The Cult of April 19th

by Pa Rock
Citizen Journalist

Rachel Maddow is speaking in the background as I type this. She is narrating a documentary on American terrorist, Timothy McVeigh, aka the Oklahoma City bomber. The program has a lot of never-before-seen footage of interviews with the madman McVeigh, along with a some good background information brought together by the MSNBC team. It is an important piece of journalism, one that will be replayed and discussed for years.

Today is the fifteenth anniversary of McVeigh's monumental crime, a date that he deliberately chose to coincide with the second anniversary of the fiery end of the Branch Davidian standoff near Waco, Texas. Two tragedies, both permanently linked with the date of April 19, and both inexorably linked with a citizen's revolt against the government.

Also on April 19, 1775, was the infamous "shot heard round the world" at Lexington, MA, another citizen's protest that eventually led to the downfall of one government and the creation of another.

All of these events associated with April 19th have found their way into the muddled minds of today's tea-baggers, with the result being some sort of gun-totting national day of protest - a rambling, masturbatory experience that brought groups of hillbillies into contact with one another so that they could wave their guns around and denounce the imagined tyranny of the United States government.

I heard one tea-bagger bragging on the news tonight that April 19th is also Hitler's birthday. It isn't - he was born April 20, 1889, but just the idea that some yokels wanted that to be a part of their fantasy fabric makes today's demonstrations all the scarier.

And they will tell you that they are not racist, but if a white Republican was in the White House running the national debt into the stratosphere, they would all be home drinking beer and playing with their bug-zappers.

McVeigh, a former U.S. soldier, claimed that he was strongly influenced by Andrew Macdonald's The Turner Diaries, a racist, paranoid fantasy about the United States government taking everyone's guns away after a Jew in Congress got a bill passed outlawing guns. The narrator of the story had a pistol hidden in his home, but three black federal agents kicked the door in and found it - get the picture - a tea-bagger's wet dream!

To pay homage to the auspicious date, I have just begun reading The Turner Diaries, and after plowing only a few pages into it, I can report that it is every bit as ugly as I expected it to be. Unfortunately, it is something that right-wing book burners would probably like. Look for the Texas Text Book Commission to make it required reading in high schools!

How sad that the some in our society feel the need to honor a mass murderer with national demonstrations. How sad that they cannot and will not allow an elected government to govern. How sad that these individuals have to stroke their egos (or stroke something) by imagining that their government is their enemy.

Something in America needs to change, but it is not the government.