Arrow-right Camera
The Spokesman-Review Newspaper
Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883

Waco Hearings Stir Bigots Some Send Life-Threatening Messages; Many More Dark Yammerings Couched In Scholarly Parody

Francis X. Clines New York Times

The fax machines kicked in early and venomously on the final day of the Waco hearings, one of the Capitol’s sultry summer reruns of bad news.

A quote from Adolf Hitler’s “Mein Kampf” was creeping out of one House fax even as Attorney General Janet Reno, around the corridor in a congressional hearing room, was stressing a need for the nation to see the complex tragedy in all its shattered pieces.

“We will never know whether there was a better solution,” she declared, her expression pained but her resolve clear in rejecting Republican complaints that the Clinton administration had performed poorly even if not conspiratorily.

But this was all beside the point to one up-to-the-minute faxer devoted to darker explanations, who summarized the hearings with a bigot’s touch as “this wonderful piece of Yiddish theater.”

More traditional in the method of his First Amendment right to be heard was a letter writer who mailed in his urging to a New York congressman on the panel whom he accused of “spouting off your ultra-bigoted, anti-white-Christian mouth.” Imagine, he advised, that the “Hasidic cult in New York is accused of beating or disciplining children” and so finds a small army of federal agents descending on it, with the subsequent loss of 80 lives.

“I named my new rifle after you, Mr. Schumer,” another faxer notified this New York Democrat, Rep. Charles E. Schumer. “Please do not misunderstand me when I say, ‘I’m going to shoot Chuck Schumer.’ That just means I am going to the rifle range with your namesake, my trusty AR-15.”

Whether or not the Waco hearings produced any new information about the Texas catastrophe, they certainly generated a sizable fresh round of bilious vox populi amid the larger daily flow of reaction. A half-dozen of the thousands of missives received by Schumer, by far the main target of disgruntled C-SPAN watchers, have been taken for investigation by law enforcement specialists as overt threats of possible harm.

Many more are simply dark yammerings and screeds couched in scholarly parody, such as the tract that fantasizes the Schumer family in America back to slave commerce, where its fortune was made aboard the good ships Torah and Pot of Gold. “Today, Schumer is one of the biggest slumlords in Brooklyn,” this piece of Americana gently vents, amazing in its way for the timelessly daring presence of words on paper. “He lives in an all-male apartment in Washington with three bisexual colleagues.”

The bottomless congressional mailbag was as sulfurous on the closing Waco day as on the first, 94 witnesses ago. A perusal of some choicer offerings gave the feel of coursing through a series of mangled, woe-blotted Rorschach tests toward the national psyche’s ragged edge. (“Achtung African!” writes one constituent. “Achtung Juden! Raus mittun ze!”)

No grand conclusions are possible except that there may be an outsized number of people in the land with time to watch the hearings all day and turn quickly to their faxes, as if to a therapist’s couch. The results often seem more news-cycle melange than consistent outrage.

And inevitably, some of the faxers wax scrofulous over the ghost of Vincent W. Foster Jr., the deputy White House counsel whose suicide and office files are the subject of the separate Whitewater hearings in the Senate.

One Republican on the Waco panel still was asking in the closing hours whether Foster might have kept a Waco “file,” the operative word of mystery. The invocation of the Foster name at the hearings - and in the more heatedly imaginative reactions to the hearings - has lent Foster the graveyard celebrity of a modern John Brown.

“Congress has adopted the same moral and ethical standards of some cheap supermarket tabloid,” wrote in one viewer, dissatisfied with the hearings, yet well-glutted on them.

Another sent a fax in advance stating his total disbelief of any conclusions or reports to come of the inquiry. “I keep forgetting you maggots are above the law,” this American notified the Congress. “Have a rotten summer,” he added in closing as the Waco panel wound down with an assurance to the watching public that more hearings are being planned, this time into the role that citizen militias play in modern American life.