Unclear and Present Danger - Oklahoma City: A Survivor's Story

Episode Date: April 17, 2026

On this week’s episode of Unclear and Present Danger, Jamelle and John watch the 1998 Lifetime film Oklahoma City: A Survivor’s Story, starring Kathy Baker as Priscilla Salyers, a real-life U.S. Customs employee who survived the 1995 bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building. The film follows the attack, Salyers's rescue, and her subsequent struggle with PTSD, as well as the way the tragedy shapes her family life (it is a Lifetime film after all). Notably, the movie avoids the political context of the attack, saying very little about Timothy McVeigh's motivations or the broader world of right-wing extremism from which he emerged.That absence turns out to be pretty fruitful for the discussion. Jamelle and John use the film as a window into how the Oklahoma City bombing was being processed — and not processed — in the late 1990s, and trace how the political meaning of the attack was fought over in the moment. They also take up the broader question of historical memory and forgetfulness in America: how events that once felt defining gradually recede, and what that says about the country.Episodes come out roughly every two weeks, so see us then for what is sure-to-be a fun episode on Warren Beatty’s Bulworth.Also don’t forget our Patreon! We cover the films of the Cold War as well as do a weekly politics podcast. Sign up at patreon.com/unclearpod.Our producer is Connor Lynch and our artwork is by Rachel Eck.

To everything, there is a season and a purpose to every time. A time to plant and to heal. We're doing better as a family, making progress, holding on. But like so many others, we're struggling still in the aftershocks of the bombing. The trials, the verdicts, the losses that are forever. Some wounds never heal. We make memorials where we leave tokens. where we mourn and ask why and vow never again.

On April 19, 1995 at 9.02 a.m., a bomb born of hate and anger, tore through the heart of this country and took the lives of 168 people. Everyone, some mother's innocent child. Hello and welcome to Unclear and Present Danger, the podcast about the political and military dealers with 1990s and what they say about the politics of that decade. I'm Jamel Bowie. I'm a columnist for the New York Times opinion section.

I'm John Gans. I write the Substact newsletter on Popular Front, and I'm the author of When the Clock Broke, Con Men, Conspiracists and How America Cracked Up in the early 1990s, available now in paperback, wherever good books are sold. Wherever Good Books are sold. I was in Texas recently on vacation with my family, and we were popping around a bookstore, and I saw your book there.

Oh, that's great. I'm glad those people down there. are getting some real knowledge. Yep. Or buying it for target practice. Who knows? Perhaps. It was shooting at my author pen.

It was a very radical bookstore in San Antonio. So it's people getting educated. Okay. That makes sense. On this week's episode of the podcast, we watched the 1998 Lifetime film, not technically a political thriller. but relevant to the interest of this podcast, so we watched it, the 1998 lifetime film, Oklahoma City, a Survivor's Story.

It stars Kathy Baker from Pickett Fences as Priscilla Sailors, Salliers, Priscilla Salliers. My apologies, it is Saliers. This is based off of a true story. This is one of those ripped from the headlines kind of television movies. as Priscilla Salyers worked in the U.S. Customs Office at the Moraw Federal Building in Oklahoma City, and she was a victim. She actually, you know, survived the bombing. And so this is the dramatization of her experiences.

This is directed by John Cordy, whom I do not know much about. He's probably a television director, I'm sure directed quite a few of these lifetime movies. And this, there's, the writers were Aura Watson and Sam Black. Bell. The cast is full of people who I imagine were regulars on Lifetime or soap operas at the time. Ray Baker is Priscilla's husband Roy. Johnny Hawks as her son Josh, Patrick Cassidy. He looks vaguely familiar as Seth, a firefighter who has a prominent role. Seth saves Priscilla during the disaster. and a number of other people. Here, I'm looking at Patrick Cassidy right now.

64 years old comes from a show business family. Actually, his mother was Shirley May Jones, who won the Academy. Oh, that's so funny. She won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for playing a vengeful prostitute in Elmer Gantry, which we covered on his podcast. Oh, yes. So that's his mother.

mom. And his father, Jack Cassidy, won a Tony Award in a Grammy Award, received a bunch of nominations. He worked on the Broadway musical She Loves Me. Oh, oh. And Cassidy's brother is the late David Cassidy from the Partridge family. Oh, wow. It's a real, real, what a family. Yeah.

I guess half-brother. David Cassidy is a half-brother. So, yeah, this is a legit, legit family. I've never seen him in anything, but he just looked familiar to me. I was like, this is a face that seems familiar to me. All right, really quick plot synopsis. This is a film based on the true story of Priscilla Salyers, a secretary employed at the Mara Federal Building in Oklahoma City. The narrative begins on the day of the bombing.

It sort of begins very much as a family drama. A big part of the film is the fact that their marriage is falling apart and the kids hate the dad. The dad sort of frustrated masculinity, lost his job, that kind of thing. You know the story. But that forms the background to Salyer's own emotional journey throughout the film. We see Saliers rescue from the collapse structure in her subsequent physical and mental recovery. After the bombing, she endures and struggles with post-traumatic stress disorder as she struggles to understand the senseless

act that killed her coworkers and threatened her life. We see her go to the trial of Timothy McVeigh and all the like. The film very much is about recovery, about sort of struggling with being experiencing an event like a terrorist attack or experiencing any kind of mass casualty event. and focuses mostly entirely on that. This is not a particularly political movie, which I would, we'll talk about this, but I actually think this was so interesting about it,

and speaks to sort of the, the way the politics of Oklahoma City and the politics of the perpetrators took quite a while to kind of filter into public consciousness, since this would have been, if this aired in 1988, Lifetime movie, we're going to give it like six to 12 months of production. This was in production in 97.

until quite soon after the bombing and when there was still quite a bit of public discussion about sort of what were this guy's motivations. As far as it means, it's a lifetime movie, no information on budget or anything, no particular tagline. I did find some contemporaneous discussion of it reading here a March 29th, 1998 article previewing the piece in S.F. Gates, San Francisco again, I guess, as the publication, which had a very, a very, um, uh, positive view of the film described it as, um, um, definitely capturing the shock of the explosion and the inlessness of the four hours, Salyers spent trapped under the concrete before firefighters

could find. and extricate her in the strain and solidarity, the tragedy brought to the already struggling Salazar's family, and to the community. The director, who is interviewed for the piece, says that the project had its roots, the magazine article that the producer had read. And that magazine article I also found it's called When the Bomb Went Off, who was written for the Philadelphia Inquirer, May 5th, 1995. And Saliers is one of the people featured in, it's actually the first person named in the piece. So it's a good article worth reading. The other thing I'll say here is this profile of the piece does have a bit on the director. Right.

