C Hribal - The Company Car

Eventually the Smithsonian scrapped the idea for an exhibition altogether. That didn’t sit well with a lot of people, either. Nothing to commemorate the bombs that ended the war? What were they thinking?

What our father was thinking was that the Smithsonian should get a taste of its own medicine.

“Somebody should drop a Little Man or a Fat Boy on the fucking Smithsonian,” said our father. He got his “I have a dream” gleam. “I… I should drop a bomb on the fucking Smithsonian. I should. Yeah, I should, goddammit.”

“Wally-Bear, stop being ridiculous,” said our mother.

“Ridiculous? Who’s being ridiculous? I was one of the Americans whose lives were saved by those bombs. Goddamn Communists.”

“Wally, you’re being silly.”

“Silly? Is it silly to love your country? Is it silly to lay down your life for your country? Is it silly to be proud of your country? I’ll show you silly. I’ll blow up the fucking Smithsonian. That’ll be silly. That’ll be real silly. People will be laughing their asses off over that one.”

We shouldn’t have been worried, but we were. Our father was adamant. Bombing the Smithsonian—it was a patriotic act. Reagan was right. Government was the problem. The Smithsonian’s planned exhibition only confirmed his low opinion of any institution run by the federal government. He’d visited the Smithsonian once when he was near Washington for his ship’s reunion. They were doing Gettysburg and all the usual D.C. sights. What he came away with from the Smithsonian was how ill-kempt and dirty it was. Nobody wiped the dust off anything. Didn’t these people have any pride? Evidently not. So between the dust and the Enola Gay exhibition, our father wanted to blow up the Smithsonian.

He wanted to shoot the homeless, too, and nuke Baghdad, but the homeless were scattered all over the country, and he had no control over our country’s military arsenal. But the Smithsonian—that was another story. Of late our father had been expressing admiration for the militias. We were worried. Was this where his impotent rage would find its outlet?

“Concord and Lexington,” our father said. “Who was it fired ‘the shot heard round the world’? A militiaman, that’s who. Maybe they don’t tell you that anymore in your history books, but I know what I know. The country’s going to hell in a handbasket. Maybe it’s time for a different kind of shot.”

“Wally”—our mother was staring right at our father, her eyes blazing green fire—“you will do no such thing.”

“We shall see what we shall see,” said our father.

Though he stammered and hawed in front of our mother, when she wasn’t around, he muttered about it constantly. He could bluster his way through a whole afternoon of talk and television, clicking from American Sportsman to Fishing with Charlie Giles while detailing exactly how a small group of trained men could infiltrate the outer defenses of the Smithsonian—the perimeter, our father called it—and once inside, slip undetected (the preferred method of handling a covert operation) or, if necessary, blast their way to the building’s very center and there leave enough high explosives—nitroglycerin, plastique, and dynamite—to take out the diseased cultural heart and sick soul of a morally drifting America. We tried to picture it. Six, seven retirees, with Humpty Dumpty–like bodies, their bellies straining and then overwhelming the waistbands of their Sansabelt trousers. There they go, sidling down the hallways of the Smithsonian. Their noses rounds of cauliflower, their cheeks broken masses of river veins. Balding, golf-shirted, bearing Uzis and sensible shoes. Their watches can give you the correct time in three time zones, and walkie-talkies dangle off rings on their fishing vests. They are registered members of the AARP, the American Legion, the Loyal Order of Moose, the Shriners, the National Rifle Association, AAA, and the Sacred Heart of Jesus. They are grandfathers, Rotarians, members of the retired reserves.

They are also terrorists.

In those pre–9/11 days, blowing things up and being an antigovernment terrorist were still things to which our father (and talk radio) could aspire. Not anymore, of course. But for a while there, in the mid-Reagan years, magazines of dubious distinction began appearing in our parents’ living room, mixed in with the mountain of paper on the dining room table, the stacks by their armchairs. We had always gotten catalogs of hunting equipment, camouflage, camping equipment—the whole panoply of outdoor living—which our father perused from his armchair. But now they were getting magazines touting the dangers of Vatican II, the need for a return to the Latin Mass, magazines warning of the Second Coming, magazines and flyers explaining how the economy would collapse and why the coming social, economic, and political apocalypse would be good for prepared, red-blooded, God-fearing Americans.

Our father, of course, would never call himself a radical. He was a patriot, a reservist, an American. And Americans knew their duty. Our father’s duty was to make phone calls. All those years in the Legion and the Navy Reserves and the Coast Guard Auxiliary—he had an address book thick with names and numbers. Late into the evening he would make phone calls. Cold calling. The old pitch. The cajole. He found it harder selling an idea, though, than he ever did trying to move pharmaceuticals or chemicals or cookies. Even among the disgruntled, he found few takers. Hearts and minds—it was a tough sell. He would explain, he would nod, he would become impassioned, get irate. Shout, scream, plead.

“My country, right or wrong!” our father shouted into the phone most evenings.

You could almost hear the person on the other end saying, “Exactly, Wally. That’s why blowing up the Smithsonian isn’t such a hot idea.”

“Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice,” countered our father.

“Blowing up the Smithsonian is,” said his friends and acquaintances. “In fact, Wally, it’s a crime. You can’t go around blowing up buildings, Wally. People are liable to get hurt.”

“You can’t make an omelet without breaking a few eggs,” said our father.

“People aren’t eggs, Wally. Would you listen to yourself?”

“All that’s needed for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing,” said our father.

“The evil, Wally, is thinking the Smithsonian is the enemy. Cut ’em some slack. The Smithsonian is an American institution. They made a mistake.”

“We have to blow up the Smithsonian in order to save it,” said our father.

But his entreaties fell on deaf ears. In the end, not one of his friends agreed to join him, and quite a few suggested he get counseling or seek medical attention.

Our father remained a conspiracy of one.

In his defense, he didn’t try to contact the people most likely to take up his cause, people who might actually have been persuaded to take up his harebrained scheme as their own. He made no calls to the Freemen, to the Michigan Militia, to the Posse Comitatus, to the militias in Oregon and Montana and Colorado.

“ Those people are nuts,” our father declared.

“As opposed to what?” asked our mother.

“Don’t start,” said our father.

“Don’t you start,” said our mother. She had gotten more feisty since he’d retired, less likely to say, “ Wally… ” in that pleading voice of hers that let us all know she was going to lament yet tolerate his excesses. No more. Now she put the hammer down, snorted at his wilder ideas, and when he got started with one of us present, would roll her eyes and say, “Wally, don’t. Just don’t.”