On the Road: Gore's Tennessee, A Dump Called Arkansas and McVeigh's Oklahoma

The subtleties in gradation of American motels, across the range of $28.50 to $54.50, make the Hindu caste system look as simple as clothing regs in a prison. By night I mostly stay in Econo Lodges, Motel 6s (all in the $32.50 price range), though later, west of Gallup, upgrade to the slightly more elevated Days Inn, at $42.50 after tax. This gives me a free USA Today, a

toaster in the lobby plus access to the indoor pool.

Bunked down at night, there's relatively wide choice on the motels' cable systems, all the way from C-SPAN to pay-as-you-snooze filth, though there's much less of that than there used to be, or maybe you have to go to a Marriott or kindred high-end place to get that.

"The Father of the Interstate"

Driving west along Interstate 40 one is reminded, mile after mile, of the recent occupants of the White House. Barely over the mountains from North Carolina I saw a big sign praising Sen. Al Gore Sr., often described as the father of the interstate system. There is in the genes of the Gore family a propensity to boast excessively. Long before young Al even imagined the Internet, Albert Sr. was claiming he was father of, or at least midwife to, the National Highway Defense Act, the $50 billion program to build 40,000 miles of interstate highway, at that time back in the 1950s the largest public works program in the history of the world.

In truth, Albert Sr. was a lowly facilitator in establishing the fortunes of thousands upon thousands of building contractors and heavy equipment operators. The real hero on the Hill was Rep. Hale Boggs, father of the great lobbyist Tommy and his sister Cokie Roberts. The big row concerned the fears of the farm road lobby that the interstate system would somehow prevent federal pork from reaching their own deserving cement contractors. It took a Louisiana good old boy rather than the Solon of Tennessee to reconcile the Guelphs and Ghibellines of the warring lobbies to work harmoniously for the greater enrichment of all.

Evidently Boggs held Albert Sr. in low esteem as a consequence of their work on the highway bill. Before he embarked on his final fatal flight over Alaska, where he disappeared forever, he made a spirited though failed bid in the late 1960s to get Albert Sr. investigated by the SEC for stock fraud, consequent upon a gift of shares from his patron, Armand Hammer.

As I passed through Nashville, the front page of the Tennessean, Al Jr.'s former employer, was mostly concerned with a bicker between executives of the country music industry assembled in Austin, for the annual South by Southwest conference. I was already reeling from the news on my radio that Puff Daddy had not only called his children with news of his acquittal but had told the assembled press that "My heart goes out to everyone who was hurt by this." It's one thing to hold a Bible in the courtroom on the advice of Johnnie Cochran, but to have a heart going out to everyone? Rap fans everywhere were surely sickened by this namby-pamby talk.

The Tennessean (a pretty awful paper) quoted Mike Dungan of Capitol Nashville as saying, "The reason we suck right now is because our music is bland and boring. If I keep making the same records that are out there now, I'm not going to be doing this for long, and nobody's going to care." "For me, in Nashville our music is totally boring and I'm partly responsible," chimed in Tony Brown, MCA Nashville, and Luke Lewis, Mercury Nashville chairman, took up the tune: "If you were to poll label heads on Music Row, the ones who didn't lie to you would tell you they don't listen to country radio."

All this nay-saying prompted DreamWorks Nashville President James Stroud into eloquent rebuttal: "We're making great music down here. It's just that we're not making bad music any more and the great music sounds the same. The standard of quality has gone up to the point where there's no mediocrity."

It's sort of the same argument as one can make for the current quality of politician in the U.S. Congress, no?

A Dump Called Arkansas

I crossed the bridge at Memphis into Arkansas, irked that I hadn't the time to wait for the next day, a Sunday, and hear the Rev. Al Green preach. A friend who went along recently said it was a riveting performance, as Al thundered against Sodom: "It wasn't Adam and Steve, it was Adam and Eve."

Once in Arkansas the environment, as observable through the window of my 1976 Ford 350 one-ton, plummets in allure. The road surface goes to hell. The country flattens out into a wan landscape, and I remember the basic fact that Arkansas is, and has always been, an impoverished rural dump in which a few feudal lords like chicken king John Tyson, the timber companies and other large corporate predators rampage at will.

How did Bill Clinton ever persuade the country to take him seriously, with his preposterous claims back in the late 80s that he and Hillary had fixed up Arkansas' education system, same way Jimmy Carter claimed he'd fixed Georgia's finances with "zero base budgeting"? Time and again these "New South" governors of states wallowing at the low-water mark in terms of services and achievement boast they know how to run things, and get away with it among the credulous Northerners. If the governor of, say, Pennsylvania claimed he'd fixed the state's education problems, everyone would laugh him to scorn. Ditto with a governor claiming he'd cleansed the finances of Illinois.

I trundle along I-40 through Arkansas, passing plenty of signposts to stories of the past: the turn off for Mena. And here the road to Hot Springs. So much for nostalgia, onward to Oklahoma.