Oklahoma cities, but the latest of many television films directed by John Cordy. He's been making them since 1969, creating such a claim works as 1974 is the autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman. Yeah, I've never heard of that film. But the television movie was a big deal for basically all of TV's history up until the last like 20 years. Some of your favorite directors got their start making TV movies. Michael Mann, for example, TV movie. I'm trying to think of who else. I name there was one in my tongue.

Oh, what's his name? I believe Jonathan Demi directed some television movies. is it was it was a thing um a low budget way to get some experience okay Oklahoma City a survivor story was released on lifetime on April 6th 1998 on Monday so let's check out the New York Times for that day well big story in the middle is half century for Israelis many voices in one land this is a story to mark the 50th anniversary of the foundation of the state of Israel. I'm sorry, a poster on the side of many Jerusalem buses marking the 50th anniversary of the state of Israel shows three boys over the slogan, together with pride, together in hope.

One boy has the dark skin of an Ethiopian. The second, Slavic features of Russian and the third, the tawny complexion of a native Israeli. That's a little complicated. All three are Jews and Israelis, and they represent a part of the remarkable edge. ethnic and cultural diversity that has evolved in the skin half century since Israel's founded as a Jewish state. To that collage, the photography could have added a boy and a black yarmulka on side girls or youth from the million strong Israeli Arabs. Yeah, whether that diversity marks the success or failure of the Zionist experiment is a matter of considerable debate among Israelis

heading toward the university on April 30th. This is weird. We keep on lining up like with the movies almost perfectly by date. This is like the third time it's happened. Yeah, I think we're just I think just there's the pace of releases is picking up. Yeah. And so it's just, it's just completely on, on schedule. It is very,

it's quite strange, though. It's happened a few times in a row. The fundamental tenet of the early Zionists was that their state would grant the Jews normalcy, denied them through centuries of wandering an alien and all, often hostile societies. The new Israeli Jew will be a soldier farmer, free of the taboos and defensive habits of the ghetto,

glorified in the heroic photographs of the pioneering kibbutzniks, with their deep tans, khaki shorts, hose, and rifles. Today's these first Israelis are often disparaged by more recent immigrants from North Africa, the Middle East, and the Soviet Union, who accuse them of being patronizing and trying to impose their European culture on them. Ultra-Orthodox Jews who are expected to wither in the newer Israel have multiplied and grown assertive. Instead of melting into single pot, Jews and Israel have coalesced into distinct camps, each with its own neighborhood and often its own political party, the endless crises and Prime Minister Benjamin Nintyahu's

Coalition of Conservatives, Religious, Nationals, ultra-arthodox and ethnic parties testify to the volatility of the mix. Yeah, I mean, look, the country, these divisions still exist in Israel. And the division between Sephardic Jews, those from the Middle East, and the Ashkenazi Jews, those from Europe, up is still a kind of important political thing in Israel. Traditionally, the Ashkenazi Jews voted for labor. And the Sephardic Jews favored the conservative Lakud party.

That's a pattern that kind of starts happening in the 1970s. That's become a little bit different. I mean, these groups have intermarried quite a bit. And it's more about education. and class now, then I would say ethnicity, but ethnicity is still big. Obviously, we're living in era when the meaning, the very existence, the legitimacy of Israel is more of a question than it was in the 1990s, although the 90s were sort of a failed opportunity, perhaps, to come to peace.

So it's just interesting to read these pieces now and look back at, you know, how much work everything has gotten. We're a couple years out from the second Intifada, which was a huge and terrible moment, which sort of shaped things the way they are. Hamas comes to the four, Nittanyahu's extreme hardline position becomes kind of commonsensical.

Ariel Sharon later pulls out of Gaza, unilaterally. Yeah, so this is on the way to get where we are. Oh, what else we got here? This is interesting maybe perhaps for our, oh, it's not really about what we're talking about, but good to think about while we're talking about the movie. TV stretches limits of taste, a little outcry like a child acting out religiously naughty to see how far it can push his parents. Mainstream television this season is flaunting the most vulgar and explicit sex, language and behavior that is ever sent to American homes. And as sometimes happens with the spoiled child and the tactic works, attention is being paid.

ratings are high, few advertisers are rebelling against even the most provocative shows, and more and more parents seem to have given up resisting their children's quibbles over television. Often in a nation of two-income families and single parents, children are left alone to watch what they want. The season stretching of the boundaries of taste has reignited opposition from some public figures who have long complained about television influence on what they call family values. You don't really hear that too much anymore family values. Not at all. You hear, you don't hear that whatsoever.

No one gives a shit anymore. In fact, not only do you not hear about family values, but you hear, and this is actually a real contrast in the 90s, is you hear conservatives complaining about the low rate of teen pregnancies. Because the thing is that we did successfully reduce the rates of teen sexual activity and teen drinking and all these things. And the vulgarity on television and violent video games did not actually produce a generation of psychopathic kids. It produced a generation basically of teetotelers.

And yet, people don't like that either. Yeah, it's really too bad that they turned out that way. Yeah, okay, so this talks about Jerry Springer, of course, daytime talk show that's cracked up its formula of sexual betrayer, followed by Fisticofts. Oprah, the queen of the genre, daytime television. It's more popular than Oprah. And they're talking also about Dawson's Creek, one of the lead, Dawson's Creek. one of the lead Dawson's Creek. There's nothing wrong with Dawson's Creek.

