re: #288 Political Atheist

Many are thinking of the Branch Davidian raid what with this big operation going on. I don’t think it’s going to get anything like the Davidian raid.

As is usual for me, I’m going to ramble haphazardly. Feel free to ignore.

I was living in Waco when the Branch Davidian thing went down. The documentary, “Waco: The Rules of Engagement” comes to some conspiracy theory-ish conclusions that I don’t know if I buy entirely, but the parts of the film that deal with the sudden clamor of media activity in the days leading up to the initial raid by ATF absolutely match my memories of what was going on at the time. The Waco Tribune-Herald ran a multi-part, front-page “expos” about David Koresh out of nowhere that just oh-so-very coincidentally reached its panic-inducing conclusion in the issue printed the day of the raid. It is a fact that the Branch Davidians were alerted to the impending raid by virtue of the fact that TV news trucks arrived at the compound well ahead of the ATF.

Another point made by the documentary that I know to be true from personal experience is that David Koresh and other “top members” of the Branch Davidians were by no means reclusive. They didn’t stay barricaded 24/7 in Mount Carmel. David Koresh was a frequent customer of a couple of music stores in Waco, and I saw him trying out guitars on more than one occasion. The existence of the Mount Carmel compound was not a secret, and it is true that if the feds had wanted to arrest David Koresh without incident, there were common opportunities to pick him up in any one of the many places he frequented in Waco.

I was also heavily into computer bulletin board systems at the time, and there were quite a few in Waco. I got ahold of a list of local BBSs and tried them all out. It was common for certain sysops to require “voice verification”, which basically meant that you would apply for an account, then they would call you up just to briefly chat and get you to confirm that you really were who you claimed to be, and to tell you about the rules of the BBS, etc. A 5-minute conversation at most, usually. Well, one of the BBSs at the time was one called “Brazos de Dios”. It was run by Wayne Martin, one of the “top members” of the cult. I didn’t know any of that at the time. Wayne called me up and told me that the BBS was mainly “church-oriented”, and gave me access. I logged in one time, looked around, and found that there was nothing there that appealed to me. I didn’t look very deeply at it, but it just seemed like boring religious stuff. It certainly was not crazy doomsday hellfire, at least not on the surface. Compared to the Heaven’s Gate website, for instance, it was downright mundane.

When the raid turned into a standoff, the media circus got worse. Alex Friggin Jones was starting to make a name for himself, and he came up from Austin to be Alex Jones as near to the site as he was allowed. There were merchandise vendors who printed T-shirts, buttons, bumper stickers, and the like. I bought a t-shirt, and still have it. There were many designs. For historical purposes, I wish I had bought more stuff.

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International press came. One of my friends spoke to a man from the BBC who was very obviously trying to frame the story in terms of Waco being a “one-horse town where the horse has died,” and that the town was so overflowing with religious fundamentalists that these sort of apocalyptic doomsday cults are a feature, not a bug. Now, I’m not a big fan of Waco for a lot of reasons, but that is an absurd exaggeration.

One of the things that supposedly led to the raid was that a UPS driver reported that a package had “broken open” revealing firearms, inert grenade casings, and black powder. Two things: First, all of those items were legal to possess, buy, and ship at the time. Second, although I did not know her or her family at the time, the UPS driver in question was the uncle of the woman I married several years later. I came to know him pretty well, and I can attest that he is a nutter. He’s a lot like “Dale Gribble” from King of the Hill. No conspiracy theory is too crazy for him. His wife was a nut, too, frequently falsely claiming to have various cancers and other severe diseases which of course no doctor would ever agree with because they were all out to get her or something. At any rate, there may very well have been such a package, and it may very well have “broken open”, but honestly if that guy told me that three comes between two and four, I’d feel like I needed to verify it independently.

Another thing is that, although I highly doubt that the conclusion to the Branch Davidian standoff was the conclusion they’d hoped for, both the ATF and FBI could not have fucked up the situation more thoroughly than they did even if they had deployed a computer-assisted, liquid nitrogen-cooled, industrial-grade Situation Up-Fucking Device. If you listen to the tapes of the conversations between the Branch Davidians and the FBI negotiator, it’s hard not to come to the conclusion that any random person off the street could have done a better job of talking them down. They goaded the Branch Davidians, famously employing so-called “psychological warfare” including playing weird noises over loudspeakers for days on end. If you *wanted* to keep a standoff tense and hostile, you could not have done a better job than was done by the Feds at Waco.

I admit I haven’t followed the “Bundy Ranch” thing very closely, but from what I’ve seen it doesn’t seem even remotely similar to Waco.