This story won first place at the MAYDAY 2024 Nonfiction Contest.
A logic is an attempt to understand when one statement follows from other statements, and why. Logic is not a settled body of knowledge, but a domain of inquiry, in which we encounter different logics for different purposes. Sweet Reason: A Field Guide to Modern Logic
In bed, lights off in the middle of the day, laptop balanced on my knees, I paused the video of Trump’s Waco rally to scan for my mother in the crowd. A woman with dark hair like hers balls a fist, the frame frozen as she raises it toward the sky. I bring my face closer to the screen: she’s the right height, maybe, but her posture’s all wrong. And the arm? No. Too gangly.
I pressed play again, and men’s voices blared through the laptop’s speakers. It’s a recording of incarcerated January 6th insurrectionists singing the National Anthem. As Trump takes the podium, the chorus voices fade into chants of USA, USA. Galaxy-brained, as if standing in front of a corkboard whereon metaphorical red yarn connects the transcript of a 1990 Bush speech to a New York Times clip about the Oklahoma City bombing, and finally, to an image of Alex Jones with a bullhorn leading a group in military garb toward the U.S. Capitol.
I opened a new tab to search: how far from where Trump stood was the chapel Jones had built on the Branch Davidian compound? Further than I would have guessed—not quite twenty miles from the site of the 1993 siege. And, of course, on the 30-year anniversary. Back to the video tab, back above the rally, I kept scanning the crowd for my mother’s face.
What would it have meant to see her there? One final, tangible connection, maybe, between our story and Waco’s history—thirty years later, back to the same spot. We’d each spent a lifetime since then fixated on the years surrounding the Siege. 1990 to 1995. We’d treated these years like a labyrinth, each going deeper alone with the faint hope that maybe, if we met at its center, we’d emerge, finally, as mother and daughter. If that had been her dark hair on the screen, her fist pumping in anger, might that image have distilled her, in all her multiplicity, down into something flat and fixed, something, at last, intelligible to me? Or maybe my motivation was simpler. Maybe I looked for her in the crowd only because I needed to see her face, how it moves when she chants. Maybe I looked for her because I can’t bear to let myself forget.
—
1990 to 1995, with Waco right in the middle: these years set everything in motion for my mother and me. In 1990, eight months after I was born, she and my dad deployed in Desert Storm and, weeks after returning to parades on Ft. Hood, she packed up and left again. When she did, my dad sent me to West Virginia to live with his parents, Mawmaw and Pops, who taught me to walk and talk and read. Until 1995, I slept every night between them. Every night when I prayed, I begged, God, please let them live until I die.
In 1995, the summer after I finished kindergarten, my mother came to get me and I, age five, kicked the back of the driver’s seat. I begged, howled even, to be let out of the moving car, but the custody agreement mandated that I spend three weeks with her in Texas, so—while Pops and my dad waved from the driveway and Mawmaw wailed between them—my mother cranked up the window and locked her eyes straight ahead.
Maya, a tall woman in cargo shorts, had driven up with her from Texas. They introduced her as a roommate. Maya drove, and as we pulled onto the main road, I leaned my hot cheek against the child-locked door. At highway speed, I forced a deep, stuttering breath and, like my mother, locked my eyes forward. A thousand miles before Waco, I’d already surrendered. How to be her daughter? I learned quick.
It’d be night and then morning and then day again before we got to Austin—24 hours straight through. Sprawled across the back seats, I slept or pretended to sleep, clocking words I’d never heard. Up front, Maya and my mother belted Indigo Girls, each singing a part in a practiced harmony. Maya’s curly hair bounced in rhythm and my mother used a baby voice with her between songs.
Twenty hours in, the sun rose over endless self-storage facilities and the beige industrial complexes off I-35. I felt a little nauseous, like I’d woken up in a bleaker universe. (Later I’d come to understand why landscapes like this unnerve me—their flatness, their newness, how the land itself seems to deny its own history.)
From the front seat, pointing to an exit sign, my mother said, “Wow, Waco.” Maya looked over, saying nothing. They held one another’s gaze.
I sat up from the pile of blankets. “What’s Waco?”
My mother turned to Maya, then to me. Even exhausted from the car ride, her greasy hair pulled back in a bandana, she looked vibrant.
“Waco’s a place where a group of people, a church, grew their own food and took care of one another.” She smiled, pulled her knee into her torso, and explained the rest: black helicopters, dead kids, firebombing. Hadn’t she used that word, firebombing? I stared at her, memorizing the almond shape of her brown eyes, a few shades darker than my own. It never occurred to me to question this story as I scanned her features for other resemblance.