A high school boy had a sexual affair with his English teacher. I guess that's pretty bad. Back then, that kind of thing nobody gave a shit about, which was bad. After South Park, the two most popular series on cable are professional wrestling, which appeals to children as much as adults. Okay, I mean, South Park was vulgar, but it was smart when it started. Yeah, okay, I don't know. You know, yeah, I think the point you made is, uh, is, uh, is, is, is, is, is, is, is,

is the right one. Like the kind of the discussion about these things ended, the outcry of these things ended. What it did to people was a little more complicated than just to make them into, you know, sociopaths. But, you know, I think a lot of people, you know, people, I remember Beavis and Butthead. Like, people were really up in arms about Beavis and Bud. They're like, yeah, kids will mimic this. They'll try to like set their friends on fire. You're right.

No, somebody set there. I think I remember exactly what you're talking about. somebody like somebody on fire. They said it was because of Beavis and Butthead. Beavis and Butthead was just a brilliant show. The Simpsons, I mean, likewise the Simpsons. I can't believe people were upset about The Simpsons. It caused, I mean, which is crazy to think about the Simpsons, which is very clearly a show written by a bunch of like 30-year-old nerds.

Yeah. But there was like a whole outrage about Bart Simpson causing children to disrespect their parents. Yeah. Like, oh, my. Oh, yeah. Bart. That's so so funny, like the different way that the Simpsons have been perceived. Like, Bart Simpson, like back in the 90s, there was a perception of the Simpsons, especially because of Bart as like this subversive, like, cool show that was like against family values or whatever.

But like it's, yeah, as you were saying, it's a show made by nerds. And it's also like kind of gentle and its values. It kind of pokes gentle fun at everybody, but it's not that tendentious. And it's sort of like very, kind in the end. You know, like, it is satirical, but it's not like South Park, which can be really cruel. It's like, yeah. If you watch The Simpsons, what comes across, right, is that there's a real affection for the traditional nuclear family. Yeah.

That's sort of like, the Simpsons are regular church attendees. And like the joke isn't that they, isn't that they go to church. The joke is that right. Like Reverend Lovejoy is kind of adult. But like, when God shows up in the Simpsons, it's actually kind of taken quite serious. Yeah, and they're all good people. I mean, they're like, except for Mr. Burns, really. Right, right, right.

Even Homer's an idiot, but he's like, he always comes to do the right thing in the end, even though he's tempted not to. Yeah, it was, I mean, it's a great show. It shouldn't still be on, but that's another discussion. I have not watched The Simpsons in, like, 20 years. It's terrible. I, like, sometimes if I'm in, like, in a hotel and it's on, like, I watch it. It's like, it's terrible.

And, like, the way that they deal with contemporary stuff, it's just unwatchable. rebel ranks expand in Serbian province in Kosovo once elusive guerrilla bands fighting for independence from Serbia suddenly seemed to be everywhere their numbers are being swelled by an infusion of troops and weapons and so called him from Albania the starting growth of the insurgency is prompting fears that the unrest could explode to a new Balkan war one rebel wearing a ski mask came from from Germany I saw pictures of the vaskers it was my duty we will fight until the last of us are dead it did start a little bit of a war The United States intervened.

Kosovo became its own independent country. The intervention was driven by fear that the repeat of the other, the atrocities of the earlier Balkan wars would happen. Yeah. And now Kosovo is its own thing. TV Street. Okay, we read that. Afghan women demanding end to their repression by militants. This is about the Taliban, of course.

We're a few years out from 9-11 and the war in Afghanistan. The government can cover our faces, said the intense young woman who had once been a teacher. But underneath, we still want our rights. The woman who was sent home from their job by the militant Islamic. Oh, yeah, the Taliban only took over the country in 1996. I forgot about that. And decree that women could no longer work and must be veiled in the olive developing Chador. She was one of about a dozen women who gathered at some risk in a private.

at home near Kabul this week to meet Carol Bellamy, their executive director of UNICEF. Ms. Bellamy had just met several members of the Taliban to press for expanded women's rights, and she wanted to know what women of Afghanistan wanted. Yeah, I mean, now the Taliban are back in power, sad. But the United States' efforts to unseat them were unsuccessful. Anything else look interesting to you? Let me look with regard to the Taliban being back in power. Isn't there currently a war being fought between Afghanistan and Pakistan right now?

Yeah, Pakistan is who big, who were backers of the, this seems to be a pattern. You know, the Pakistan's ISI, which is sort of a state within the state, its intelligence services, were longtime backers of the Taliban. And now it's the Pakistan is fighting a war against the Taliban. over Taliban support of Islamic militants within Pakistan. And have at it, guys. Hasn't really worked for anybody else who's tried to beat them. I mean, the Soviet Union couldn't beat Afghan rebels.

The United States couldn't do it. I don't know Pakistan is going to be able to do it. But yeah, they're bombing. All right. Yep. I just thought this headline here is a little funny. leftist causes keep an old age home active just about an old age home in Los Angeles which I guess was just occupied by red diaper babies

yeah this is amazing yeah or their parents even yeah their parents like it's just all old communists yeah I had a friend his mother was a communist and she used to teach us old songs from the communist. His mother was a red diaper baby. And yeah, she would teach us old communist songs. She lived on the Lowery Side of Manhattan and would not be moved,

even though she must have been in her 80s or 90s when I knew her as a young teenager. Yeah, that unfortunately, sadly, that generation is mostly gone. Yeah, here's a funny. At 101, Jacob Darnov, a rabbi son from Russia, who is a messenger in the Bolshevik army, is unwavering his admiration for Lenin. He's the greatest politician we ever had in this world, said Mr. Darnov, whose other heroes, Leo Tolstoy, funny. Yeah.

Okay. All right. Oklahoma City is Survivor story. John, tell me what you think about this. I'm not going to ask you how you seen this before, because obviously you have. I have not. But it was weird. I mean, I've seen light.

