I was surprised to learn, in Waco, Texas, that no public monument exists to the Waco Siege that occurred there in 1993. What remains of the Branch Davidian compound is in private hands and does not generally welcome visitors – or so the staffer at the Dr. Pepper Museum told me. (She also said that Wacoans get tired of all the negative publicity, like the Biker Shootout or the Baylor Sexual Assault Scandal, so she may have been trying to dissuade me from any further investigation.) This is in contrast to the former Alfred P. Murrah Building in Oklahoma City. Timothy McVeigh blew it up in 1995 in revenge for Waco; its entire footprint, and those of the buildings across the street, is now a beautiful park of remembrance, and the street itself has been transformed into a reflecting pool.

Is this a bad thing? Should we not remember the victims of government tyranny, as well as those of domestic terrorism?

Well, of course we should, and the Feds could have handled Waco better, but my mother told me not to kill federal agents when they’re trying to execute a search warrant. So we probably don’t need a monument to the Branch Davidians on quite the same scale as this.

I wonder how much of the militia movement in the nineties, and McVeigh’s terrorism in particular, was just an expression of partisanship, a reaction to having a Democratic president (and a female Attorney General).