Did she bring up Timothy McVeigh, or did I? Like her, he’d deployed in Desert Storm and had some realizations after coming home. Or maybe, thinking of the dead kids in Waco, I brought him up. I’d seen his photo on the news after he’d bombed the Murrah building in Oklahoma City a few months prior. I’d seen the makeshift memorial, that fence in front of the rubble. The Barbie dolls and Teddy bears hanging from the chainlink. Sick in the head, Mawmaw had said every time. An elementary school principal, she knew what nineteen screaming children sounded like.
But in the car, my mother spoke about McVeigh in a different way. Like her, he knew about the New World Order, the one-world government, how they’d ordered black helicopters to kill the Branch Davidians. On Austin public access TV, she told me, she’d found a man named Alex Jones who asked the right questions. Had Clinton ordered the bombing and used McVeigh as the fall guy? Was this another CIA mind control program?
As she wondered aloud, I watched the way her head turned—quick, back and forth, between me and Maya. The tiny ashes that flew from the end of her cigarette. How can I explain that I would have believed anything she said? How can I explain that belief was beside the point? She’d driven all that way. She’d come back to be my mother. I pointed to the freckles on her arms and hoped that, one day, I’d have them too.
Maybe I realized even then, just out of kindergarten, that when it comes to my mother, belief can unravel from truth, can grow from another kind of light. Thirty years on—after shattered Capitol windows, after red hats gathered there, chanting—I see the stakes. But there, in the car in 1995, Waco’s history felt intimate, private, like it belonged to us and no one else.
Besides, I had other needs—louder ones, sharper. Her smile from the passenger seat. That she might look back long enough that I could study the shape of her ears, how her eyebrows moved when she spoke. In her absence, I’d come to understand the weight of this word mother, how we’re bound to one another. If mother, then daughter.
If the car ride felt long, the three weeks laying themselves out before us felt longer, infinite. I knew, through some base intuition, that I’d have to shed some part of myself to survive. We pulled up to their small rental house. On a break from unloading, I followed my mother into the bathroom, wanting to show her my first wallet, a gift from Mawmaw in preparation for the trip. The wallet had come with a pre-lined card in the ID window: Name, Address, Phone Number. I’d filled out both sides of the card in a gel pen. When my mother saw it, she started crying, repeating, I am your mother, I am your mother. It took a minute to realize what had upset her—I’d written Mawmaw and Pops’ address. Their phone number.
Why had I written their information on both sides? Why hadn’t I written hers on at least one? Had they told me not to write it? See, this was proof: all those years she’d been gone, they’d kept her away. They’d tricked her. Stolen me from her. Brainwashed me, too. See? I didn’t even treat her like she was my mother.
I was sorry, I was sorry. I didn’t want her to cry. I didn’t want to see her cry. She couldn’t fall apart. Not while I was trapped there. I didn’t yet have the words to say that if I’d ever treated her like she was my mother, if I’d needed her before, I wouldn’t have survived. That the sun rose and set without her because she hadn’t been around. Somehow though, the same base instinct maybe, I knew that my need for her mattered less than her perception of my need. I stayed with her on the bathroom floor and told her I wanted a real ID, a driver’s license. That once I grew up and had my own car, my own house, things would be better. To picture a life without Mawmaw and Pops at the center would have felt like a betrayal even then, so I’m sure I was careful about my words. Careful as a five year old can be. I tried to convey that she could believe whatever she needed about those early years. She could blame whoever she needed to excuse herself all that she’d missed.
Still there on the bare linoleum, both sitting with our backs to the bathtub, my mother told me that by the time I was old enough to drive, anyway, men would come around with guns and try to implant a microchip into my forehead or my wrist. I’d need the chip to buy, sell, or trade. To drive a car. The men wouldn’t tell me that the chip was the Mark of the Beast, that to take it would be to enlist myself into Satan’s Army, to exclude myself from the possibility of Heaven. She’d never take the chip, she said. They’d have to kill her. If I took it, then, we’d be apart for all eternity.
I promised I’d refuse, that I’d choose Heaven, choose her, no matter the cost. How can I explain the irrelevance of the question of whether or not I believed? With these new words—Illuminati, one-world government, New World Order—I could transform myself. Within my mother’s universe, this new form made sense. She and I were of a kind. With the new secret knowledge—of Koresh, Jones, McVeigh—I could reflect her back to herself. For the first time: mother, daughter. If mother, then—
A logic can arise from almost anywhere.