I mean, I used to, I got the vibes from it because I used to, like, when I was sick at home from school, I used to watch Lifetime movies. I probably saw a lot of them. So, like, I remember the general atmosphere. Yeah, you know, look, this movie, there are certain things that are almost risable. I mean, the subject matter is serious. It's very upsetting even at times. But, you know, the acting is hokey.

the writing is close to risable at times. It is a television movie and not a particularly high budget one. It is quite melodramatic. What I think it's really interesting about the film was how it, yeah, it's so interesting that it sort of intertwines this woman, the main characters, personal struggles. which were very standard, you know, a marriage, perhaps falling apart. Maybe she has a work crush. The husband is jealous.

He is having trouble with his job. And then the explosion literally rips apart this whole situation and puts its own. So I guess it's meant to show the normality of the lives of infected. But it's incredible to have this kind of family drama in this movie about terrorism, which I guess is because lifetime movies were for women. television for women. And they thought this was a way to make it relatable for women. But it's interesting how it completely elides the political context of the bombings and really doesn't talk about what motivated Timothy McBay and Terry Nichols. And I sometimes watch movies like this

and out of some perverse imp in me that has been the result of reading way too much of the stuff while working on my book and doing my research is I kind of watch these from the point of you sometimes of a paleo conservative or even a Nazi watching one of these movies. So I'm like, what would you watch? I just, I want someone to clip this and be like, don't, don't, don't clip that. Do not clip that. What I'm saying is I'm trying to think about these, because these movies are so apolitical, what would a person who had the politics of Timothy McVeigh or was a sympathizer of Timothy McVeigh

think about watching the movies and how would they do like an ideological critique of this movie? So I kind of did that while watching it. And what I came up with was this movie is a perfect example of liberal ideology and they're trying to show this innocent victimized woman and normalize the state liberalism and even women resisting to a certain extent or being dissatisfied with the patriarchal domination of their husbands. And then, you know, they are the victims. John, as you say this, I can, I can hear, I can hear actual conservatives today.

saying this kind of stuff. Yeah, I mean like this stuff is in my, I can reconstruct this stuff. It's like, yeah, this movie. Yeah, I mean, you could just see someone like Yarvin or something and be like this movie is like the cathedral like talking, the liberal values. And yeah, so I just watched it of like,

what would Sam Francis say about this movie or what would, you know, somebody like that say about this movie? And yeah, it's like the movie has a politics, which is to depoliticize the political stakes of it and make the, to focus on, well, I think correctly, to focus on the human toll to show women as being subjects of, of, and rather than just objects, which some conservatives really don't like in the media. So I can imagine a conservative watching this movie and being like really, like, you watch it and you're like, wow, this is completely anodyne. Like obviously this woman had a normal life that was shattered by this.

She's just not really a bad person. You know, a normal family dynamic, normal people's problems. And then I could just imagine a very resentful paleo con being like, this is about a feminist woman and like her, she's the victim of this attack and da da da da da da. And they try to make it about women and children, et cetera, et cetera. So I could just imagine doing that critique. from it. And that's kind of what made the movie kind of interesting about me as doing this kind of Marxism in reverse on it, which is like, this is ideological state apparatus for mainstream liberalism. And I kind of watched it and I was like, it sort of made me sad in the way that I was like,

well, this sort of was important because it did show like now we live in such a nutty world where like the basic decency of this movie, which obviously I can inhabit like an insane person because I'm so exposed to those views, like I can make that interpretation. But like, I think you would come across that interpretation of that movie way faster than you would have in the 1990s. Like you would have had to subscribe to like chronicles. Yeah. Or things to it's right to like be like to find somebody who was pissed off about this

movie. And back then it was like, yeah, you know, like it's a pretty. affecting movie. Maybe it's a little hokey. But yeah. So the fact that this is like no longer normal, you know, like it's no longer. And I'm like, yeah, we've lost some of these. Okay, even admitting that there's a politics of this movie where it just like made people sensitive about these things. I do think though from my left wing critique would be like my left wing critique of liberal of the liberal depolitization depolitization of the movie would be like it doesn't talk. about how this guy was a Nazi enough and it doesn't talk about his politics enough.

So I have a right wing critique of its depolitization and its left wing critique of its depolitization. And between the two of them, I guess you get a kind of critique of critique of kind of critique of TV liberalism, you could call it in it. So that's my thoughts about the movie. What do you think? Yeah, I mean, it's interesting to think about the fact that the audience for this is sort of, I mean, basically stay at home mothers, right, perhaps like retired women. right who were at home no longer working right but who had been in the workforce and so the the core family dynamic in the film which is that priscilla is a working woman who enjoys working

her husband who was you know owned his own business was sort of a you know kind of a pretty I mean he's like square jawed to is a very traditional looking owned his own business um and lost it We don't know why, but the business is gone and he's been sort of left adrift and feels basically emasculated by the fact that he does not work. And his wife is the primary earner for their home. Their son even, their older son seems to sort of like have internalized this notion that like, you know, the mother's, the wife's job is to be at home. The father's job is to earn money. And that's the bargain. That's the patriarchal bargain.

And Priscilla being, it's very clear in her characterization being just very dissatisfied with the notion that her husband ought to be some in command of the household, dissatisfied with the idea that if there's something wrong with her, having close male friends, that's another aspect of the family drama. Her husband basically thinks that, like, his wife is trying to have an affair. And she's like, no, I just have a good friend who's a man. Thinking about the audience here, it's like, it's like, yeah, it takes for granted a certain amount of, you know, second generation feminism. Even in a very traditional environment, this is Oklahoma, right? The Oklahoma City, these are conservative people. So even in the context of quite a conservative political environment, it takes for granted a certain amount of, yes, this is how life is. This is like, Priscilla is a modern woman in some regards.

