Chuck Grimes wrote:
>
>
> Why just yesterday we cooked some guy in Terra Haute. And there's
> Timothy McV, last week who took the big ride for besmirching the
> all American way of life. McV is more important and problematical than
> whats-his-name, not because he killed more people, but because he blew
> up a government temple and its priesthood---he attacked our sacred
> national bureaucracy, emblem of the state, and holy of holies in the
> secular universe. This is like committing rape and murder in the
> temple of Athene. We were so outraged we built a new temple on top of
> the ruins of the old temple with great fanfare and solemnity.
Most of the diatribes against McVeigh I read in conservative media portrayed him as a lone madman, in a completely one-dimensional way. Apart from the speculative possibility that killing him cut off the possibility of interrogating him later about a broader conspiracy, his execution tended to heighten the focus on him as an individual and not as a representative of a broad point of view.
You carry your otherwise rather good classical analogy with this: "rape and murder in the temple of Athene." Hardly anybody sees a federal building as a temple. Most of the animus towards him had to do with his having killed many individual people, and the particular bitterness was against him as a child-killer. Of course he helped it along with his remarks about the murdered babies as "collateral damage."
Killing him was a way of pretending that he didn't represent a key part of a widespread American outlook.
Christopher Rhoades Dÿkema