Oklahoma City Aftermath: Trauma, Time, and Adaptation - A Psychohistorical Montage (article)

As I write, a recurrent image comes to mind: not a finished portrait, but a montage. The image is one of brokenness in search of wholeness. Many posters and other graphic artworks prepared by Oklahomans and no Oklahomans following the April 19, 1995, bombing were themselves montages or collages — pieces of glass brought together, or photographs of faces assembled over a background of the state’s outline or the American flag.

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The Experience of Time and of Timetables — From “Crack” to “Closure”: A “crack in time” theme of this radical disjuncture of life pervaded Oklahomans’ characterizations of the event. The experience of time, of memory, and of memorialization go hand in hand. In late May, the blown-out, mutilated Murrah Building was imploded. To a large extent, the event itself has been removed and is being continuously effaced so that city, state, and prairie heartland can be restored. One way or another the “crack” is being sealed over. Whatever the officially espoused and decreed timetables and rituals of “healing” and “closure” (two repeatedly heard words), wished-for finality over the Federal Building bombing eludes us, both those “directly” and “indirectly” affected.

Some recurrent questions haunt the perimeter of all psychohistorians’ — all social scientists’ — work: How do groups (cultures) mourn? What all are they mourning? What is the relationship between a traumatic event, the life histories brought to it, and the adaptations which follow it? How are “events” themselves construed and constructed so as to make them felt and labeled as “traumas”? How do events become incorporated into disaster narratives? Can the narratives, in addition to the traumas themselves, be traumatizing? What is, and what is not, newsworthy, media-worthy (for instance, tangibles such as dead, mutilated children and the fire department in action, versus intangibles such as fear and dread, and the long-term fear of violation on the part of those ostensibly “untouched” by the disaster)? How do peoples remember? What do people “do” with these events that “happen” to them? How does the sense of place, and the fantasies that are part of that aesthetic if not apocalyptic sense, figure in to the response to calamity? What is therapy and therapeutic? How do “whole” cultures heal — or fail to heal and still call the failure “closure” and “healing”? No answers are definitive, but the fragments of the montage, like remembered fragments of last night’s dream, hint at answers. This essay attempts some preliminary answers to some of these questions.

The Dialectic of Cultural Inferiority and Superiority: Tragic as the bombing was, its horror quickly became transformed into a moment of pride, if not exploitable opportunity, as it helped Oklahomans redeem, at least temporarily, the long-standing “inferiority complex” associated with the Dust Bowl; John Steinbeck’s novel of the Great Depression, The Grapes of Wrath; and the image of backwardness and redneckness. Inferiority was inverted into a feeling of goodness, pride, and superiority. The “boonies” on the “frontier” proved nationally and internationally more adept and more caring than many of the ostensibly more civilized urban centers of the USA.

Many people who came from all around the country to help in the acute rescue effort found themselves unexpectedly rescued as well. Virtually anything they needed (medical supplies, food, clothing, blankets, gloves, batteries, flashlights) was provided almost immediately by long lines of cars and pickups. The out-of-town rescuers felt overwhelmed by the sight of “people helping people” and the “community pulling together.” They experienced a “social solidarity” felt to be absent in urban Elsewhere. Their lives and their work were suddenly no longer petty; they had “meaning.”

It was a “culture shock” to those myriad of professionals from either coast to be so welcomed in Oklahoma and to find Oklahomans both immensely skilled at responding to disaster and uncommonly generous. But it was for many of these same people a worse culture shock to return to their far-away homes two or more weeks later, and not only come down from the emotional “high” of such intense effort, but to re-enter their ordinary family and work-place world of far less intimacy and sense of purpose. Much reciprocal idealization characterized both Oklahomans and those who came to help out and who felt that in the process they had rediscovered an America they felt long ago lost. If over the long run, Oklahomans are at risk because of the widespread “macho” attitude toward feelings, loss, grief, and work, they will at least have some visual and interpersonal reminders that will help the process of mourning along. Those who return to business-as-usual in far-away worlds will be lost to this kind of follow-up. I suspect that their risk for physical and emotional illness, and family conflict, will be even greater.

The local communitarianism rapidly decayed after the initial rescue almost as quickly as it spontaneously had formed. In the months following the bombing, the image of a single, all-loving, unselfish, coming together broke down into professional sibling rivalries, pettiness, factionalism, the search for “credit,”

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and grievances: they, not we, got too much attention. Even the coordination of firefighting evidently left much to be desired. The initial “oneness” gave way to splitting and projection. The decay took place at the same time as nostalgia for the communitarian spirit, and the idealization of it, occurred: “Why can’t we be that giving all the time? Why can’t we let go of our Egos now like we did then? Why can’t we go back and be the way we were?” — questions not unlike the annual post-Christmas bewilderment of “Why can’t we have the Christmas Spirit all year ‘round?” The recurrent human problem of aggression, and the “narcissism of minor differences”¹ lurks to puncture our fondest desires for a peaceable kingdom.