And the film is very sympathetic towards her desire to be a modern woman. The same goes when she is post her recovery or as she's recovering, she's very much engaged in survivors groups and talking about the attack and sort of engaging with the public. And the people around her are quite dissatisfied with this. Her son's like, why are you doing this? Her husband and why are you doing this? even when her friend Brenda Brenda shows up at the house

and it's just sort of like I would stop talking about this yeah I wish I wish the old Priscilla could be back which I gotta say I was watching that and I was like that's fucked up yeah I was like fuck you lady

your friend your friend went through really horrible yeah got blown the hell by an actual terrorist yeah and you're just like it has been a month

and you're just like, why can't we go back to the way things were? So I think you're right. I mean, like, it is funny to think of a modern right winger and the current, on the political right, the current, you know, the real rage against working women that's very much part of right wing political discourse right now against the laying of, of, of, of, of chowellings. Rearing against women's professionalization against all these things, a real desire for the return of the patriarchal household for both like aesthetic and ideological reasons. And I'd also say for like, you know, this is the Melinda Cooper argument, right? The counterpart to state retrenchment of services is you put the women back in the home. And they're the ones who do all that work.

So the real vogue for that amongst right wingers right now, I can imagine them watching this and being furious with anger. And also, honestly, you know, quite sympathetic towards the idea that you would blow up a federal building. One thought I had about watching this is like, I'd love to ask Russell vote who once bragged about tormenting federal employees. Like, you know, what's, what are your feelings of the Oklahoma City bombing? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, and also, I mean, look at the, the, the, the fringe that this movie, that Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols once represented isn't really a fringe anymore. I mean, like Trump launched his second campaign at Waco, you know, like, which was what the event that infuriated McVeigh.

Right. And inspired him to go out and commit this, this act. So I think like the politics of the, oh, and this is just the way. politics works, the weird dialectics of politics, I guess you could say, is that, you know, this was once a horror from a fringe movement in the United States. And now it's part of the more or less mainstream coalition of the GOP. You know, people with Timothy McVey's politics are not particularly fringe anymore. I mean, it's half the staffers in the White House. for sure little Tim McVease yeah for sure and well maybe now some of them are pissed off because they think that the Israel controls everything so they but but you know yeah so it's just interesting to watch like what was the common sense of the era change in in ways that I think are not so great and yeah you know I just kept on thinking about in terms of the gender politics of the movie it's like you know okay

Timmy Dwayne Grype was Waco, and he was inspired by the book, The Turner Diaries, which is a kind of novel, a manual for racial terrorism, you know, disguised as a novel. And the idea was to kind of start this racial war in the United States with bombings like this. And he thought he was acting out the Turner. diaries, which was written by a prominent neo-Nazi. And the thing that I couldn't help, so couldn't help thinking about was like the weirdness that, yeah, okay, McFey was more about federal power, viewing the federal government as this alien force, and then after that and related to that race.

But there is also a big gender component of that, which is. the belief that the federal government and Jews or whatever are undermining traditional gender norms. And so I just couldn't help on thinking about how like the politics of McVeigh was kind of targeted even at like the idea that women would be working. I don't know if that's a stretch, but that is an interesting way. And also, like, it could have, and that's a way you could have included more politics in the movie. Also, like, Waco itself, I mean, the way gender interacts with this stuff is interesting. Like, the Waco itself was a highly patriarchical society, which was going about this in what the branch of Vienn's thought was an Old Testament way, which involved, you know, plural marriage to young, to children, essentially. So, which, you know, from the point of view of McVeigh and anti-government people thought was their business and the federal government should have opposed.

So, you know, behind, I mean, it is a something that is said by feminists I don't think listen to enough that there is, when you look at the politics of the extreme right, there is always an element of gender relationships. And I think it's just very interesting to look at the gender relationships of the movie and then think a little bit about the gender politics of the far right and how they would interact with it. Yeah. Yeah. So the movie mentions Waco once when they were kind of discussed. The movie kind of cycles through the explanations, right, that emerge after the bombing. First, it's, oh, Middle East, Middle East terrorist. which was the initial thought, right? This was some kind of Middle East terrorist attack. Just a couple years earlier had been the attempted, or the first World Trade Center bombing. And then in the aftermath,

the sort of tempting McVe, this is revenge for Waco, that kind of thing. And it doesn't go really beyond that. And I think I said this earlier, but as more information came out, as the investigation proceeded, there really was like there wasn't the official narrative downplayed McVey and Nichols's connections to like a wider white supremacist militant underground.

That's, none of that's certainly in this film. And I, you know, when I think about how we remember Oklahoma City, as sort of a cultural and political event, which we don't really. It's not really in the atmosphere. Last year was the 30th anniversary. And it kind of just went unremarked upon. Perhaps that was because of, you know, the chaos in the federal government.

Perhaps that's because, as we've already said, the federal government, the White House is basically led by people of the same ideological persuasion these days. So, I mean, unless they were. going to be like celebrating their earlier blow against the feds. I don't think they're going to be marking the the anniversary. Although, I mean, you know, a bunch of federal workers died. I mean, it kind of, it's, it's, it's fucked that it was, there was no official remembrance of that moment from Washington. But neither really in the larger popular culture, right? Like, I don't recall, I don't recall reading anything in any major publication.

last year about the 30th anniversary. I myself, I'm sort of like, I was so preoccupied that I didn't write anything about the 30th anniversary. Yeah, I didn't either. And I wasn't aware of it. And it's up my alley and I should have. But like Oklahoma cities really receded from our national memory despite being fairly recent. And really horrible. Despite being, you know, very terrible.

But also the largest single such attack on American soil prior to 9-11. 11. It kind of... Yeah. 9-11 really eclipses it, too. Yeah. Right. I mean, you could make the case, right, that although 9-11 remains the largest in terms of single casualties,

the country doesn't actually struggle with Islamists violence on home soil. It does continue to struggle with, like, mass casualty white supremacist attacks. Because this last year is a 10-year anniversary of the Mother Emanuel shooting, right? Right. But you can't even talk about those things because it's politically controversial now.

