The Unfinished Bombing: Oklahoma City in American Memory.

• Author: Kellman, Steven G.
• Position: Books

THE UNFINISHED BOMBING: Oklahoma City in American Memory BY EDWARD T. LINENTHAL OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS 2001, 325 PAGES, $30.00

Sept. 11, 2001, changed much in America, including what and how we read. Not long after commercial airliners were flown into the World Traae Center and the Pentagon, books on Islam, Afghanistan, and Osama bin Laden fairly flew off the shelves, as did the works of Nostradamus, the 16th-century French astrologer said to have divined the recent devastation. However, the stars did not seem to favor Edward T. Linenthal, a professor of religion and American culture at the University of Wisconsin, Oshkosh, when Oxford University Press began over the summer to set type for his new book. A study of how American culture has absorbed the 1995 terrorist attack on the Alfred R Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, The Unfinished Bombing now seems outdated. "The bombing in Oklahoma City killed 168 people, more people than any other single act of domestic terror in American history" states Linenthal, inaccurately, alas.

Yet, readers still reeling from thousands of deaths in New York City, Washington, and Pennsylvania have much to learn from Linenthars patient account of the aftermath of another recent national trauma. More a large town than a city, Oklahoma City is worlds away from the coastal cosmopolis that is New York, and even a calamity could not transform Mayor Ronald Norick into the international celebrity that affliction made Gotham's Rudolph Giuliani. The Oklahoma City bombing was an assault on the American heartland, all the more shocking to a nation that felt secure within its own vast spaces.

Unlike the Al Qaeda cabal, the 1995 mass murderers, Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols, were as American as apple pie, home-grown sociopaths so alienated from their compatriots they plotted to exterminate them. Nevertheless, the immediate reaction to the Oklahoma City bombing, with even less justification than in the aftermath to Sept. 11, was to stigmatize, scapegoat, and persecute people who appeared Arab or Muslim. Both of the attacks aroused widespread displays of patriotism, even as they raised questions of American identity. What had we done wrong to beget such monsters? Each seemed...