—
A logic—I’d learn years later, on a Pell Grant at a Western Massachusetts college—is defined by its operators, the connective symbols that link sentences together. In Seelye Hall, a brick Georgian-style flanked by red maples, a professor said to a full auditorium, “Suppose that A and B are statements.” The chalk clicked as he wrote an A and B on the blackboard. He drew a symbol between them and said, “This means and. We write
A ∧ B
to mean A and B.” He continued on through or (∨) and not (¬), then finally up through implication. “We write
A⇒B
to mean If A then B.”
I’d never been a strong math student, going so far as to fail calculus in high school, but my introduction to logical proofs felt like a kind of reverse-lobotomy—an instant restructuring of the mind by way of plugging in a single cord. It felt like an illumination.
“We translate English sentences into logical notation,” the professor said, “because it allows us to better understand the relationships between statements and objects in language.” The symbols reveal the invisible structure below the words we use. Implication, for example, is a one-way relationship. Let’s say:
A = It rained this morning
B = The sidewalk is wet
To say A⇒B (If it rained this morning, then the sidewalk is wet), we’re saying that from A (it rained this morning) then we can prove B (the sidewalk is wet.) Anytime that A is true, we know that B will also be true.
But the reverse doesn’t work. If we know B (the sidewalk is wet), then we can’t, from A⇒B, say anything about A. We can’t say whether it rained this morning. We can’t say anything, really.
It’s like B is looking at A through a one-way mirror. B can see A, can mimic A, but A can only see itself.
—
I think of that first summer—passing through Waco, the hours spent together on the bathroom floor—as the beginning of my relationship with my mother, but of course it wasn’t. She’d once contained me. My consciousness formed from her flesh. We’d always existed as mother and as daughter. Each of us had always defined the other. And, if 1995 was the end of one absence, even after that summer, other absences loomed. We didn’t speak for a year when I was eleven. We lost a few months at thirteen, another few at twenty. But between the absences were periods of intense closeness. Over the course of an afternoon, we might smoke a pack of Marlboro Lights and debate Keynesian economics. Might start a long trail run, cursing as we cough up the cigarettes and—unable to cough, laugh, and run at the same time—decide to walk the rest of the way.
All the while, that first absence that ended in 1995 was a landmine we tried to avoid. If we veered too close, one of us might, within seconds, explode or threaten to explode. I might find another place to sleep, book an earlier flight. Days or weeks or months might pass in silence. Inevitably, I’d call. We’d pretend it never happened.
In my twenties, I moved between various east coast cities; my mother stayed in Texas. Time between our calls stretched longer—I felt a growing inertia against picking up the phone. I hadn’t visited for years when, in 2015, I came to Austin for a friend’s wedding and extended the trip to visit my mother and Maya for a few days.
The day before I was set to leave, my mother said, “We need to talk. I can’t keep living like this.” We were on the patio drinking coffee, smoking. Our usual pattern. We’d had a nice few days, I thought. I said nothing but kept eye contact, as if to say, Go on.
“I am your mother,” she said. “But you don’t treat me like your mother. You never have.” For what felt like hours, we sat there, shifting in the plastic lawn chairs, while she listed her grievances: I hardly call, I never visit. Even if I’d wanted to speak, which I didn’t, I wouldn’t have been able to get a word in edgewise. When my mother gets going, it’s impossible to get her to stop. Finally, she said, “I’ve given this a lot of thought. We’ll never have a mother-daughter relationship until you acknowledge what they did to me.”
My first reaction: to fawn. I might have said It was a complicated time. Might have said, I’m grown now, let’s forget the past. Or if, when she said they, she’d meant the Army, who sent her to a warzone months after she gave birth, or George H. W. Bush, who’d ordered the troops, Saddam Hussein, who’d invaded Kuwait, the diplomat who’d told him, days earlier, that the U.S. had no opinion on Arab-Arab conflicts… If my mother had meant Harry Truman, who ratified Article 125, which made coming out as a lesbian soldier illegal or meant Catholicism writ large, the forces that made her feel like her only choice was to marry a man and become a mother… Even if she’d meant the one-world government, its plot to enslave her and the rest of the population… I could have reflected her anger back to her, might even have shared that anger—what she’d lost had, of course, been the mirror image of what I’d lost. I swear, I would have named every pain that the State and these men had inflicted on her, on us. I would have cursed their omnipotence, chanted our pains for as long and as loud as she needed.
