for the last four weeks i have been panicking over this column and the lateness of the second issue and the multiple typographical and layout errors in the first. i wrote some interesting fascist prose, tore it up. i sat for hours writing silly crap and still nothing… but by yesterday afternoon my savior had arrived. no, not david koresh—i am personally bored with, if not somewhat afraid of, religious fanatics; especially those, like koresh, of the christian variety—but the federal bureau of investigations, the a.t.f., the attorney general and the president of the united states of america. finally, somewhere to direct my anger.

okay, who to believe: fuck the media. the media has already slung its ponderous bulk back to the side of public outrage and from there, back again. last week they were on the side of the increasingly diligent federal agents who protect us. they don’t enter into this.

point two: killing killers is one thing. pick up a gun—expect to get gunned down; that’s what guns are, that’s what they do. but there were over forty children in that compound at the engineering of the crisis, and over twenty by the end. children ages one year to ten. children are not targets, not even in a war.

point three is we’re supposed to be in a liberal phase of government. the first two clinton nominees for attorney general (the highest office of law enforcement) were admitted criminals. usually, as we know, women don’t commit crime but these ones did. rich white women who knowingly and with full culpability broke the law. how did they pay for these small affronts to society? they lost the chance at a higher profile job and had to retain their six figure ones.

back to the a.t.f. agents. let’s not quibble about incompetence (yet)—the agents are dead and their families are left with severance pay instead of husbands. let’s not argue about probable cause or bicker about the constitution—the davidians’ firearms were legal in texas unless converted to fully automatic. there was no evidence beyond testimony of disgruntled cultists that the guns had been converted. the davidians hadn’t hurt or threatened anyone with these weapons… let’s face it, there’s no substantial evidence they’d hurt anyone at all, including their children who were supposedly the victims of physical and sexual abuse. well, koresh let more than half the children out when the siege began and none of them showed any signs whatsoever of the abuse that aforementioned ex-davidians spoke of. in fact, these kids showed as completely normal except of course for their conditioned distrust of the world outside the davidian compound. this fear seems irrational to me; i trust the government and all their agencies, i trust my neighbors’ addicted teenagers, i trust my banker, i trust my local police, my news stations. i only pray that these poor deluded children koresh torturously brainwashed can come to love and trust the world again. after all, what good are sheep you have to carry to the slaughterhouse?

check out the scenario: crazy spiritual guy and his devotees are holed up on home turf with a great deal of guns, supplies, and suchlike. add some gun waving, music blaring, screaming f.b.i. guys. now—for nearly two months this cult leader promises, death, suicide, brimstone and fire. so the f.b.i., as advised by the attorney general and approved by the president, decide he’s not that serious, we’re the best, we’ve got the technology, we can take him alive.

okay, raise your hand if you think you already know how this scenario will be played out.

so the feds call koresh on the loudspeaker from a tank (a tank for godsakes) and tell him: we’re gonna be shooting some tear gas around, but it’s not lethal. just come on out and you’ll be okay. but the feds knew that the davidians had gas masks. they start shooting dozens of exploding canisters into the wooden buildings. if they didn’t start the fires, they sure gave a good attempt. when the gas isn’t working, they run out their tank to start pushing over the building; which for all they know is filled with children. raise your hand again if it’s starting to be real hard for you to tell who is the criminally insane in this black comedy.

a friend of mine told me to try this recently; a little nietezsche—now, sometimes obvious questions seem too obvious to ask, so we all keep quiet, but i’m going to ask anyway: why were they, the g-men, there at all? really, think about it. try to answer it. why?

the probable cause the a.t.f. had was slim, if even real. the kids who were released are fine; we’ll never know about the others. so doesn’t it follow that if the abuse allegations were false then it’s much more likely that the bit about the guns was false too. it wouldn’t be the first time a situation has been distorted or even created to get a warrant. and forgive my ignorance about police work but is it proper to stage a full scale assault with said search warrant as your license to kill? it looks like koresh would have had a hell of a civil case in the wings if he’d had the presence of mind to surrender at the outset. so who were the federals, with all their guns and tanks, there to protect? how were they earning their paychecks? who were they there to serve? and don’t let them sway you with big terms and sympathy for the people they killed. this was not a hostage situation. agents testified at the scene that they tried to rescue people from the fire who ran right back into it when they saw their only option was the help of the feds. if someone would rather burn to death than run to a government cop, that speaks of a strong and free (albeit messed up) will to me.

but, hey, let’s not cloud the issue with facts.

what happened in waco? it was business as usual for koresh: wacky every day apocalyptic spiritual garbage, sleeping with girls who are plenty old enough in two or three states to be considered adults. the stuff the american dream is made of. because, for all we know, koresh was a prophet. when you talk about religion, you talk about the unseen, the untestable, the unprovable, the undefinable. when you talk religion, you are necessarily involving the irrational. a contest of gods and interpretations, a series of theorems whose proofs lie beyond the grave. it doesn’t matter so much if koresh was a holy man or a manipulative psychotic, they’re both a penny a pound. what matters is that the government, which we pay outrageous sums of money to be ever sane, to protect us—failed us. what matters is that clinton and his underlings carried out this operation with even less finesse and more violence than the reagan regime might have. the first one hundred days of the new presidency are gone and they have set tones and precedents for the thirteen hundred to come. it’s not just incompetence at this point. after the years of repeat episodes: police inspired riots, kent states, s&l scandals, politically motivated wars (from the mexican-american to the gulf), ever more creative bending and thrashing of the constitution, and failure in the government to serve the people beyond the capacity of a trained gibbon… it’s not excusable as simple incompetence anymore—to steal from alan moore—it seems nothing short of deliberate.

what matters is that twenty one more children are dead and no one is going to pick up the check… because it can’t be paid for.