Right. Right. And so it's just, it's, it's interesting to think about how it, how it was politically controversial then to bring in not just discussion of kind of like generic lone wolf extremists, which is a comfortable thing to talk about. But the underlying ideology, the networks, the way that those networks aren't actually isolated, even then. from mainstream politics, that there are people, I think Kathleen Ballou's book gets into this. There are certainly members of Congress, right, who are, like, broadly sympathetic to this kind of stuff. So the connections to mainstream politics are there. And it's never really become comfortable to discuss this because, because it raises, I mean, it raises all kinds of deeply uncomfortable questions. both about the extent to which there has been, you know, progress of a sort in the country,

but also the sense of which the federal government is willing to commit resources to dealing with this. Do you remember, I think this was under Obama, when they put out that report on the sources of basically domestic extremism? They were like, listen, the main danger here in terms of attacks on Americans comes from, like, white supremacists. and congressional Republicans, this would have been 2011, I believe, congressional Republicans got so angry that they got the report suppressed, as portraying it as an attack on conservatism. It is, and they shouldn't admit it, but they do. It's, you know, like that, that, you know, if you go back and actually watch the hearings about congressional hearings about Waco and Ruby Ridge, neither side. really covers themselves with with glory I would say but the issue is extremely partisan because basically what the congressional and Democrats are doing is to be like look these

people are Nazis and they kind of had what they had coming to them I don't think that's the correct response there's there are there were grave incompetencies and abuses of of government power in both of those incidents but the response of the response of the Republicans is to say that these people did nothing wrong and their ideology is immaterial. They're just normal people. The government was after them. So you can see this becoming already a partisan issue then. And the government and these and these politicians had a sense of who were their people, you know.

And this almost very Karl Schmidian way where you know who is your existential enemy. And yeah, I think also Republicans knew that they had constituents who if they weren't sympathetic exactly to the politics of these people. They were sympathetic to the narrative that made it more about the abuse of government power than, oh, isn't it weird, what views these people had. They were, you know, doing horrible things and involved perhaps with terrorism, so and so forth. So I think that that already, that politicization is starting to happen, but obviously he's extreme now. But yeah, those hearings are, I went back and watched those hearings.

I forget for what reason. It was probably book-related. And Chuck Schumer isn't that, I think it was a judiciary committee. Is that right? I don't know. But it was some hearing about it. And it was just remarkable how partisan the entire thing was with basically the Democrats trying to defend the federal government, obviously, because it was.

controlled by Democrats at that time, the federal government's actions and paint the, you know, the people involved as really violent and scary extremists and the Republicans going after the government as being, you know, as this being a terrible example of government overreach and tyranny. So it's already breaking down back then. But I wonder, yeah, so it's played out in politics, perhaps before I played out in culture, which is why I always think that that politics is downstream from culture shit is bullshit. Because like, look, if you pay attention to politics, you would have known, if you pay close attention to politics, like your antenna would have been aware of the subcultural elements of the right that would break into the mainstream a lot faster than if you

watched movies and TV and stuff like that. Like politics picks up, there are things expressed in politics that like mainstream culture misses all the time. Yeah. And so I think it's more the other way around that then culture kind of catches up with political developments. Yeah.

I mean, it seems like just a false separation to me. Yeah. Like that there's like politics is down the stream of culture. It feels like cope from people. who have just not been able to be culturally relevant ever. The reality, to my mind, is that these things are in conversation with each other, obviously, that they're entangled up in each other, that our cultural output and our political developments or political culture, neither flows from the other, but kind of like emerge out of things happening kind of like below immediate visibility.

And that's always been the case. That's always been true. So, like, for example, the growth of the religious right isn't flowing downstream from some, like, cultural shift. It's sort of, it's political organization happening beneath the surface that, like, that eventually erupts. And its eruption into mainstream politics has an effect on the national. cultural in one way or another. But it's not, the one's not flowing from the other. It's just, it's, I don't know. I'm very skeptical of like any kind of, you know, pithy line or whatever that

suggests that like human societies aren't terribly complex. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's totally, yeah. And it's also just like, we'll define culture. Right. Yeah, it's a very complicated concept. it's not amenable just to be like that. Yeah, exactly. As you were saying, this is politics. This is culture. It's, yeah, they are not. And America has many, as a huge country, has many concurrent cultures, some of which

are regional, class based, so on and so forth, religious, racial. You know, so it's, yeah, it's a very complicated question to disentangle those things. in each case you have to kind of look at them. And, you know, obviously these concepts are useful to make sense of the world. But you can't, you can't in the abstract say, well, cultural products are this and this is political. I think it's a stab. Culture drives like this. Yeah.

Culture drives like this. Yeah, exactly. So I think that it's a stab by people who don't read a lot of theory, perhaps, at like, the I think that's like what like they didn't have the benefit of like critical theory or the Marxist tradition. So like the right is playing catch up where they're like I think politics and culture are related. You're like yeah, that's fucking brilliant man. Where did you come up with that? But you know like so I think it's a little bit of like these sort of attempts to do those those those kinds of analyses in a kind of

a half hard and abstract way. But anyway, like, this movie shows that, like, the culture that just took for granted that the Oklahoma City bombings were bad or even important event in American history wasn't permanent. No, not at all. Nothing lasts forever. Nothing lasts forever. And, you know, in kind of in fairness, even 9-11 has really begun to recede.

It no longer acts as sort of like an all-purpose justification for things in foreign policy. No. It is even treated with that much reverence, which may have a lot to do with the fact that it was kind of weaponized so quickly, politically. Yeah. There's like a concrete metaphor for this. I mean, it might literally be concrete, which I like, which is in Fort Green Park in Brooklyn. There's a huge column that was supposed to. to have an eternal flame on top of it for the those killed in the prison ships that were in New York

Harbor during the Revolutionary War. There's no eternal flame anymore. And no one remembers that. You have to read a plaque to know that story. Now, you and I know about the prison ships. But like, the average person walking through the park doesn't know what that memorial means. And there are so many examples like that in American history. Like I'm walking through, I was walking through Washington Square Park, which is not far from where I live. And I was just reflecting on the monuments in it. And I was like the Washington quote, there was a time, I think even in at the very beginning

of our lifetimes, but more in our parents' lifetimes, were the founders. And I'm not trying to sound like a grumpy old conservative here. Where like the founders were like more a part of the culture. of the country. Yeah. And their quotes, even when they're apocryphal and stories were more parts of the culture of the country. And there was a, there's a sculpture, there's a statue of Garibaldi in the park.