But I didn’t say anything because that first reaction, the closed-mouth smile, lasted no more than a second. I felt my eyes narrow. My head cock. She’d finally come out and said it. She wanted to force me to choose.
I imagined yelling Who do you think you are? Yelling Do you think your pain is the only pain? Yelling In what possible universe would I ever rely you? Because when she said they, I knew she hadn’t meant any of those powerful men or those omnipotent forces. For the years we lost and our stilted closeness after, for our failure to live up to mother-daughter, she blamed Mawmaw and Pops. They who’d changed diapers and read bedtime stories. They who’d taught me to sing and swim and say the alphabet. They who, later, bought me the earlier flights, came to Texas to pick me up. She blamed them, and she needed me to blame them too. If mother—
In the end, I said nothing. Nothing when she pressed for an answer. Nothing on the way to the airport. As brave as I might have imagined myself, my body wouldn’t let me fight. My body couldn’t shake the animal need for a mother, the five year old trembling in the back seat of her car. Silent, I flew back across the country, where I couldn’t force myself to call.
—
In formal logic, the contingent nature of truth is made explicit: before we can begin to prove anything, we must first lay out our axioms, the statements we’ll assume to be true. Each list of axioms creates a little universe, and each proof only applies within that little universe’s confines. If our axioms are
A⇒B (If it rained this morning, then the sidewalk is wet) and
A (It rained this morning),
then we can prove B (the sidewalk is wet), but only in the context of that universe. These logical universes may or may not correspond to reality.
In logic, we see that what’s called true changes depending on the axioms we choose. The structure of a proof reveals the hubris in believing in our own objectivity. The hubris to believe our axioms correspond to “reality.” The hubris, even, to believe that, if such a thing exists, it’s perceptible to our tiny human minds.
Maybe I took to logic because it gave language to the way I’d always seen truth. With my mother, I learned early on to pick up her axioms, how the operators worked, how to embody her universe’s logic. To connect with my mother, I learned to live in a kind of suspended neutrality. I slipped between. I believed nothing outright.
—
As is true, maybe, with all daughters and mothers, my life has been animated by dueling fears—one: that I’ll lose her, two: that I’ll become her. Conspiracy theories, though, had always been safe territory between us. The logic of that world is rather predictable, and I knew enough to pass. Connections imply causation. Coincidence does not exist. All tragedy and threat can be explained through a grand narrative of Evil. About the theories themselves, I didn’t care enough, one way or another, to figure out what I believed. With my friends or my teachers, it was easy enough to say Sorry about my mom. She’s got some oddball beliefs. With her, though, I didn’t argue. The Illuminati controls all world events? Fine. FEMA’s building concentration camps for American patriots? Unsettling, but sure. For most of my life, I mean to say, these theories were fringe enough to be harmless.
In the months after our last visit in 2015, this all changed. In December of that year, Donald Trump called into Alex Jones’ show, the one I’d watched so many times with my mother. She’d bought supplements for my migraines from his website, bought droplets that claimed to double the oxygen content of the water we’d filtered for fluoride. Trump, who was everywhere, parroted Jones on the campaign trail. In Trump, I heard Jones. In Jones, I heard my mother. I couldn’t look away. Still, I couldn’t force myself to call.
By the following spring, lights off in my shithole New York apartment for days at a time, I played every Jones clip I could find, the earlier the better. Clips would appear and then be pulled down, so when I found one from his early Austin public access days—pre-1995, ideally—I’d replay it so many times I could recite it by memory. I’d note the date of new words and phrases. One-world government. Tyranny. New World Order. Jones found connections everywhere. Every new event supported the theory that the Illuminati controlled all world events in an effort to enslave the population. If I couldn’t make myself call my mother, I could, maybe, reconstruct a narrative of these years from the clips, from the conspiracy theories and their origins. Maybe this narrative would help me finally choose.
In one clip from 1995, Jones stands in suit and tie in front of the Oklahoma City memorial fence. “This is tyranny at work, one way another,” he says into the camera. “Either they’re exploiting this terrible tragedy and our children that died, or they were actively engaged in it.” He’s young, 20 or so, and his youth shocks me. He’s got a full head of hair and a chiseled jaw. Unfortunately, a friend of mine joked, he’s kind of fucking hot.
Walking back and forth across the Williamsburg bridge in headphones, I’d play the clips on repeat. Sometimes, I’d mumble the lines along with Jones. Sometimes, looking down at the sidewalk, I’d argue aloud. Sometimes, between the clips, I’d block or unblock my mother’s number, look out over the East River and imagine the force of my feet hitting the water.
