by Adam Gopnik

About the author: Adam Gopnik is a journalist and contributor to the New Yorker magazine.

“Terror Strikes the Heartland,” read one headline, echoing a note widely sounded in the immediate aftermath of the Oklahoma City bombing. But, even before the revelation that this particular atrocity had been as homegrown as a bushel of wheat, the alibi of foreign infection already seemed evasive. For the heartland was in many ways where terror began. The practice of political terrorism has been refined in Europe and the Middle East, but its theory—the understanding that in an age of instant communications killing can be a kind of symbolic speech, a form of show business, engaged in for its publicity value—was pioneered by Americans.

Organic Americanism

It was out West, among the...