Rush to Closure

Closure, the national buzzword of the week, is the panacea for all our ills. No sooner was Timothy McVeigh found guilty than it was universally declared that closure would arrive soon for the loved ones of his 168 victims. The verdict brings instant closure to some troubled American institutions, too: The F.B.I. proved that it could still get its man (even if it did bungle evidence), and the legal system proved that it could still work (R.I.P., Judge Ito). There's even closure for the press, which is already racing on to Paula Jones.

Closure truly is a balm for grief, and we can only hope that the mutilated families of Oklahoma City will find it. But if the rest of us are now lulled into complacency by a well-conducted trial's fair outcome, that's not closure -- it's amnesia. Timothy McVeigh didn't come from nowhere but was an exemplar, however extreme, of a diverse, violent right-wing fringe, ranging from neo-Nazis to gun-absolutists to Christian Identity white supremacists, that most journalists ignored prior to April 19, 1995. Now that his case is closed, will this terrorist netherworld be forgotten again? Though Mr. McVeigh may be going away, his political bedfellows and comrades in arms are not.

Yet unless a terrorist incident occurs in full view of a TV camera -- as in the still-unsolved bombing at the Olympics -- it no longer commands the national media. The mass carnage of the Oklahoma City bombing has so raised the bar of horror that other incidents are now ''minor.''

Not for their victims, however. Abraham Foxman of the Anti-Defamation League, which monitors militia activity, has noted ''a dramatic increase in militia-related crime'' over the past 18 months. Since Oklahoma City, two serious bombing plots involving militia cells in Oklahoma and Michigan were foiled in midstream by arrests; the targets included an ADL office in Houston and a Federal building in Battle Creek.

Abortion clinics have not escaped so easily. This year alone, bombings and arson have struck clinics from Portland, Ore., to Atlanta -- to name just the most violent of 14 recent incidents categorized as ''extreme'' by the National Abortion Federation. Remarking on how little attention is paid to these crimes, Gloria Feldt, Planned Parenthood's president, says: ''There seems to be an inability to recognize that this terrorism is terrorism. Isn't bombing a women's health center terrorism?''

If anything, Planned Parenthood's frustration right now is a replay of just three summers ago, when it held a press conference in New York to call attention to its self-defensive research into violent far-right activity threatening its members. Its lonely findings were all but ignored until Oklahoma City, at which point the Justice Department and journalists alike came running for valuable leads into militias and other terrorist groups that had turned up on Planned Parenthood's nationwide radar screen.

With the National Rifle Association no longer talking of ''jackbooted government thugs,'' even the above-ground political activity of the far right is now little noted. No one seems to know or care, for instance, that William Pierce, whose 1978 novel ''The Turner Diaries'' inspired Timothy McVeigh, spent last month promoting his neo-Nazi organization, the National Alliance, at conclaves starring David Duke in cities like Cleveland and Tampa. Or that Norman Olson, the Michigan militiaman examined by the Senate and Ted Koppel two years ago, this week unveiled new (and on the Internet, widespread) Waco-driven logic pronouncing the McVeigh verdict proof of government ''culpability'' in Oklahoma City.

The journalist Frederick Clarkson, whose new book, ''Eternal Hostility,'' is an up-to-date guide to our rightist factions, points out that it's ''an authentic crisis of democracy when people seek to blame the Government'' for all ills and forsake the ballot box as a means of change. Chip Berlet, another longtime analyst of the far right, speculates that ''perhaps as many as five million'' Americans adhere to the most enraged varieties of right-wing populism and are part of ''the recruitment pool'' for ''neo-Nazi demagogues'' waiting ''to exploit and channel unresolved anger toward bloodshed and terror.''

Thank goodness for closure. None of this is our problem anymore.