Giant Country: Essays on Texas

American Narratives

American Narratives here are only three or four Oklahoma narratives. There is the Boomer Sooner story, the opening of free land to anybody capable enough or lucky enough to grab it. There is the Grapes oj Wrath story, the one all Oklahomans have been trying to live down since 1939. This is a story of being busted flat, of pulling up precarious stakes and heading farther West. John Steinbeck, the author who enshrined the word Okie in the American lexicon, is still a name that raises hackles in Oklahoma. Then there is the Oklahoma story according to Rogers and Hammerstein. This is the one where the wind comes sweeping down the plain and the corn is as high as an elephant's eye. Oklahomans love this story. And now, there is the story of the bombing of the Alfred P Murrah Federal Building in downtown Oklahoma City. The chairman of the Daily Oklahoman, the top newspaper in the state, believes this may 51 Giant Country 52 be Oklahoma's defining moment. He likens it to the assassination of President Kennedy in Dallas. After that tragedy, he says, Dallas came roaring back to become a boom town. This is the economic silverlining thesis, very popular among Oklahoma optimists. Months earlier I had made plans to be in the city on April 21, 1995, to attend the Seventh Annual Gathering of Cowboy Poets at the National Cowboy Hall of Fame. Then, on April 19, came the bomb that shook the nation as nothing since the Kennedy assassination . In spite of the disaster, the Cowboy Hall of Fame decided to go ahead with its two-day program. The analogy that again spurred them on was that weekend in November 1963 when the NFL had played its regular schedule the Sunday following the assassination, a decision which many later believed was the correct one. But after President Clinton declared Sunday a day of national mourning, the Cowboy Hall of Fame did indeed cancel the second day. The Oklahoma City that I know bears little resemblance to the one that the national media describe as a typical city in America's Heartland. Where I stay, when I go there, is at a cheap chain motel. My booking this trip was way out north, on 1-35, next stop, Wichita, Kansas, the same route by which TImothy McVeigh journeyed from Oklahoma City to Perry, ninety miles north. At the Holiday Inn next door to my motel that weekend, there was an NRA meeting, but the Star Trek convention had been canceled. The interstate is a no-man's land of temporary lodgings and chain eateries, where truckers and travelers pause on their flights across the flat lands of the southern Midwest. Oklahoma, however, does not picture itself as Midwest, preferring instead the romance and glamour of a western identity. Coming out of the airport, I flicked on my lights in the bright afternoon sun. The freeways were alive with the lights of automobiles , in what seemed to be universal respect for the dead and the missing. Radio talk shows made much of this show of solidarity. They made much of everything. Oklahoma's insecurity complex was the subtext of a lot of the commentary from callers and talk-show hosts. And there was a great deal of talk of retribution, of crime and punishment. One ca1ler, declaring himself no "offbeat redneck," pro- American Narratives posed a public hanging-to show that such things can happen on the East Coast or the West Coast, but not here. (But of course it had.) A hanging would show the East Coast press that Oklahoma could take care of its problems and they could then just "leave us Okies alone." (By this time, late Friday afternoon, McVeigh was already in the hands of the authorities.) Another caller favored a public beheading so that citizens could have the satisfaction of seeing the criminal's head roll down the steps of the palace of justice. But there were other callers who sounded a different note. Without condoning the act (nobody could brook the slaughter of the children), many callers agreed that the attack possessed a certain logic, an eye-for-an-eye retaliation against what they saw as the overweening power of the federal government. According to these callers, Waco and the Branch Davidian massacre were the driving force behind the assault on the Federal Building. Following this line of...