I swore I’d seen each clip live, but I couldn’t have. Before 1995, I’d never stepped foot into my mother’s house. I’d never been to Austin or heard of public access. The déjà vu must have come from somewhere else—grief makes time strange. And all these mirrors: I, after walking away from her in my mid-twenties, had turned to what she’d turned to in her mid-twenties after walking away from me. A mirror of a mirror where I was both mother and daughter, both re-living and living for the first time.
“They’re lying to you!” Jones says in one clip. At this, I pulled the headphone cord from the jack, ripped the buds from my ears.
“You’re lying motherfucker!” I yelled in the middle of the bridge as a man on a bike diverted his eyes.
Every one of his lies felt like a small vindication, a reason I’d been right to cut my mother out. If she believes… Horrible person, horrible person. With each lie, I let out a bit of my anger, but I still couldn’t direct it toward her. How deep into the abyss would I go if I let myself blame her for leaving, for the years she wasn’t around, for the fights and months of silence when I—an infant and then child and then an adolescent and then a fledgling adult—had needed her. Anger toward my mother had been a luxury I couldn’t afford. It would have pulled me down from my suspended neutrality, made it impossible to slip unnoticed in and out of her universe.
Regardless, though, my obsessed outrage toward Jones kept leading me back to her. There were so many connections. Jones and my mother overlapped at Austin Community College in the early 90s. They both studied history and geography. Like my mother, McVeigh had served in Desert Storm. One morning at 5am, I texted a friend in all caps Timothy McVeigh sold pro-gun bumper stickers from the hood of his car during the Waco Siege!!!! Jones had rebuilt the church at Waco. On this he’d built his whole career. McVeigh had bombed the Murrah building on Waco’s two-year anniversary. He later said it was the event that radicalized him.
At Brooklyn parties, I rattled through these connections—Jones, McVeigh, Waco, my mother, Jones, McVeigh, Waco. Crazy, right? Crazy? I poured myself whiskey. My friends blinked back at me.
Years passed this way. I left New York and met the man I’d marry. We moved to Colorado, and in vivid dreams, I’d remember I had a baby—where had I left her? I’d search and find her shriveled in a cupboard or soaking in the garden in the rain. I’d wake up panicked, shooting up out of bed before remembering that she doesn’t exist. Unable to sleep, I’d open my laptop and dive down a rabbit hole.
One morning in 2023, midway through the transcript of a 1990 Bush speech, I burst into my husband’s office. “H.W. coined the term new world order!”
He didn’t look up from his computer. We’d talked about this—my habit of bursting in.
A long blink. “He did?”
“Well,” I said, ignoring his tone, “he was the first politician… Yeah, here, Wikipedia says he referenced a 1919 Woodrow Wilson speech. Yes! After WWI Wilson addressed Congress…” Panting, I laid my computer on his desk. “Wilson called on Congress to sign the, I quote, charter of the new order of the world. The Treaty of Versailles! To have the U.S. join the League of Nations!” If I’d have sat down, it would have been on his lap.
“Why does this— How does this—”
“As you know, my mother believes the U.N. is trying to impose the New World Order…” I huffed, annoyed he couldn’t see these obvious connections. “The League of Nations was the precursor, I don’t have to tell you, to the United Nations. Bush literally said the New World Order was the reason for Desert Storm! Bush sent my mother and Timothy McVeigh to Saudi in service of….”
“I don’t understand what this has to do with her leaving, or whether Mawmaw and Pops kept you from her. I don’t understand what it has to do, really, with you and your mother at all.”
I glared at him and snatched my computer, stomped up the stairs, reading the transcript in a whisper. These valiant Americans were ready at a moment’s notice, Bush said, to leave their spouses, their children… I wondered when my mother realized she’d miss my first birthday. I wonder whether she had, as some cargo plane landed in the desert, felt the relief of escape.
A few minutes later, my husband poked his head into our bedroom where I’d retreated with my laptop. “You’re not like her,” he said—what I always needed to hear. We both want to have a baby, but when I imagine myself as a mother, I worry that what happened to her may happen to me. If—
Crying, I asked, “But what if I am? How could I know beforehand?”
As if it was obvious, he said, “You aren’t going to leave your kid.” He paused, looking down at the bed. “You get to decide that.”
This was never how I’d seen it—that she’d made the decision to leave—but of course he was right. All the other characters we might have blamed—Bush or Saddam or the Illuminati or Jones or Mawmaw and Pops—had been a smokescreen. I’d gone down all the rabbit holes to come up with some alternate theory, some grand narrative of my own.
