Honolulu Lite
I'd like to kick off my tribute to Ernie Pyle by saying, Jesus, I'm glad the FBI's finished pulling things out of the alleged Unabomber's cabin. I was beginning to think I was watching clowns pile out of one of those little cars at the circus.
Every day, the FBI would pull something new and amazing out of Theodore Kaczynski's little tool shed: a piece of pipe, a can of fertilizer, a doll with no head, four marbles, a 35,000-word manifesto whining about technology - the same manifesto cut down to 750 words for submission to Reader's Digest - a deflated basketball and a shoe box containing 17 dead mice in Barbie costumes.
Crazynski is a guy who may have killed, wounded and terrorized people for 20 years, but he's portrayed by the media as some sort of rumpled intellectual rascal.
On the other hand, alleged bombers like Timothy McVeigh are portrayed as cold-blooded right-wing nuts.
Now that you, poor reader, are in severe non sequitur shock, let me attempt to explain how Ernie Pyle is connected to the Unabomber, right-wing nuts and circus clowns piling out of tiny cars. He isn't. He's dead. But if he were alive, I think he would be involved. Because one thing that Ernie Pyle did better than just about any other writer of his time was explain why war sucks. He did it by foxhole journalism, telling small stories about the real people involved so that readers would understand the ultimate horror of it all.
Today, the war is in our living room on television. It's on the radio in our cars. It's a strange, fragmented war in which fighters from the fringe of our society are locked in battle with demons that many of us can't even identify.
I wish Ernie Pyle was around to cover this war. I wish he could explain to all of us plain ol' stay-at-home, weekend barbeque types what is it about industry that would cause Kaczynski to bomb innocent people. Or why someone like McVeigh would think the best way to get back at a government he hates is to kill a bunch of kids in a preschool.
Or why someone like Louis Farrakhan would hang out with murderers like Moammar Gadhafi and Saddam Hussein and urge the overthrow of the United States. Or why racists like Tom Metzger would urge intellectually stunted skinheads to attack unarmed dark-skinned human beings with baseball bats.
Or maybe Ernie could have explained why all this great technology we have to assist in communication - satellites, computers, multiple-television channels and cellular phones - is only succeeding in fragmenting our country instead of bringing it together.
People are not interested in learning about other people's points of view anymore. They are interested in finding a particular radio station, television channel, religion, Internet home page, militia or organization that espouses their own beliefs and then hunkering down in that philosophical fort.
What is happening physically in Montana, a band of anti-government wackos holed up in their heavily armed compound, is happening in an ideological sense all over the country. The Republicans are holed up behind Rush Limbaugh and Newt Gingrich; the Democrats behind Bill Clinton; the Muslims behind Farrakhan; conservative Christians behind Pat Robertson and on and on.
Each has vilified anyone not in his own spiritual compound. Each is at war.
I just wish Ernie Pyle was here to explain to all of them why it is wrong.
