewing out of the religious right...
...Only mothers and fathers, sisters and brothers, sons and daughters, husbands and wives...
...Too much "them...
...Alfonse D'Amato imitates Judge Ito in an "Ah-So" accent...
...Government is us...
...Not enough "us...
...Rush Lim-baugh, who dared listeners to find anything he'd ever said that would have any connection to the Oklahoma bombing...
...the rightwing has gone from cursing the feds for incompetence to regarding it as the mother of all evils...
...Of course racism, sexism, and homophobia are alive and well in America: who ever claimed different...
...We own it, we run it...
...But there was no enemy there...
...Killing babies in the springtime in Normal, Oklahoma...
...Most of what happened in Waco was more like the Keystone Kops, except with tragic results...
...Representative Gerald Solomon puts up a portrait of a racist predecessor in the committee room until black lawmakers complain...
...But this kind of language has not been heard in public debate in this country for years...
...Lynch 'em, hell, they wanted to nuke 'em...
...The Waco P.D., McLennan County Sheriff's deputies, state troopers, Texas Rangers, BATF, and the Fibbies, all tripping over one another, engaging in petty turf disputes, chewing tobacco, spittin' and gettin' hot, and finally taking the monumentally stupid action because they were tired of looking silly...
...Before that, I was with a freight company here in K.C., but we got killed by deregulation...
...According to Gingrich's mother, he calls the First Lady "a bitch...
...That whole bubbling stew of hate—gun nuts, racists, right-wingers, and religious zealots—finally boiled over...
...The NRA...
...The fertilizer is the climate of hate...
...Conversation with a cabbie in Kansas City: "I was down there in Texas in the early 1980s, had me a job in the oilfields out in Midland-Odessa...
...Time to haul out again that phrase that goes back to the Kennedy assassination, when paranoia fanned by the John Birch Society was rampant in the Southwest, "the climate of hate...
...But who listens to this crap, who finds it persuasive...
...Jesse Helms introduces Benazir Bhutto of Pakistan, twice, as Prime Minister of India...
...people kill people...
...I'd only been with 'em a year, but I had a technical job, reading the wells...
...Start at $400,000, can you believe that...
...Newt Gingrich calls Jim Wright "a crook...
...So now we get to blame all the usual suspects...
...Is that even a question...
...Representative Dick Armey of Texas refers to Barney Frank as "Barney Fag...
...McVeigh and company meant to kill the enemy...
...The bomb in Oklahoma City was made from fertilizer...
...And if you'd been listening to talk radio when the theory was that some kind of Middle Easterners did it, you'd be thanking God too...
...And let us stipulate that both the Branch Davidian disaster and the Randy Weaver case were gross misuses of government power...
...But that job went, too, so now I'm drivin' cab...
...The fertilizer is all the "government-is-bad," "government-is-the-problem," "government-is-the-enemy," rhetoric...
...Damn right, those are mansions...
...You still have to have a simplistic, paranoid world view to see it as part of a government plot...
...Robert ("Shut up, fag") Dornan, now a candidate for President, calls the President a traitor on the floor of the House...
...I went on vacation, come back, got fired a month later...
...Just a whole lot of us haven't been paying enough attention...
...I come back up here after Texas, got another job haulin' freight, long hauls...
...the NRA was born of paranoia...
...The fertilizer is the meanness of spirit we've all felt glowing...
...Yeah, I been kicked around some by this economy...
...Of course the hate-filled callers to the radio talk shows are the same kind of white guys who did the Murrah Federal Building...
...Bombs don't kill people...
...Because they were...
Vol. 59 • June 1995 • No. 6
