There is no more moving memorial in America than the one that they built on the place on North Harvey Street in Oklahoma City where the Murrah Federal Building used to be. There is a reflecting pool between two large arches — the time, 9:01 A.M., is carved into one of them, and 9:03 A.M. is carved into the other. The lost minute is represented by the reflecting pool and by the long lines of lonely, empty chairs, all on crystal bases, each representing one of the American citizens killed in the bloodiest act of insurrection since the Army of Northern Virginia hung 'em up.

In the accompanying museum, there is a remarkable exhibit — an audiotape of a mundane governmental hearing that was going on not far from the Murrah Building when Timothy McVeigh's bomb went off. Some poor guy is asking for permission to drill for designer water on his land. You can almost hear everyone on the tape yawning. The mundane business of self-government is grinding along. And then there's a tearing in the universe and somebody's screaming for a flashlight.

Outside again, the lonely chairs are reflected in the pool and one truth hangs there between the arches: This is what we can do to each other.

This moment should have been transformational. This should have been a moment of diamond-tipped truth. This is part of who we are. This is a part of our politics. This is something to look at, honestly, and admit to ourselves that, pushed by our own dread and anger, whether or not they are skillfully stoked by demagoguery or not, this is what we can do to each other. This is what we will do to each other.

And the most remarkable thing about what happened in Oklahoma City is how little it matters today. The president of the United States gave a fine speech Wednesday night in Tucson at the memorial for the people Jared Loughner shot. The only mention of Oklahoma City in connection with the president's speech was to compare it with the speech that another Democratic president had given in the aftermath of the memorial service for the 168 people that Timothy McVeigh murdered in 1995.

People mostly remembered that Bill Clinton once had made a passing mention of what he called "the purveyors of hatred and division... the promoters of paranoia" on the airwaves. (At the actual memorial service, Clinton quoted Scripture and talked about healing.) This time, many people struck pre-emptively; Rush Limbaugh may be self-medicating his wounded ego for the rest of his life over what he imagines Clinton said about him. There was a lot of what was called "defensiveness" on the activist Right, but it was nothing of the sort. They were on offense, just the way they have been since they took that heat in 1995. They abide by the order Stalin gave to the Red Army when the Germans invaded in 1942: Ni shagu nazad.

Not a step back.

The activist Right wants this rhetoric for 2012. It wants the same dark energies that helped it win the House last fall. It wants to be able to say the same things with impunity that it's been saying since 2009, as though Tucson never happened. Oklahoma City might as well have happened to the Hittites.

Which is how nothing ever changed. Which is why Oklahoma City wasn't enough.

One-hundred and sixty-eight people.

One-hundred and sixty-eight lonely, empty chairs.

It wasn't enough.

The political culture is not what it was in 1996. It's worse. The wild-assed, Clinton-centric conspiracies — death lists! Vince Foster! Mena airport! — look positively quaint compared to the grand paranoid delusions spouted on television and on radio these days. And the casual mainstreaming of vicious mendacity isn't the property talk radio alone; we have just seen installed a Congress full of thunderous loons. Against all odds — and, arguably, against all decency — what Bill Clinton so carefully criticized has degenerated into a time in which the governors of major states talk glibly about secession, and automatic weapons are casual accessories at political rallies.

One-hundred and sixty-eight people.

That wasn't enough.

(Perhaps the crowning irony is the fact that, of all the repercussions from the Oklahoma City bombing, the most lasting is probably those provisions of Clinton's own 1996 antiterrorism act that were strengthened and codified five years later into what became the constitutional nightmare that is the USA PATRIOT Act.)

So you'll forgive us if we're not impressed by the conspicuous public introspection of Roger Ailes. Why wasn't Oklahoma City enough? Why have there been sixteen years of lucrative invective since then? And you'll forgive us if we are a little dubious about Sarah Palin's contrition, and the maundering of Peggy Noonan, and the generally sanctimonious flummery that passes for comment on this latest outbreak of American political violence.

Oklahoma City happened. The carnival rolled on. It got wilder. It got nuttier. Ideas so long abandoned and destructive that they seemed like primal superstitions from a barbarian age now were shined up for the cameras and presented as legitimate alternatives to the accumulated reason and intellectual progress of two centuries. The complicity in it got broader and deeper and nobody thought much about the empty chairs.

One-hundred and sixty-eight people.

By the reflecting pool, suspended there to represent a single bloody second, we suspect there are prayers offered these days for Gabrielle Giffords and the rest of Jared Loughner's victims. And they will be offered again, some day, for the victims of whatever comes next, because something will come next, and because the 168 souls lost in that place are not enough. That much murder was not enough and, may never be.

EARLIER: The Editors on Who Profits from the Madness of Jared Loughner >>

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