“Nothing in modern times approaches the Oklahoma disaster,” the Chicago Tribune announced on April 20, the day after a thousand pounds of ammonium nitrate and fuel oil nearly leveled the Alfred P. Murrah federal building in Oklahoma City, killing more than 100 people in the process. The explosion “slashed deep into [the nation’s] sense of heartland security,” continued the Tribune. It “stabb[ed] an icy fear of terror into the American heartland,” the Sun-Times echoed. Everywhere you turned that day “the heartland,” once a bastion of simple Christian virtues, was under siege.
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Journalists seemed particularly shocked that the bomb had penetrated our most impregnable defense: kitsch. “It does not happen in a place where, disembarking at the airport, passengers see a woman holding a sign that welcomes them to the lieutenant governor’s annual turkey shoot,” the New York Times explained on its front page. “It does not happen in a city that has a sign just outside the city limits, ‘Oklahoma City, Home of Vince Gill.’” Commentator after commentator lined up to cry that such a thing “wasn’t supposed to happen” there, “1,500 miles from New York, where such things are expected,” as Harvard professor and Oklahoma native Mickey Edwards put it in his April 28 Tribune column. (He went on to condescend, “This may be a hard concept for people in other parts of the country to understand but people in Oklahoma are nice….We say ‘howdy’ (we really do).”) As Lisa Anderson and Stephen Franklin pointed out in the April 24 Tribune, the city sports license plates with “Oklahoma OK” stamped across them and “bus stop benches brightly emblazoned with ‘It’s a Wonderful Life. Oklahoma City.’” Surely license plates and public benches don’t lie.
And from high atop all this embarrassingly naive prose, that photograph of the fireman cradling the bloody corpse of one-year-old Baylee Almon always loomed, reproduced everywhere except on T-shirts and coffee mugs. It was “an icon of national trauma,” Time magazine declared, as well as a great way to sell newspapers. In case the point of the photograph eluded anyone, freelancer Mary Beth Elgass explained it in an April 28 Tribune column: “Oklahoma City fireman No. 5 looking down at the bloodied child in his arms defines the loss of the last stronghold of our American innocence. No longer can we turn on our televisions or look at our newspapers and beat our breasts over the tragedies inflicted daily in other countries, in our own big coastal cities or in the violent confines of our inner cities, and murmur platitudes from our safe heartland homes.
But this ghoulish group of journalists, so concerned about the welfare of several dozen Oklahoma children, overlooked the real source of danger to those and tens of thousands of other kids across the country. Only a week after the bombing, the U.S. Advisory Board on Child Abuse and Neglect issued the results of its two-and-a-half-year study. It showed that abuse and neglect in the home is the leading cause of death among American children under the age of four, claiming some 2,000 lives and 18,000 disabling injuries annually. (The report also says that child abuse fatalities are underreported.) By comparison, the second leading cause of trauma death, car accidents, kills only half as many children. A dozen horribly unfortunate children may have been victims of a single, massive explosion, but a much more lethal and insidious terrorist campaign has been raging for years against children unsafe in their heartland homes.
The full photo, reproduced in Newsweek, shows an African-American woman lying on a stretcher in the foreground, her head bandaged, a stream of blood trailing across the pavement toward the viewer. Behind her stands the fireman. It wasn’t enough to leave the person of color at the white savior’s feet; in order for him to become an “icon of national trauma,” she had to be removed from his presence altogether.
If white heterosexual men need to lose anything, it’s their willful ignorance. Perhaps now they know what it feels like to be a target in their own country. But as the press coverage of the Oklahoma bombing shrinks to a detective story, with federal agents tracking leads and questioning suspects, our defenses will spring back into place, allowing us to forget that for a brief moment we understood the plight of someone other than ourselves.