And obviously, you know, that was a way of playing homage to the Italian immigrants in the area and also, you know, Americans in the mid-19th century were very enthusiastic about those European Democrats because they viewed it as being in continuity with the creation of their own democracy and the Democratic project worldwide. Or like Hungary, I just wrote about this. Like, you know, we're talking a lot about Hungary. Lyos Casu, you know, toward America. And it was a giant uproar and everybody was celebrating him.

So, and like, you know, a lot of these things that were huge in America. And it's sort of sad. And I guess it's also sort of what makes it interesting to be a person who's interested in American history to uncover these things. But there is a certain forgetfulness in America where things that's, seemed very important to certain generations. Get a little lost. We don't have, and maybe in some ways it's good because there are European cultures,

which are really hung up on grievances from a long time ago. I mean, I have, so I have like two thoughts. Yeah. A more minor thought is just with regards to the, I think you're right to observe that the founders used to have like a larger place on just like American civic culture? Like you don't even really hear politicians like quoting. Like could any could any currently serving national politician recite any part of the Gettysburg

address from memory? No. I'd be shocked. Four score and seven years ago they could probably do it. Maybe they could get that. Four score and seven years ago, our forefathers, blah, blah, blah, blah. I've been working on trying to, I used to be able to have no other thing and have been working on trying to get it back.

Isn't it like a two-minute speech? Yeah, it's like two-minute speech. Yeah. But like the rhythm of it is like very, very specific. Yeah. Which actually helps for memorization. Have you read the Gary Will's book about it? Great book.

Yeah, it's really good. It's a terrific book. Yeah. I reread it last year, actually. Yeah. But my other thought is just about forgetfulness. Yeah. I think you're right that I don't know if it's a good thing or bad thing, but I do think part of the appeal of the United States to many people

who come here from abroad is the forgetfulness, is the notion that kind of like the past is lightly worn, is not something that weighs heavily on people here. And that what matters is the future in that I've long had this theory that part of the, you know, this country's longstanding resentment towards natives and black people in particular is that we're kind of the two groups in the country for whom we can't do that. You know, we can't shed the past in the same way, given our history here, given our long history here.

And so the insistence from these two groups on remembering the past engenders, in gender's resentment, because the whole deal with this place is that, yeah, you can kind of just, you know, it doesn't matter where you came from. It doesn't matter, you know, past ethnic rivalries. It doesn't matter. What matters is being able to make money. In fact, I'm rewatching The Wire. I may have mentioned this already on a previous episode.

This is a great scene in season two where the Greek and his compatriots, they are trying to figure out how the cargo ship full of girls got killed. This is like the instigating thing of season two. They find a container ship on the docks full of basically dead trafficked women. And so the criminals who brought him here trying to figure out what's going on and they go to the ship, which the container was on, and they find the captain, and they're like torturing him for information. And eventually they see a tattoo and they realize he's Turkish. And the guy, and they're not really Greek, but like, they're referring to each other as the Greek or whatever.

And the Turkish captain gets really worried. He's like, oh, shit, these Greeks are going to kill me. And the Greek says, that is old world. We are in the new. And I thought that was such like it was such an interesting, um, interesting nod to this idea, right? That's sort of like, whatever our ethnic or national rivalries are, that's for, that's for there.

Here, it's about making money. And the reason why you're here is, is that you cost me money. Anyway, I, I, you know, this is just like an observation I've had. And I think you can actually perceive this and sort of like, you know, conversation around recent conversation over the last five years over wokeness or whatever. But like there's, I think they're, the sense or the insistence that the past and specifically the worst parts of the past cannot be worn so like.

and have weight in the present, it engenders resentment and not just because of prejudice, but because it feels like a betrayal of some idea of what the country is. Yeah, no, I think that's true. I struggle with it in a certain way because I do kind of like the fact that America is a new world and people are free to make their own lives and they don't have to be attached to all these old bad memories of the old world. But I do think, you know, I'm a historian and I believe that America has interesting and important lessons.

And I think that the weird thing about Trumpism as a phenomenon is how a historical, a form of right-wingness it is. Like it does kind of participate in certain parts of old civic cults, but it's just so kitchified. Yeah. Like it's just really on on even the tea party was better about or more accurate civic religion than Trumpism. So in that way, I just sort of am like and and maybe this is a little naive, but I'm like, I think if people knew the civic culture of the United States, like we would be in a better, a better place. Not necessarily. It would always be things I would agree with. But perhaps it wouldn't be quite as feelings quite so terminal. I don't know. It's funny. Clarence Thomas just gave a speech

basically making this point, but blaming people like us for spreading, spreading nihilism. No, fuck you. We, I mean, we at this point are the real, uh, we're. We, we at this point are the real, uh, We are the real conservatives. I was recently called a woke pocket constitution guy. Yeah, that's funny. That's basically true. It's basically true. Yeah.

Yeah, I think, you know, basically I'm also sort of like, I mean, I think there are cool things about the American Republican tradition, small R that I'm interested in. I like Lincoln and all those guys. I and I wish people knew a little bit more about it. But that's always, you know, there's always a struggle over the meaning of those things. Oh, of course. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

I'm, uh, my last comment on here is I'm reading, I'm reading a great book right now called boss Lincoln about Abraham Lincoln as political boss. It's quite interesting. It's actually really interesting. But, uh, we're, we're in 1858 now. And it's Lincoln beginning to, you know, begin his campaign against Stephen Douglas. And what's happening in that moment is a struggle over the meaning of the founding era. I mean, that's the Dred Scott, popular sovereignty, like all those things are a struggle over the founding era with what it means and what it meant for Americans in the present.