Trying to find a Radio Shack, I drive down the main street of Henryetta. Oklahoma towns seem so often stuck in endless rural depression. Why? Isn't the oil patch booming again? A little thicket of signs on Main St. proclaim "Vote for Peavler for Council Ward 3. Seduction is Sweet. Wake up and think. Show School Pride NOT Corruption and Greed. Support Black and Gold Not Black and White. No Prisons." "God's Land Is Grand. So Take a Stand. No Prisons." "Prison Takes from Needy and Gives to Greedy."

Oklahoma Memorial

Some 380,208 Oklahomans identified themselves as American Indian in the 2000 census. Indians are twice as likely to be victims of violent crimes as blacks, whites or Asians. Oklahomans favor the lottery and are about to vote on Right to Work. I head for the memorial to the Oklahoma bombing and park my truck not so far from where Timothy McVeigh left his Ryder truck packed with 4800 pounds of ammonium nitrate and fuel oil on April 19, 1995, lit the fuse and was driving out of town when the truck went up at 9:02 a.m., killing 168 people.

There's a chainlink fence with various memorabilia stuck to it, poems by kids, and several irritating statements encased in plastic, written by Dr. Paul Heath, self-described bombing "survivor," who'd been working as a psychologist in the VA that day on the fifth floor of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building. A typical Heath-gram: "The bombing was surely an evil act that should not have happened. Because of this evil a white stone statue of Jesus now stands off-site weeping with its back turned away from the site and facing 168 empty spaces in a black stone wall."

The acreage previously occupied by the Murrah Building now holds a big expanse of water bracketed by two "gates of time," respectively labeled 9:01 and 9:03. South of the pool there are 168 odd-looking chairs, with high bronze backs and plastic seats that light up at night, each displaying a name. On a wall nearby there are the names of "survivors." There's also a "survivor tree," from the 1920s, an elm. The whole memorial complex was designed by a German-American team in the form of Hans Butzer, his wife Torre (a native of Oklahoma) and Sven Berg.

The old Journal Record building next door is now a memorial center, also housing an Institute for the Prevention of Terrorism. In the shop you can buy a K-9 poster, featuring Bella (L.A. Search Dogs), Butch, a smart-looking Collie (Vancouver Fire and Rescue), Bethany (Oklahoma Bureau of Narcotics), Keli (WOOF Search and Rescue Unit) plus about 45 other dogs that distinguished themselves in the post-bombing hours.

There's sensurround media evocation of the news noises on April 19, 1995, plus an effective tape of a fellow trying to get his permit to bottle and sell water. This proceeding was going on across the street at the Water Resources Board and on the tape you hear the bomb go off, and a sententious voice saying that the permit seeker was using government correctly for peaceful ends, unlike McVeigh. This is a theme sounded throughout the exhibition in many different ways, none more vigorously than when lauding the Oklahoma citizens and survivors who rushed to Washington, DC, to press (successfully) for rapid passage of the Effective Death Penalty Act.

The memorial is supposed to educate us about terror and about the bombing, yet an uninformed person could spend several hours in it and leave without knowing anything more about the perpetrator of the Oklahoma bombing, beyond the fact that he was white and his name was McVeigh. Certainly not that he was a veteran of the U.S. Army, well trained to kill by Uncle Sam and actually quite vocal on his motives, which on his various accounts derived from government tyranny, the federal onslaughts at Ruby Ridge and Waco, plus the attack on Iraq. As a political analyst and historian, McVeigh, scheduled to meet the Reaper this May, stands head and shoulders above the memorialists in Oklahoma City, who have produced a self-congratulatory and utterly sickening display of Survivor Kitsch. On this evidence, Oklahomans have learned nothing.

The center should have a weekly screening of McVeigh in his various interviews and statements, followed by debate. They could start with this, from his handwritten submission to Media Bypass: "Remember Dresden? How about Hanoi? Tripoli? Baghdad? What about the big ones?Hiroshima and Nagasaki? (At these two locations, the U.S. killed at least 150,000 non-combatants?mostly women and children?in the blink of an eye. Thousands more took hours, days, weeks, or months to die.) If Saddam is such a demon, and people are calling for war crimes charges against him and his nation, whey do we not hear the same cry for blood directed at those responsible for even greater amounts of 'mass destruction'?like those responsible and involved in dropping bombs on the cities mentioned above?

"The truth is, the U.S. has set the standard when it comes to the stockpiling and use of weapons of mass destruction. Hypocrisy when it comes to the death of children? In Oklahoma City, it was family convenience that explained the presence of a day-care center placed between street level and the law enforcement agencies which occupied the upper floors of the building. Yet when discussion shifts to Iraq, any day-care center in a government building instantly becomes 'a shield.' Think about that...

"When considering morality and 'mens rea' (criminal intent) in light of these facts, I ask: Who are the true barbarians?"