Trauma culture

From Oklahoma City to New York, we've turned violent human loss into epic narratives of suffering and patriotism. Does this help people heal or hurt them?

By Charles Taylor

Dec. 15, 2001 | "Will the prominence of the Oklahoma City bombing be ensured by its location in the nation's official memory? ... Will a future terrorist act that inflicts more death consign Oklahoma City to a less prestigious location on the landscape of violence? Or might such an act increase its prestige as the first event in a continuing body of domestic terrorism?"

Those questions appear toward the end of Edward Linenthal's "The Unfinished Bombing: Oklahoma City in American Memory," and I think the only honest answer is that it's too soon to tell. Linenthal couldn't have known, when he wrote those words, that by the time his book arrived in bookstores in October, the Oklahoma City bombing would have already been eclipsed by the Sept. 11 attacks in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania. Yet when you read "The Unfinished Bombing" it's striking just how many parallels there are in the reactions to these attacks and the similarities in their ripple effects.

Many of us found comfort after the Oklahoma City bombing in the knowledge that it turned out to be the work of a pair of lone kooks (no matter what Gore Vidal claims) and not perpetrated by an organized and well-funded cabal of middle-Eastern terrorists, as was initially speculated. Well, that comfort isn't available anymore, and Oklahoma City offers Americans the only precedent we have for what lies in the future for a city and its people after a terrorist attack.

It's only normal, after a catastrophic event, for people to turn to religion for comfort, or for some to see therapists, or for all of us to buoy ourselves up by adding the disaster to the long line of events that have brought out America's optimism and determination to get on with things; Oklahomans did all of this. Linenthal is not out to deride or deny religion or therapy or the American spirit. But good listener that he is, he finds that these sources of comfort have their limits, and that there are even ways in which they prolonged people's grief by ducking the full horror of the bombing or, worse, by changing the experience into something noble and comprehensible.

The heart of "The Unfinished Bombing" is a chapter called "Telling the Story: Three Narratives" in which Linenthal identifies three types of stories the survivors have told themselves while attempting to assimilate the event. The "progressive" narrative focuses on the sense of caring and kinship forged in the shared disaster. It shows a determination to build something positive from the tragedy. The "redemptive" narrative is the response of religious communities as they try to find meaning in an event that threatens to undermine the bedrock beliefs of their faith. The third narrative, the "toxic" narrative, finds neither progress nor redemption. "It is," Linenthal writes, "a story of an unfinished bombing, one that still reaches out to claim people through suicide, to shatter families through divorce, substance abuse, and the corrosive effects of profound and seemingly endless grief."

For the people whose family and friends were murdered in the bombing (It's part of Linenthal's scrupulousness that he uses that word "murdered," and tries to avoid the vagueness of "lost" or "died"), each of these stories has some validity. One woman whose husband, a secret service agent, was killed told Linenthal, "All of the narratives seem to live within my experience, some to greater or lesser degree, from Day 1 to now." This woman, whose name is Pam Whichler, has, at different times, been "absolutely determined" that her family would emerge stronger; felt abandoned by God despite saying that she "felt his presence in my mourning" and that "every day without a disaster is a day to be thankful for"; and become a more questioning believer, more cynical, less tolerant -- as well as a pack-a-day smoker.

Next page: The bereaved father who opposed McVeigh's execution