Thoughts on Boycotting a Book

There's a fine lady who lives in Oklahoma and with whom I carry on an e-mail correspondence. She's a warm, intelligent, and profoundly caring woman and I enjoy every message I receive from her.

Recently she sent me a message supporting a boycott of a new book about Timothy McVeigh. The book is "American Terrorist: Timothy McVeigh and the Oklahoma City Bombing" and the protests against it are heartfelt and compelling... but I have yet to find one that is well-reasoned. I feel a certain lack of information. All I've found against it is, basically, "We don't like what McVeigh has to say and we don't think he should be allowed to say it."

(Before I get hate mail, let me say I don't like what he has to say either, and he can't be executed soon enough for my taste. I like the idea that no one will ever have to worry about him again.)

So I've asked her for more information. She's closer to this mess than I am, and I figure she has more access to information about it than I do. She mis-took my debating of certain points with her as an attempt on my part to get her to change her mind. Here's my response:

> you have not changed my mind at all

I was never interested in changing your mind. Whether or not you read the book is not important to me. It's your choice, and yours alone.

My concern was about the call for boycott. I have yet to see its justification. I have yet to see any evidence that the book glorifies McVeigh or attempts to justify what he did. All I can determine from what I've read from both sides is there are people who think people should not be allowed to hear what McVeigh had to say. And I regard any attempt at censorship, even one disguised as a boycott, as an assault on me.

I'm reminded of the furor, here, over the movie "The Last Temptation of Christ." So many right-wing Christians shouting about it and its alleged blasphemy and how people shouldn't see it, shouldn't be allowed to see it. Not one of those people actually saw the movie. People who saw it couldn't understand the outcry, and people who objected to the movie and then actually saw it changed their minds. It was gorgeous, beautiful, sublime, and if you haven't seen it I won't tell you why I loved it because that would spoil it for you.

Do I consider that you have assaulted me? No, I don't. I think you believe what you've been told about the book. You didn't send me the messages for any reason other than to inform me, I think.

I've read a great deal on the subject of such people as McVeigh, and I've noted one major thing: I am just like they are, and they are like me. Each of them are human beings, through and through, and I am no less capable of committing the atrocities McVeigh and Bundy and Gacy and the rest than they were, than anybody is. But too many people want to pretend they weren't human, they call them "monsters" and claim they are a breed seperate. People don't want to admit that someone Just Like Them could plant a bomb and kill hundreds of people or stalk another human being, torture them, kill them, rape their corpse, and then eat parts of the body.

That is not to say I am likely to do these things. I am capable, but that doesn't mean I will do it. My beliefs are such as to prevent it, and my sense of who I am and where I fit in the universe prevents it. But I am not seperate from those people whom others would call "monsters".

What makes these so-called monsters? It's a simple case of stupidity. Hiding behind our book-learnt moralities, sound-byte rallying cries, and dependence on pseudoscientific theory instead of pragmatic common sense, thinking that if we just wish hard enough our reality will magically become what we think it "oughtta be". Fundamentally, it's bad parenting that breeds these "monsters" and that's caused by stupidity. Not ignorance, which is an absence of information, but stupidity, which is a refusal to learn.

People who want us to hide from what McVeigh has to say may be well-intentioned, but intentions don't mean a thing. The end result of the refusal to hear him will be responsible for making more just like him. Time and time again we hear "he was such a quiet boy" and "no one ever suspected" and "no one had any idea," and all we have to do is look a little deeper and we find those are lies. Everybody saw, and everybody turned a blind eye because they didn't want to believe.

What I'm wanting is not to change your mind, but for you to give me the information I need to make up my own. You're closer to this than I am. I won't read or recommend a book that glorifies McVeigh, but I would read and recommend a book that tells about his glorifying himself. (For example, the material I've read indicates that the authors quote McVeigh as referring to the children as "collateral damage", but the authors themselves don't refer to them that way. It's a major difference, a MAJOR difference.)

So if you offer me information that has a gaping emotional hole in it, I'm going to point to it and ask for it to be filled. Not to change your mind (though if your examining your point of view causes you to change your mind, you might find yourself relieved) but to feed my own.

Of course, I'll understand if you don't want to participate.

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