My Mother and Timothy McVeigh
A Prologue of Sorts
My mother died of cancer 30 years ago today. I went to see her at The New England Medical Center in Boston for what turned out to be the last time with my then partner Jen Rogers and my father. One thing I remember, the magnolia trees lining Commonwealth Avenue had detonated their pink and white blossoms against the April blue sky .
Janine Anne Hortense André was born in 1930 in Toulouse to a Russian Jewish immigrant mother, and a French dentist father. She spent her childhood in petite-bourgeois comfort. Her early adolescence brought the Nazi invasion, and because they were subject to deportation according to Statut des Juifs, she and her 3 younger siblings spent a couple years living secretly in barn. As the oldest, she was in charge, which broke her for life. Among other symptoms, she developed a permanent phobia of all things German, and all leather clothing. At the end of the war, the André family found them selves declassed. Janine finished her education in Toulouse, becoming a physician. A few years ago, I found out she known in student circles as an out lesbian.
At that time, France required medical school graduates to do an internship in the US in order to compensate for the post-war “brain-drain.” Janine fulfilled that obligation by working in an immunology laboratory in Boston, but instead of bringing medical knowledge back to France she met and married my father, a former GI in the Japanese occupation who never did like me all that much.
It always puzzled me that Janine, who read À la recherche du temps perdu repeatedly, had the courage to be in one of the first large cohorts of women to graduate from medical school in France, and to put up with misogynist hazing there, but was too nervous about taking the exam that would have allowed her to practice in the US, choosing to become an electron microscopist instead. Janine was what you might call “emotionally unavailable,” and had a lightning temper that I inherited and still work on ameliorating. Nevertheless she made me feel loved.
When we got to the hospital, we stopped, transfixed, in front of a bulky cathode-ray television set showing CNN coverage of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building exploding in Oklahoma City. It was the most stunning thing I had seen on TV since my first night home alone when live coverage of the SLA shootout in Los Angeles interrupted regularly scheduled programing. When we got to my my mother’s room, she spoke her last words, “au revoir mon fils,” perhaps her most direct and profound expression of affection for me.
There is some solace in her not living to be 85. Her past would surely not have alowed her to tolerate Trumpism psychologically, even if she would have been safe from its depredations.
The same social forces that created the Trump’s armies of MAGA clowns created Timothy McVeigh, who blew up the Murrah Building with assistance from Terry Nichols and Michael Fortier. McVeigh was born into a working class family in Niagara County NY in 1968. In high school he learned computer programming, and used his Commodore 64 personal computer to hack into government systems. He enlisted in the Army two years after graduation, and was deployed to operation Desert Storm in 1990, and was turned into a stone killer. McVeigh’s grandfather had introduced him to guns as a boy, which he liked so well he brought them to school to show off some days. In battle, he shot missiles at tanks, decapitated an Iraqi soldier, and got PTSD from the carnage on the road lading from Kuwait City, He was discharged in 1991 with several medals.
Back in the USA, the traumatized McVeigh found himself fully lumpenized. He worked a series of dead end jobs, couldn’t get a date, and became himself an incel avant la lettre. In that era of government austerity, when the bourgeoisie had destroyed all proletarian organizations and political tendencies capable of recognizing declassed working white men, and channeling their resentment politically, McVeigh began to blame the federal government and taxation for his problems instead of recognizing capitalist social relations as his oppressor. In basic training McVeigh had been punished for wearing a t-shirt reading “White Power” to protest Black recruits wearing shirts emblazoned with “Black Power,” and later systematically assigned Black soldiers undesirable tasks. He was cut off from the diverse ensemble of the dispossessed class by racism. He became a gun rights activist and distributed far right literature on the second amendment outside the 1993 siege of the Branch Davidian complex in Waco. In the following moths he toured gun shows, selling survivalist paraphernalia and The Turner Diaries, a white nationalist novel about a counter-revolutionary war in the US lead by an organization dedicated to exterminating Jewish people, Black people, and all people of color. Over the next year and a half, McVeigh planed and executed the bombing with his two friends from the army, Nichols and Fortier.
In the 30 years since April 19th 1995, the immiseration of the capitalist metropol by ongoing financialization of the economy continues to declass more and more social social layers. The resentments of white white petite-bourgeois men, sons of small business owners, in particular has created a growing mass of fascists without a fascist apparatus. Trump harnesses that mass and has twice been able too win elections and attempt to destroy the political system those fascists blame for their troubles. At the same time the dispossessed class in US has awakened over the past decade and a half and made strides towards self-awareness in the streets. We have started to self-organize by means of struggle itself. The proletariat has given some declassed white men a way to grasp the actual source of their troubles and start to act within the diversity that is the class. I do not have the force to develop this optimistic theme on such a sad day, but I have already done so in an entry still being edited and to be posted shortly.
Rest In Peace Janine. I miss you every day, and I’m glad you didn’t have to live through this shit.