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What I thought about for my summer vacation
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Sept. 8, 1999 |
My summer report begins with my enormous sense of satisfaction and relief
over the renewal of public attention to the Waco disaster, which was so foul
an affront to American civil liberties. The abortive investigation into the
1993 incident, in which more than 80 members of cult leader David Koresh's Branch Davidian religious sect died in a fire at their Texas compound, is currently being blamed on the FBI's
withholding of crucial information from Attorney General Janet Reno, who had
just assumed office. But the major media, with their strongly liberal bias, are equally guilty,
for in trying to protect the new Democratic president, Bill Clinton, they let
Reno get away scot-free with her blatant mismanagement of the Waco standoff.
At the quickly convened congressional hearing into Waco in 1993, Reno's
self-righteous invocation of the child-abuse card deserved to be derided and
rejected by the media, who were already in a state of collective amnesia over
the appalling spectacle of government tanks knocking down the buildings of a
private citizen. Where were America's leftists after Waco? Diddling their thumbs in their
urban and campus coteries, as usual. The shocking absence of protest about
this incident drove the issue underground. It reemerged two years later on
the lunatic far right, in Timothy McVeigh's bombing of the federal office
building in Oklahoma City on the anniversary of Waco, at the cost of 168
lives. This is a good example of what I have described as the principle of rightward
drift in populist thought (a phenomenon also germane to the endless blunders
of insular gay activism). When authentic critique is silenced or censored by
the left, issues drift subliminally to the right, where they burst out again
full-formed as fascist violence. Government authority was illegitimately used at Waco -- and one fascism begot
another. A side effect has been the destruction of yet another female
professional reputation: Janet Reno's mishandling of Waco, like Secretary of State Madeleine
Albright's folly in leading us into a senseless, hideously expensive war over
Kosovo, shows that women, when placed in high office, can be just as
incompetent as men.
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