Why April is the Cruelest Month

April is the cruelest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain
-T.S. Eliot, “The Wasteland”

T.S.Eliot’s epic poem is one filled with images of death, madness, rats, and “White bodies naked on the low damp ground.” The poem was first published in England in 1922 as a reflection on the devastation of World War I, and you see that echoed in lines like this: “I had not thought death had undone so many.” April, in Eliot’s poem, is the cruelest month because of the mix of death and hope. That’s the timeless insight of this poem and it resonates with this month so filled with notorious anniversaries of the far right violence.

April 19, 1995 is the day when a bomb went off in a federal building in Oklahoma City killing 168 people. The assailant chose the target and the date as retaliation for the siege at Waco. These two events hit close to home for me. The spring that the stand-off between the FBI and the Branch Davidians was happening, I was teaching at Southwestern University, just a few miles down I-35 from Waco.

When the Oklahoma City bombing happened, I was further away geographically (on a one year teaching gig in Florida - god help me), but it hit much closer.

My first girlfriend was from Oklahoma and with her, I’d been out to a fabulous gay bar there. The old kind, with no sign out front and a little window like a speakeasy that the person working the door would open to make sure you weren’t the cops. That event undid me in ways that I’m still figuring out how to write about. Even though I was in New York on 9/11 (and a different girlfriend was downtown when that happened), it’s the bombing at Oklahoma City that still lingers in my body as trauma. To this day, I cannot look at the images of that building without dissolving into a puddle of tears. That’s why you won’t see any of those images here. Instead, enjoy this beautiful mural that celebrates my favorite city.

By some quirk of the universe, this is also a day that I’m flying out to a conference on hate studies to present some of my research and to interview some folks for the CTFR project, so I thought I would share some resources for those reading along here who want a deeper dive into why April is significant on the far right.

Here are a couple of documentaries as a place to start:

• “Documenting Hate,” PBS/Frontline (2018). This features excellent reporting by A.C. Thompson, and an interview with scholar Kathleen Belew, whose work connects peaks in far right violence to historical periods of veterans returning home from war. There’s also an interview with one of the people who worked at DHS in 2009 when they released a report about the threat of white supremacist, far right violence and the particular vulnerability of recruitment within the military. For this, he was fired and his investigative unit disbanded. This was the same year that I published Cyber Racism, about the threat of white supremacy online.
• “Waco: American Apocalypse,” Netflix (2023). Does a decent job of covering the basics of these events. Worth it for the glimpse of the Oklahoma City bomber showing up there handing out far right literature.

There are also several newsletters on this and other platforms that I read regularly and recommend:

• Radical Reports: Teddy Wilson is doing the hard work of tracking the characters on the far right and offers regular updates on their latest.
• Ctrl-Alt-Delete: I wish I could be clever with titles like Melissa Ryan, who keeps me up-to-date on many of the online aspects of the far right.
• Public Notice: Aaron Rupar (and some excellent guest writers) provide info on the mainstreaming of far right politics.

If you’d like some books to read, let me recommend these three:

• Bring the War Home, Kathleen Belew.
• No Pasaran!, Shane Burley, ed.
• The Politics of Bitcoin: Software as Right-Wing Extremism, David Golumbia.

Have to board soon, but a reminder that if you’re a white-raised person who would like to get involved in gathering our cousins, we have fun over at SURJ. You can find a local chapter near you.