So part of American political life is an ongoing struggle over the meanings of our origins. Yeah. Yeah. That's just, that's, that's, that's culture and politics. That's culture and politics, folks. All right. I think we're, I think we're, I think we're to wrap up there. You know, it's a lifetime movie. You know, no need for you to see it. I think it's, I think it's an interesting artifact. It's always useful, you know, one of, I feel like one of the many, um, conceits of this podcast is that there is something to, learn from even watching the marginal cultural production of the past. And no one is going to remember Oklahoma City a survivor story. It's not going to end up in any retrospective. But I think it's

worth watching just to get a better sense of how people were thinking about and internalizing the Oklahoma City bombing, if that's a thing that you're interested in. So it's worth watching for like historical reasons. Otherwise, you know, there are better, more interesting things to watch. Rewatch the wire. Rewatch the wire.

Great show. So yeah. All right. That is our show. Thank you, as always, for listening. You can find this wherever podcast

or found. That's Apple podcast. That's Spotify. That's, we're a podcast. We're around. Wherever you find your podcast, if you leave a rating

in a review. We always appreciate it. It helps other people find the show, makes it seem like we're popular and well liked. And that's always, that's always fun. If you want to reach out to us, you can find us on various social media places. I'm kind of active in the YouTube, TikTok space these days. John, you're still on Twitter, I believe. Yeah. And you're also occasionally on Blue Sky. Yeah. The best way to reach out to us is via the feedback email. That's unclear and present feedback at fastmail.com. And I, And for this week in feedback, we've been getting a lot of emails that are basically like, when are you guys going to do the siege?

When are you going to do the siege? We're going to do the siege, people. It's coming up soon on the, on the, on the, on the, on the, on the, on the, on the, on the, on the, on the, on the, uh, on the, uh, on the, uh, on the, uh, on the, uh, the. We probably should. Um, let me see if the people at the, at the, I think our contact at metrograph left, but I will look into, I also, I know a bunch of other people in. independent cinemas here. So maybe we'll find somewhere else. If not, Metrograph, I'll look into it.

Yeah, we could, we could, if not, I mean, we could probably find, you know, find some way to do just like a straight up live show, not even screening, but just sort of like, you know, we go in having watched the movie and the episode's all live. We'll figure it out. I mean, it's one of the things that we could do an episode for here and then do another, another episode too. It's fine. but people really want us to cover the siege in this email we have, which is from Matt is just titled Bruce Willis' character in the siege.

This is a short, stray observation, but I wonder if the name for Bruce Willis' character General Devereaux in the siege is indirectly inspired by Colonel Mathiao from the Battle of Algiers. Both characters seem similar that they both seem to not be eager or altogether even convinced of the rightness of what they are doing. But once they are directed to carry out their control of a civilian population ruthlessly, with nothing held back, they see what they're doing as the only necessary and logical way to complete the mission set out for them. Makes sense to me. It's been a minute since I've seen the siege. I will keep that comparison in mind when we do watch the siege, which is coming up very soon. I just pulled up, I just pulled up the list.

And so we are here at Oklahoma City Survivor's Story. The siege is like one, two, three, four, five, six movies away. So by the end of the year, we're going to be hitting the siege. It's coming up soon. Thank you, Matt, for the email. Episodes come out roughly every two weeks or so. And so our next episode is we're moving away from the Lifetime movie. just a little digression there.

And back to Hollywood, we are watching Warren Bady's 1998 political satire, Bullworth. Oh, hell yeah. Starring Beatty, along with Hallie Berry, Sean Ashton,

apparently Amiri Baraka shows up in there. Don Cheadle shows up. Michael Clark Duncan. Yeah, I'm excited for this. I'm excited for this movie. I like this movie. I don't know if it's great, but I like the movie. It is a fascinating artifact.

It's also responsible for the one single by Fuji's member Praz. It's Ghetto Superstar with featuring the old dirty bastard. So I'll probably watch the Ghetto Superstar music video as well. And, yeah, Warren Bady's Bullworth. looking forward to it to Warren Beatty. We'll talk a bit more about Warren Beatty because Strange Guy. Strange guy has a truly fascinating filmography. Reds from 81, Dick Tracy, Heaven Can Wait from 78, Bullworth, and rules don't apply from 2016.

He also, every decade or so to maintain his rights control over Dick Tracy, films a Dick Tracy. films a Dick Tracy special where he dresses up as Dick Tracy and interview someone in character. It's very strange. But Bady, I don't know what I'm going through this now, but he, a producer too, and some of the movies for which he did not direct, like Bonnie and Clyde and Shampoo, he was,

I mean, he was kind of effectively the director as the producer for those movies. Yeah, weird guy. So that's the next episode. Our next episode is Bullworth. Did I give a brief plot synopsis? I'll just say that real quick. This is taken from the letterbox description.

A suicidally disillusioned liberal politician puts a contract out on himself and takes the opportunity to be bluntly honest with his voters by affecting the rhythm and speech of hip-hop music and culture. Ah, sounds good, right? It sounds great. So that's coming up. Over at the Patreon, we are doing some Vietnam War movies. So we did a film. We did an episode on the, why did I just forget his name? Southern Comfort is the film directed by Walter Hill.

There we go. So Walter Hill, Southern Comfort. We just did Michael Chimino's the deer hunter and next up we're going to be doing apocalypse now one of the more recent versions that was released and then after that we don't have a particular plan for the Patreon the next set of episodes suggestion John I'll throw this out to you suggestion from the Patreon chat was that we do the Rocky series or at least the first four um after the Nuremberg after the yeah Nuremberg and then Rocky yeah all right

since those movies are actually very fascinating artifacts when it comes to thinking about Cold War, about working class life, race, gender, all those things. Come join us at the Patreon, patreon.com slash unclear pod. $5 a month. You get two Patreon episodes on movies, plus our weekly politics show, which will be recording after this.

I believe we're coming up on our 20th episode of that show, which I may have been posting every five episodes, on the main feed. So you may get that as kind of a bonus if you're interested in the politics show. Until then, for John Gans, I'm Chimaudhue. It's unclear and present danger. And we'll see you next time.