Harvest of Rage Why Oklahoma City Is Only the Beginning By Joel Dyer, Colorado and Oxford: Westview Press, 1997, 292 pp.

Abstract

On April 19, 1995, a Ryder truck filled with fenilizer and racing fuel exploded
outside the Alfred P. Murrah Building in Oklahoma City, killing 168 peo­ple and wounding 500 others. Harvest of Rage is an extremely readable and informative attempt to place
this brutal terrorist attack within the context of Christian fundamentalism,
right-wing politics, and the dramatic decline in the living standards of
America’s rural population. Joel Dyer is the editor of the Boulder Weekly and
has written many investigative features on the farm crisis and the rise of the
radical right. He begins by stating two themes that govern his book the reluctance
of most Americans to recognize the existence of numerous terrorist
organizations within America itself and the increasing tendency of these
groups to use violence to achieve their aims.
While the smoke was still clearing from America’s most infamous terrorist
attack, all eyes looked across the Ocean for answers. The national media began
to explore which faraway terrorists were likely culprits. After all, this was
Oklahoma City, the middle of the American heartland, and only the mind of
some foreign murderer could have conceived such a bloodthirsty plot.
But in Oklahoma and around the nation, FBI agents were looking across our
own Oceans of wheat, corn, and barley for their answers. They weren’t raiding
the homes of Palestinian nationals or people born in Imq or Iran. Within hours
of the blast, they were questioning men and women who had attended meetings
on how to stop farm foreclosures or on how to return the country to a constitutional
republic (p. 1).
Harvest of Rage is divided into three parts: “Fertile Ground,” “The Seeds of
Influence,” and “The Harvest,” all three of which share with the book‘s title an
indebtedness to organic metaphors. This reliance on organic imagery is a major
feature of Dyer’s book; the once-rich lands of the American heartland, he
implies, are now fertile grounds only for terrorism. “Fertile Ground” examines
the disastrous impact of recent government policies on America’s rural population,
the subsequent disenchantment with conventional government, and the
subsequent allure of organizations which respond to this growing dissatisfaction
and anger. “The Seeds of Influence” focuses on the nature and beliefs of
these numerous, primarily right-wing Christian groups which have proliferated
throughout rural America in recent years, in particular those influenced by
“Christian Identity” beliefs. ‘The Harvest” examines the bitter disputes concerning
the meaning of the American Constitution and the increasing reliance
of America’s disaffected rural population on common-law courts. Dyer is, of
course, a journalist, and the book’s audience is the educated general reader. At
times, Harvest of Rage is a little too lushly written, but the reader is never left
in doubt as to the seriousness of the author‘s subject: “We will continue to pay
the price-one building, one pipe bomb, one bumeddown church at a timeuntil
we come to understand, first, that the nation is holding a loaded gun to its ...