After my husband left our room, I pulled a folder down from the high shelf in the closet. When I turned 30, Mawmaw had given me this folder full of letters from my mother that she’d kept over the years. At the sight of my mother’s handwriting on one dated November 1991, I felt my chest tighten. I sat down on the bed.
I needed to get away from everyone and every thing for a while, she wrote. I just need you to understand that I am doing what I need to – for me…
My whole life has been lived for everyone else. I was a poser. I was just living on the set of what I thought was real. In the letters she apologized for missing child support payments. I pictured Mawmaw opening them. Maybe I slept in her arms while she read my mother’s words. Maybe I cried in the other room, or maybe Pops read the letters while Mawmaw and I sang the alphabet. My mother had needed to get away. As my mother, she’d felt like a poser. I hope that she remembers me.
—
Sometimes, when we find that our logic lacks the nuance we need, it can be useful to define a new operator. With it, we can build a logic that better describes a relationship or a state of affairs. With my mother, that old operator of implication—If mother, then daughter—broke down after our last visit, but even in her absence, even after I stopped calling, I couldn’t see myself outside of it, beyond that one-way mirror. Daughter can see mother, but mother can only see herself. All the late nights on the message boards, the hours spent watching Jones clips—I’d been trying to find my mother in the labyrinth of the history of the first years of my life. I’d been trying to spin up some universe where she hadn’t chosen what she’d chosen over me. But it’s all there in her letters. Mother can only see herself.
In Lacanian logic, reality, in all its multiplicity, is intelligible only after it’s been flattened into an image by a structure of fiction. A mirror is one such structure. The mirror operator, formalized by philosopher Marc Heimann, describes the relationship between an object and its reflection, the flattened image that can be understood.
A
O | Ø
For an object O, the mirror | creates a reflection Ø. O is the object that exists in reality. It is unchanged by the mirror, but incomprehensible. The mirror’s axioms (A) are the fiction that determines the shape of Ø. Think: the mirror that shinks us, the mirror that stretches us. Each of those mirrors have different rules, different axioms. In this way, Lacan’s mirror operator describes a relationship between an object, the object’s reflection, and the mirror, as defined by its axioms.
Is this a better way to describe what I’d been trying to do with Jones? I’d taken this one fact about my mother—she happens to be a right-wing conspiracy theorist, happens to have found Jones early, before the millions adopted his views. I used this fact, this one fact, to create mirror in which I could recognize myself. All this time, have I, too, been a poser? Just living on the set of what I thought was real? Doing what I need to do – for me. In doing all of this, had I been reflecting my mother, or some distorted version of myself?
—
A few weeks after I’d read my mother’s letters, I found the video of the Trump rally in Waco. By then, a part of me had transcended the need for the mirror as a way to understand myself. This part of me could see the tenuousness, even desperation behind those shaky connections, all spidering out from Trump’s podium in Waco. This part could see the futility, even the hubris in trying to impose geopolitical significance onto my otherwise ordinary pain.
But there’s another part of me, the part, perhaps, flattened through the mirror operator. A woman in bed in the middle of the day, ignoring all the people who love her. A woman watching a Trump rally, searching for her mother. For her, time moves in both directions and she can hear the future chants of USA, USA from the car as her mother talks about firebombing and Timothy McVeigh, about their deployments, about the duty of citizens to push back on tyranny. If she can find her mother in the rally video, thirty years later, might some circle complete? Might the anger from the rally fuse with her mother’s anger, her own? Might it radiate as a single force toward the burnt Branch Davidian compound, toward Bush and Saddam and the CIA and the Illuminati? Toward the black helicopters and the one-world government?
“In an odd way,” sociologist Michael Barkun writes, “the conspiracy theorist’s view is both frightening and reassuring…frightening because it magnifies the power of evil…reassuring, for it promises a world that is meaningful rather than arbitrary.” Sucked through the mirror operator, won’t our private grief melt into Waco’s public history? The years 1990-1995, the mother’s letters, Desert Storm, New World Order, McVeigh, Waco, Jones. Through the mirror operator, don’t all these connections glow with meaning?
Forget the axioms. How could all of this be arbitrary?
SARAH MULLENS is a Hammond-Schwartz Fellow at Colorado State University and associate editor at the Colorado Review. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Oxford American, Missouri Review, Literary Hub, and elsewhere. A sixth-generation West Virginian, she lives between Putnam County and Colorado’s Front Range.
