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T.S. Eliot had it right when he wrote that April is
the cruelest month.
There's no record that the
expatriate poet ever endured an April in Colorado, where it
is possible to suffer frostbite and sunburn on the same
day, but he may have read about it.
Perhaps Eliot had April 15 in mind, but he lived in England, where April 15 holds no special significance for the Inland Revenue.
Eliot died in 1965, long before anyone cared about April 19, a day that has everyone wary this year. Our last April 19 was marked by the bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma City, which resulted in 168 deaths.
The bombers may have picked that day because on April 19, 1993, the tanks rolled into the Branch Davidian compound outside Waco, Texas, and at least 72 people died.
Then again, the bombers might have had another April 19 in mind -- April 19, 1775, the Battle of Concord in Massachusetts. That was the start of the Revolutionary War.
Perhaps, as the trial proceeds in Denver, we will learn why it happened on April 19.
More informative, though, would be to learn how anyone could be so stupid as to believe that a bomb could advance a cause.
During my college days, radical bombers frequently attacked components of the military-industrial complex, presumably to stop the Vietnam War. The war went on.
A big bomb -- gunpowder under a load of scrap iron in a wagon -- went off on Wall Street after World War I. Capitalism continued without skipping a beat.
Nor did Colorado's mining companies, intent on breaking unions at the turn of the century, allow a few bombs (13 dead at Independence near Cripple Creek in 1904; a mine manager's house at Telluride in 1908) to get in their way.
After some anti-Vietnam bomb, I asked a campus revolutionary if there was any rationale for such bombs.
The theory is that the government will respond with
draconian measures,
he said, and then the general
population will be radicalized and rise up in revolt
against the oppressive system.
If that's the rationale for bombing, that it will change people's minds, bombing doesn't work. Our own military history demonstrates that.
While domestic terrorists set bombs off in this country during the Vietnam War, our own government was dropping thousands of tons of ordnance on North Vietnam. Those bombs didn't change anybody's mind in Hanoi, and despite all the bombing, we lost the war.
Our strategic bombing survey concluded after World War II that our bombing had little effect on German production or morale and did not measurably alter the course of the war.
More recently, we bombed Baghdad for more than a month in the Gulf War. Iraq did not retreat from Kuwait until we actually moved on the ground, and even at that, Saddam Hussein remains very much in power.
If the U.S. Department of Defense, with its immense destructive resources, cannot effect a political change by bombing, how could an individual, even someone as diabolically clever as the Unabomber?
Alas, there is some truth in the political theory of
bombing,
in that the government often responds with
stricter laws, even if the populace doesn't rebel. Thus we
have a Domestic Anti-Terrorism Law
now touted by the
Clinton Administration, and I hate to think of what the
law-and-order Republicans will contrive to top it.
With current laws and resources, our authorities appear to have solved crimes and arrested suspects. Why do we need more laws? Doesn't that represent, to some degree, a triumph for the terrorists?
Maybe that's just the American way. When something happens, we want to fix it with a law.
Three people died in a plane wreck last week in Cheyenne. A seven-year-old girl may have been at the controls. Predictably, there were calls for a new law.
Without a spy camera in every private airplane, how would such a law be enforced?
Since the real pilot will suffer if the plane crashes, he has every self-interested reason to prevent a passenger from operating the plane in an unsafe manner. Anyone who lets a seven-year-old fly an overloaded airplane into a thunderstorm is not going to let a mere law stop him, anyway.
In admitted bad taste, we started a pool here. My bet is
that the first quicky paperback on Jessica Dubroff will be
on the stands by Memorial Day and that the made-for-TV
movie, Spreading Her Wings: The Jessica Dubroff
Story,
will air before Independence Day.
We didn't include First Opportunistic Politician to
Propose Legislation on Account of the Dubroff Tragedy
because we knew it would happen before we could get the
pool organized.
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