Having recently exchanged my day job for the primary care and feeding of a 10-month-old male offspring, these eyes and ears are getting more in tune with daytime TV and talk radio than at any time in the recent past. A couple of days into the new gig I turned on the tube to watch a Columbo rerun and, lo and behold, I saw the end of the world. It had to be.
The screen was filled with fire and Tom Brokaw was reading from the book of Revelation. Well, I thought, so much for my mushy evolutionary co-creationist ideas about eschatology.
But, while I was contemplating the prospect of a thousand years bad luck and trouble, the NBC News camera panned back to show that the fire was limited to a couple of buildings on a dry prairie. Then the legend "Waco, Texas" appeared at the bottom of the screen, and in an instant it was obvious that David Koresh's Branch Davidian community was going down in flames. What I witnessed, and maybe you, too, on that sad midday live report, was a tragedy less cosmic than the Apocalypse, but all the more painful for its very human specificity, and its absurd futility.
The TV discussions that day often compared the Davidian holocaust to the mass murder-suicide at the Peoples Temple community in Guyana some 15 years ago. But my own sense of déjà vu went back even a little further, to the scene in Los Angeles in 1974 when a confrontation between the police and the Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA) ended in a barrage of gunfire and a raging inferno.
The SLA was the group of messianic New Left nutcases who first kidnapped, and then either brainwashed or recruited, newspaper heiress Patty Hearst. The SLA had been on the run for a while when the cops finally cornered them in Los Angeles. The SLA confrontation happened during Eastern and Central prime time, and it, too, was televised live nationwide. When the SLA hideout caught fire the cops not only watched it burn, as the FBI appeared to do in Waco, but they kept firing into the flames long after the SLA guns were silenced.
THE SLA AND the Davidians couldn't be more different in their surface ideology. But those kind of groups can be found operating under the cover of virtually any belief system that allows for absolutes--from anti-imperialism to fundamentalism to hippie peace and love à la Manson. After all, Peoples Temple leader Jim Jones was, before the weirdness kicked in, simply a charismatic mainline Protestant pastor with a passion for racial equality, the social gospel, and inner-city ministry.
Things get weird in a fringe group when individual leaders pretend to be the voice or mind of God (or history). The weirdness is compounded when self-contained communities cut themselves off from the reality check provided by regular contact with the world outside the "kingdom," or the "vanguard," or whatever.
Some kind of sexual domination trip seems always to be a part of the controlling psychosis in these groups. It was certainly true of all the culty crews named above. And, needless to say, the maximum leader as sexual predator is always male. In this regard cult-land is only normal life in these United States writ extremely large.
Of course cults turn up in other countries. In fact many of the Koreshies came from abroad to serve God in Waco. But there is also something peculiarly American about the killer sect phenomenon. It seems that our individualist ethos, and our cultural agnosticism on all questions of faith and morals, leaves some people so unmoored that they come unhinged.
The good news is that, at least so far, America's totalitarian mystery cults are firmly relegated to the private sector. In some countries similar groups have taken state power. We can check the Khmer Rouge, China's Cultural Revolution, and, of course, Nazism for examples of what can happen when utopia comes from the barrel of a military rifle. America's untameable diversity (as well as the individualist ethos and cultural agnosticism) helps to protect us against such monomaniacal experiments.
As has been widely noted, the federal agents in Waco had no idea how to deal with a group of people whose religious fervor, and in-grown hothouse lifestyle, had taken them so far off into their own communal fantasyland. The feds are used to dealing with crooks out for a payday or hustlers hungry for fame. They put Koresh into that mold, and wrote off his followers as sheep.
When Koresh started using his outside lawyers to make book and movie deals, it seemed the FBI was right. I know that I began to wonder if the part of Koresh could be played by his look-alike twin, the sleazy shock rock jock Howard Stern. After all Stern is trying to get a film career off the ground. The challenge for Koresh and his collaborators, it seemed, would be to concoct a peaceful resolution for the crisis that would also make for a saleable story ending.
No doubt there will now be a made-for-TV movie about the hapless Davidians. In fact there will probably be several of them. But the apocalyptic real-life ending of the story reminds us that there are some things even worse than our cash-in-quick popular culture. One of those is faith, or idealism, that allows the thundering voice of some so-called god to drown out the still, small voice of humanity, as heard, for instance, in the cry of a child.
Danny Duncan Collum, a contributing editor of Sojourners, lived in Alexandria, Virginia as a free-lance writer when this article appeared.
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