{"id":3303,"date":"2015-10-21T09:56:30","date_gmt":"2015-10-21T16:56:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/?p=3303"},"modified":"2015-10-21T10:03:02","modified_gmt":"2015-10-21T17:03:02","slug":"diary-this-american-road-oklahoma-city","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/?p=3303","title":{"rendered":"Diary: This American Road, Oklahoma City"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Cross-country<\/p>\n

I’d looked forward to our arrival in Oklahoma City, less\u00a0because I knew anything about it\u00a0than because it came after an eight-hour, three-state-spanning drive from Albuquerque<\/a>, through what I mostly remember as a sense-deadeningly repetitive pastoral punctuated by vast fields of windmills. After that, I felt just about ready to settle forever in any place with “City” in its name. But\u00a0National Geographic Traveler<\/em> did also name\u00a0Oklahoma City<\/a> among the “20 go-now destinations” on its “Best Trips 2015” list, which fueled my suspicions that we’d find something genuinely worthwhile there.<\/p>\n

\"Cross-country<\/p>\n

We found, on our first morning, the genuinely worthwhile\u00a0Myriad Botanical Gardens<\/a>, an acclaimed (and, coming from California, shockingly bum-free) public space in downtown Oklahoma City just across the street from the Devon Energy Center, the recently built 50-story skyscraper\u00a0that, so far out of scale with any other nearby structure, pretty much constitutes the skyline by itself. On the opposite side of the gardens, a children’s pumpkin festival had got into full swing, providing perhaps the\u00a0highest concentration of wholesomeness I’ve ever beheld\u00a0first-hand.\u00a0At every intersection, electronic voices offered \u2014 and repeated, and repeated \u2014 detailed descriptions of which streets we could cross and when. Professional downtown guides zipped by, their canary-yellow uniforms in perfect color coordination with their Segways.<\/p>\n

\"Cross-country<\/p>\n

We passed through a few torn-up streets, but\u00a0they’d been torn up, so the signs informed us, in the name of Project\u00a0180<\/a>, a $176 million pedestrianization scheme, reaching\u00a0the edge of a neighborhood called MidTown (yes, capitalized T). There we sat down, across the corner from a tempting ramen joint, for a cappuccino, hot chocolate, and “sparkling cold brew” among the bearded baristas, MacBooks Air, and Macklemore haircuts of\u00a0Elemental Coffee<\/a>. They’d even put up a stand of tools with which to\u00a0tune up your bicycle while awaiting your drink (which will sometimes require, as the beards put it, a serious “time investment”). But you won’t\u00a0have to worry about that if you use\u00a0Spokies<\/a>, the city’s bike share system, which has placed\u00a0one of its stations right in Elemental’s parking lot.\u00a0Clearly, the\u00a0center of\u00a0Oklahoma City, in common with many other greater downtown areas across America (some of which we’ve experienced on this very trip), has a revival going on.<\/p>\n

\"Cross-country<\/p>\n

Still, mention the name Oklahoma City to anyone outside it \u2014 and surely some\u00a0inside it \u2014 and they think of one thing and one thing only: the 1995 bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building. Though only ten years old and in Seattle at the time, I still remember the day it happened, and from then\u00a0on the disaster, for me as for so many others, stood for the city. I didn’t imagine\u00a0then that I’d ever have occasion to visit Oklahoma City myself, much less the memorial grounds to be one day built on the\u00a0Murrah building’s cleared footprint. But there I ultimately went, and there I saw\u00a0the\u00a0bronze gates, one representing the minute before the explosion, one representing the minute after. Between them stretches a shallow reflecting pool (dotted, dispiritingly, with pennies), and beside that stand\u00a0168 sculptural empty chairs.\u00a0It ranks high among the massacre sites I’ve seen, lacking either the sinister feeling of\u00a0Tlatelolco or the whole city of Hiroshima’s faint air of unreality.\u00a0(The giant weeping Jesus across the street does go a bit far, but a Methodist church built it\u00a0on their own property.)<\/p>\n

\"Cross-country<\/p>\n

On a length of chain-link fence hang stuffed animals (the building’s day care center having infamously absorbed\u00a0some of the blast\u00a0and most of the news coverage) and photos\u00a0of the victims. One studio portrait stood out for its now strikingly retro hair and lighting, and then for the dates below: 1971-1995, 24 years old, hardly more than a girl but not much younger than the bomber himself. The violence of the event haunts me less than the question of how\u00a0Timothy McVeigh, clearly an intelligent young man of iron resolve and philosophical consistency, somehow arrived, through a seemingly coherent\u00a0set of principles, at\u00a0what he saw as the necessary step of car-bombing a federal building. (Incidentally, he did his\u00a0planning\u00a0in Kingman, Arizona, where we happened to stop\u00a0earlier this trip for lunch at a barbecue place called Redneck’s.)<\/p>\n

\"Cross-country<\/p>\n

I don’t want to overstate this\u00a0point, but I’ve spent a great deal of this time behind the wheel trying to understand something more of America, and from that\u00a0perspective I see McVeigh as not just a “domestic terrorist,” but a thoroughly American terrorist. Brought up on this country’s mythology, more than a few of us entertain the fantasy\u00a0that we, too, might one day grow into tyrant-toppling outlaw. Many more of us harbor an inherent distrust and even perpetual suspicion of any visible center of power, especially one as colossal as the federal government of the United States: we think of the state as not Us, but Them.\u00a0McVeigh certainly regarded it as Them, and as malevolent a Them as They come, insisting on describing his act in Oklahoma City as “morally equivalent” to the recklessness of the U.S. government not just at home (he framed his\u00a0bombing as “counter-attack” in a war\u00a0initiated by the United States\u00a0at Ruby Ridge and Waco) and\u00a0abroad: “Remember Dresden? How about Hanoi? Tripoli? Baghdad? What about the big ones \u2014 Hiroshima and Nagasaki?”<\/p>\n

\"Cross-country<\/p>\n

Few\u00a0Americans, I suspect, feel active guilt about the Dresdens, Hanois, Tripolis, Baghdads, Hiroshimas, and Nagasakis of the world, due to a tribally instinctive categorization of the foreigners there, even noncombatants, as Them rather than Us. (I admit to feeling no guilt myself at Hiroshima, less because I regard wartime Japanese as Them than\u00a0because I regard the Americans who ordered the bombs dropped as an even more alien Them.) McVeigh abandoned\u00a0that particular concept of Us and Them (to say nothing of “two wrongs don’t make a right”), and so the death of innocents in one place looked as unjustifiable, and so as justifiable, to him as the death of innocents in another \u2014 a sentiment with which all 21st-century American liberals would surely agree. For most of us, the less we think\u00a0in terms of Us and Them, the\u00a0more humane individuals we become. Timothy McVeigh, on the other hand, became the deadliest mass-murderer in American history.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’d looked forward to our arrival in Oklahoma City, less\u00a0because I knew anything about it\u00a0than because it came after an eight-hour, three-state-spanning drive from Albuquerque, through what I mostly remember as a sense-deadeningly repetitive pastoral punctuated by vast fields of windmills. After that, I felt just about ready to settle forever in any place with […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[69],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3303","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-diary"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3303","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3303"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3303\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3319,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3303\/revisions\/3319"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3303"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3303"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3303"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}