it's also heartening to read a dense, academic work that doesn't feel the need to shy away from speculation, anger, or faith.

I have several pages of this bookmarked for personal reference, including the chapter on UFO culture, along with the Paul Bennewitz story. There could be a great thesis here, but you have to find it in the wall of data and multiple theories. There was also his Gulf War Syndrome, and his increasingly disconnected and rootless life, seemingly driven by paranoia. Within a few years of Oswald's appearance on the public stage, a number of other equally frustrated and listless lone nuts emerged. After graduating high school, he enrolled in college, where he was remembered as a "strange, aloof and argumentative" fellow who "rarely talked to anybody.

In Aberration in the Heartland, Painting explores Cold War popular culture, all-American apocalyptic fervor, organized racism, contentious politics, militarism, warfare, conspiracy theories, bioethical controversies, mind control, the media's construction of villains and demons, and institutional secrecy and cover-ups. The only thing that was unfailingly consistent throughout, (and continued through 9/11, and beyond) was the ceaseless theme that the American government had right and might on its side, and those who opposed it were morally failed cowards who deserved no mercy. In 1978, the year following the publication of Snapping, Theodore "Ted" Kaczynski began targeting individuals in some way connected to modern technology through planting or mailing home-made bombs that, from 1978 until 1995, killed three people and injured twenty-three others.

It delves incredibly deep into not just the perpetrator, but to those who knew him in some fashion to varying degrees. A real shame that a person with this much access to real and important information about McVeigh and the role of security services in the bombing is instead more interested in UFOs, the X Files, Tracy Letts, and spurious insinuation. I had always had the opinion that he chose to do this evil nonsensical act of his own free will, an act which ultimately had no purpose to anyone, even himself.A deeply, deeply scary book but absolutely fascinating if you’re into parapolitics and the machinations of the covert state in America. i figured out some things about the nature of historian as concealer rather than revealer, but more importantly, things just got boring, and i eventually headed back home.