In any event, within Oklahoma, a quick and premature “closure” promises a short-lived sense of competence and genuine community. “Superiority” will be of the boastful, protest quality, because it lacks the quiet, self-assured sense of being haunted by nothing. The Dust Bowl and the Depression have not been dispelled by public valor and by the May 23rd implosion, the obliteration from sight, of the Murrah Building. Family life and public policy alike will keep Oklahomans “at risk” just as before the bombing.

Iconography — Recurrent Images and Their Meanings: Psychohistorians have learned to examine carefully images from an historical epoch or culture as much as the words its people use. Prominent images are diagnostic as symbol and symptom. In the weeks immediately following the bombing, the Christian cross, the war ribbon, and the American flag became linked in numerous posters and bumper stickers. In a widely circulated poster about three feet wide and two feet tall, a large, simple purple white cross is superimposed over the state of Oklahoma, located at the center of the poster. Photographs of individual and group rescuers and recoverers are placed in a montage around the outline of the state, and are all set against the background of the American flag. My fantasy is that of “Oklahoma Crucified.”

The recurrent images and their association together condense into a story line or narrative structure: Oklahoma as heart and heartland (conscience, group ego ideal, repository of values such as togetherness and individualism); Oklahoma as warrior and battleground for and in America; the dead as fallen soldiers; Oklahoma as the crucified and as the resurrected America. Heroism and martyrdom fuse. The narcissism of victimization² sets the stage for historical repetition, for smug entitlement, for the shrouding of event and feeling alike into myth.

A Clinical Vignette — The Pain Beneath the Scab: The following clinical vignette is exemplary of the cultural psychodynamics of Oklahomans over the nine months since the bombing, not only of all that emotionally takes place “beneath the surface” topographically, but precisely the role that “surface” (the scab over the wound) plays in dynamic relation to what is beneath it. In early December [1995] I was giving a talk to an Oklahoma mental health group on the long-term emotional consequences of the bombing. I had brought into the room and lay on the conference table a piece of granite from the Murrah Building. One participant, a psychologist and pastoral counselor, continued to eye this artifact with misgiving long before I introduced it into my presentation. When I passed it around the room, he pulled back, and handled it as if he were trying not to touch it. I asked him to help me to understand his intense discomfort, one I had labeled aloud as “anger.” He assured me that he was not angry, but surprised. Courageously, he continued to free associate to my presentation and to the unwelcome piece. He said he didn’t want to hear about the bombing yet again, eight or nine months later. The scab was healing, and here I came and picked it off. Then his voice softened, and his tense body relaxed.

Maybe I need to feel what I don’t want to feel. Maybe I still have strong feelings I haven’t dealt with. Maybe I need to have the scab picked off and I’m afraid how much it will hurt. I look at that stone from the Murrah Building, and I’m thrown right back into April again. I hurt, but not as much as before. Maybe this time, the open wound will take less time to heal, and I’ll heal more quickly.

We then briefly discussed two types of wound healing: from the top down, and from inside-out. He had thought he was healing properly from the top down, now to discover that the authentic healing could only occur from the inside. Between us was a moment of unimaginable grace. He said something generous like: “We keep helping each other. That is the best we can do.”

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“Culture Against Man” Revisited: One of the most influential books in my personal as well as academic life is Jules Henry’s Culture Against Man, an honest and unapologetically angry account of how self-destructive so much of American culture is: for example, in our educational system, in our treatment of elderly people, and in the bogeyman image of the Soviet Union we had created.⁴ I leave this montage on Oklahoma and American culture nine months after the bombing with a similar feeling of having witnessed a culture (or rather an interplay of organizational, city, state, regional, and national cultures) in which genuine healing (working through) occurs mostly despite rather than because of Oklahoman and American culture. Recovery from the trauma and humiliation of the bombing has consisted largely in the reconstruction of defenses to reaffirm the prior cultural identity. To heal is to (re-)mythologize, not to examine myth critically.

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Endnotes

Howard F. Stein and Robert F. Hill, The Ethnic Imperative (University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1977).

Jules Henry, Culture Against Man (New York: Random House, 1963).

Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, vol. 21, Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, James Strachey, trans. (London: Hogarth Press, 1961), 64-145.

Vamik D. Volk an, “On Chosen Trauma,” Mind and Human Interaction 3(1) July 1991: 13.

Editor’s Note: This article is a follow-up, completed nine months later, to the author’s “The Rupture of Innocence” (Clio’s Psyche, June, 1995) written shortly after the bombing the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City.