"Chilling" doesn't adequately describe listening last night on TV to Timothy McVeigh tell a reporter (caught on tape) about what he did in Oklahoma City 15 years ago and why he did it. One of the detectives who got to know McVeigh so well that he invited her to his execution called him "cold," noting that, in regards to the victims, McVeigh "detached himself from their hurt altogether."
Of course that is the definition of a sociopath -- someone who cannot feel someone else's pain. Yet McVeigh DID claim to feel the pain of the women and children killed in the raid on David Koresh and his group at their compound near Waco, Texas, exactly one year earlier. Seeing them die, his heart filled with rage. His heart filled with vengeance. Of course those feelings of revenge helped McVeigh to de-humanize all the people who happened to be in the Murrah building the day of the blast -- even young children. Yet the detective asks, "How can you feel so much for the people of Waco and you can't have feelings for the people you killed?"
As one woman who lost her two young grandsons said of McVeigh, "It seemed like he was angry with us, like we had done something to him." He had objectified his enemy, "the government," into anyone who happened to be in a federal government building that morning.
Of the victims' families' stories, he remarked, "But I'd like to say to them, I've heard your story many times before; the specific details may be unique, but the truth is, you're not the first mother to lose a kid; you're not the first grandparent to lose a grandson or granddaughter. I'll use the phrase, and it sounds cold, but I'm sorry, I'm going to use it, because it's the truth: get over it." What lengths we humans can go to try to justify our wicked deeds! His logic justifies every murder that has been committed since life began. He's like Cain when Cain said to God, "Am I my brother's keeper?" (Genesis 4:9) In other words, "I don't care about what others feel."
Of hell he said, "First of all, I believe there is no hell. But if I go further and say, even if there is [hell], I don't think I'm going [there]." Of course not; no one thinks they are evil. In fact, as a seminary professor once told me, "Sin becomes Evil when Sin is not acknowledged as Sin." Sin is uncontrollable in its destructiveness when there is no repentance from it, no remorse. Hitler thought the greatest thing he ever did was kill 6 million Jews.
Yet we must go deeper than that, and McVeigh helps us in trying to do so. He is someone who not only refuses to back down about what he did, he even revels in it. When confronted about why he left clues that led to his arrest, he calls himself "a groundbreaker. My objective was state-assisted suicide....I'm manipulating the system for my own gain." He was suicidal, but he didn't want to "lose" to the enemy by going alone. He took 168 people with him. "In the crudest terms," he said just before his death, gloating in victory, that the final score was "168 to 1 on the scoreboard" so "there's no way they can beat me by executing me." This is the theology of a Middle East suicide bomber.
But notice that he wanted to commit suicide. He had given up on himself and on this world. He couldn't fulfill the command to "love your neighbor as yourself" because he didn't love himself. Nor did he allow someone else (or Someone Else) to love him. Breathtaking in his honesty, McVeigh reveals the bare knuckles logic of evil itself, of the devil himself. He (McVeigh or Satan) knows he's losing...but he's going to take as many down with him as possible.
David Hewitt
