True enough – though here, once again, the problem is that you can always find matching material from an opposing political quarter. Angry white guys are saying some pretty scurrilous, inflammatory things, though to the best of my knowledge they are not the ones broadcasting the allegation that the AIDS epidemic was deliberately introduced into Africa by the CIA and/or into this country by Jewish doctors. Now here’s a thought: the idea seems to be that people who do terrible things, like the unspeakable bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma City, are inspired to do them by the words and example of others, such as, to cite one group of verbal suspects, those right-wing zealots who have been going up and down the land wondering if Bill and Hillary Clinton may not have been complicit in some murder. But if this is the case, does it not seem equally probably that those right-wing zealots were themselves inspired to think along such outlandish lines as younger people by those who did the pioneer work a generation back and wrote plays and tracts that were taken seriously, suggesting that Lyndon Johnson had organized the murder of John F. Kennedy? Just wondering.

Look: this whole dispute is a mug’s game. I might add it is a mug’s game being largely conducted in and by the press, my gang, who, as we search high and low for ever more culprits to accuse of contributing to the dangerous “delegitimization” of government, seem utterly and hilariously unmindful of one relevant fact. It is that we, as an institution, have done as much as any other player in the society in recent years to deconstruct both the mystique and the authority of government in the eyes of the people, including presumably those among the people who are certifiable nutbags and potential murderers.

I don’t for a minute think that we should apologize for that or change our valid but disagreeable journalistic ways, just as I don’t think that the political government-bashing of right or left – a tradition as old as the country, by the way, and permanently on display in some of our most venerated literature – can be held accountable for the vicious acts of individual criminals who claim some kind of redeeming political purpose. I didn’t’ like it when George Bush’s spokesman made the outrageous suggestion that the Los Angeles riots, replete as they were with crimes like that committed against truckdriver Reginald Denny, could somehow be laid at the door of Democratic policy; and I don’t like it now when people imply that Republican doctrine could well have inspired that mean-looking suspect in the orange, prison-issue jumpsuit. Of course political scare-talk that is full of threats and lies needs to be countered, denounced, exposed and otherwise unremittingly combated. And the stuff that is truly dangerous needs to be watched and kept from fulfilling its promise of violence. But that is different from saying that there is some kind of thematic connection and therefore continuum of guilt that runs from ordinary, roughneck political argument to incendiary extremism to crimes of the kind committed in Oklahoma City.

What is really in play here is an insidious national habit. It is the infuriating and unfailing propensity we seem to have as a people to deflect guilt and even responsibility away from individuals who have done wrong onto some much larger aggregation of “forces” or factors beyond their control – or merely onto some larger aggregation of people. I remember when the assassinations of the 1960s were committed how the conventional wise ones, pretty much to a man, immediately began to write this soupy stuff about how we were all guilty. I thought: like hell we are. But this was political high fashion at the time, and I cannot say I think it is progress that the preferred analysis has since gone from an imprecise and cockeyed tendency to ask the whole country to shoulder the blame to a tendency to search out ever larger groupings of others one doesn’t like to shoulder it. I observe that even as politicians of both parties, along with the tut-tut brigade of the press, seem to be making an absolute fetish these days of demanding that welfare mothers take restaurant for their actions and their lives, they seem, oddly, to be saying that no one else must do the same. They say this by their habit of reflexively diffusing guilt for wrongdoing outward from the doer to all who could conceivably be construed as having influenced him. The wrongdoer becomes little more than a stand-in for some larger group that neither pulled the trigger nor knew of the act but is nevertheless pronounced guilty. The very concept of a crime vanishes.

But the worst thing about the self-satisfied hurling around of accusations now underway is that it could undermine the true and proper national response to the Oklahoma city bombing that began to appear very quickly when the explosion occurred: an outpouring of valiant efforts to help, which crossed all the barriers of politics, class, race and region with which we have become so familiar; an all-too-rare feeling of connectedness among Americans of starkly differing view and experience; a tendency in some normally strident and self-assured places to be a little quieter and maybe rethink a thing or two. What we saw on our television screens could even have the effect of turning down the heat a little in the national discourse, making the participants a little more reflective and slow to anger. What could stop such a welcome development in its tracks is more of the acrimony and scapegoating so voluble now.