for 30 April 2001. Updated every WEEKDAY.

Tim Cavanaugh
Special Guest Editor

Terry Colon
Art Director

Heather Havrilesky
Senior Editor

Joey Anuff
Publisher

Hannah Arendt took a couple hundred pages to say, in "Eichmann in Jerusalem," what you said in a paragraph. Mr. McVeigh killed my father along with a lot of other people; so I've had the opportunity to tell a number of people in the media (print, because I know better than to do TV) that the guy just ain't the creature they're making him out to be. You may therefore take this as first-hand confirmation that the fiction is, in fact, willful.

Thanks and well-done.

Timothy McCarthy

I've been sitting here trying to figure out a good way to respond to "your comments about the guy who killed my father were really perceptive," and I have to admit that I've pretty much failed at finding a good way to do that. But thank you, of course, and I'm sorry that you lost your dad, and I'm sorry that you lost your dad in such an awful way.

The even-more-sad thing in the inflation of Tim McVeigh, I suspect, is that it's going to accelerate in the next couple of weeks, and lose whatever small anchor it has in reality altogether once he's dead. He'll be a martyr to the militia movement, and a shorthand symbol for the news media, and a figure rather than a person. And that seems to be pretty much what he wants out of the deal.

I read an op-ed piece a few days ago — I forget where - that argued that the best way to really punish the man would be to let him die slowly, in isolation and obscurity, and make him watch his balloon deflate for a few long tedious decades in the dark. You have a much-stronger claim to the right to say what's just punishment for him, obviously, but that makes a certain amount of sense. At the very least we could shut down the circus, but that's not going to happen.

Thanks again for your kind comments, and good luck to you, particularly over the next few weeks.

Ambrose Beers