ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1995, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, December 31, 1995 TAG: 9601020004
SECTION: HORIZON PAGE: F-6 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: DAVID FOSTER ASSOCIATED PRESS
From O.J. Simpson to Timothy McVeigh, Yitzhak Rabin to Colin Powell, 1995 yielded a bountiful crop of villains and heroes.
Too bad we couldn't always agree which ones were which.
The saints and scoundrels who populated some of the year's top stories reflected a world at odds with itself. Simpson's murder trial laid bare a racial divide we like to pretend doesn't exist. The Oklahoma City bombing enlivened angry extremists who saw big government as the real villain. Israeli leader Rabin, having survived decades of war with Israel's neighbors, was slain by a fellow Jew.
Thank goodness not all the headlines were so complicated.
Consider Air Force pilot Scott O'Grady, an old-fashioned hero who might just as well have stepped out of one of those faded photos we dusted off for 50-year remembrances of World War II.
Shot down in June over the deadly woods of Bosnia, O'Grady survived for six days on rainwater, bugs and faith in God until Marines came to his rescue. It was a tale of courage anyone could understand, one of the few things we did understand about war-splintered Bosnia.
Back home, we celebrated other straightforward heroes.
On a ballfield in Baltimore, Orioles shortstop Cal Ripken showed us the virtue of dependability, playing his 2,131st consecutive game to surpass Lou Gehrig as baseball's most durable player. Balloonist Steve Fossett proved adventure is not dead, making the first solo crossing of the Pacific. Astronaut Norman Thagard took the space program to new lengths, if not heights, setting a U.S. endurance record with 115 days in orbit.
We had our undiluted villains, too.
Susan Smith, the South Carolina mother who strapped her young sons into her car and rolled it into a lake, was sentenced to life in prison. She got off easy. One poll showed 63 percent of Americans thought she should have been executed.
The Unabomber added blackmail to his deadly resume, getting his anti-technology manifesto published in The Washington Post by promising to forgo more violence if it was. He's still out there, unknown, unpredictable.
Colin Ferguson, the gunman who killed six people and wounded 19 others on the Long Island Railroad, got life behind bars, but only after he'd turned the courtroom into a circus, acting as his own attorney and haranguing victims during cross-examination.
Speaking of courtroom circuses - yes, you guessed it - the O.J. Simpson murder trial was a daily banquet of heroes and villains, though which title each character deserved was as debatable as the verdict itself.
Judge Lance Ito: Was he a model of jurisprudence for keeping the trial of the century from disintegrating under the excesses of grandstanding attorneys? Or a weak-gaveled fop for letting things drag on?
Jurors: Angels for treading through nine months of trial? Or fools who rushed to judgment after deliberating less than four hours?
Mark Fuhrman: The cool, competent detective we saw in the trial's early days? Or the lying racist portrayed at the end?
Finally, Orenthal James himself:
Was he the ultimate villain, manipulating the legal process with his celebrity and wealth to walk away from charges he slashed ex-wife Nicole Brown Simpson and her friend Ron Goldman? Or was he a victim, too - and ultimately a hero for beating a system stacked against the black man?
Forget bloody gloves and the barking Akita. How we viewed O.J.'s acquittal had more to do with our skin color. Blacks cheered. Whites jeered. A CBS News poll after the verdict found that 78 percent of blacks, but only 17 percent of whites, thought Simpson probably was innocent.
``We appear to have the evidence viewed through two different prisms. A black prism, if you will, and a white prism, and we came to very divergent opinions,'' said Bill Hodgman, part of the prosecution team.
The same prisms diverged on Louis Farrakhan - a holy man, a champion of the dispossessed, leader of a million-man statement of solidarity? Or an untrustworthy bigot?
By contrast, few Americans disputed Timothy McVeigh's standing as pariah of the year. The crowd booed and shouted ``Baby killer!'' as he was led from jail after the April 19 bombing that killed 168 men, women and children in Oklahoma City.
``He wouldn't get a fair trial here,'' Oklahoma City resident Cindy Skinner said tearfully at the time. ``I don't know where he would.''
That chapter must wait for 1996, when McVeigh and alleged accomplice Terry Nichols face trial.
In the meantime, the bombing opened doors for an angry fringe of militia groups, tax protesters and self-proclaimed ``patriots'' who shared McVeigh's hatred for the federal government.
Such malcontents have been around for decades, scarcely able to find an audience for their mutterings about unmarked helicopters and U.N. conspiracies to invade America.
After the bombing, they were daily fixtures in the news, unperturbed that the coverage was uniformly negative. The day after CBS News aired a piece slamming militias, one militia group received 400 calls for information.
All the attention fed an anti-federal mood already in the air. Through summer and fall, Republican-led congressional hearings revisited FBI sieges at Waco, Texas, and Ruby Ridge, Idaho.
This time, the government was on trial.
``The American people have the right to expect better,'' one former FBI official said of federal agents' bloody 1993 standoff with David Koresh and his followers in Waco.
Ruby Ridge's Randy Weaver, once portrayed as a white separatist who trafficked in illegal weapons, got a new image as a martyr who lost his wife and son to trigger-happy FBI agents. He also got a $3.1 million settlement from the government.
America was not the only country to lose its way between dissent and disaster.
In Japan, members of a religious cult admitted to unleashing a poison gas on the Tokyo subway, killing 12 and sickening 5,500.
Israel mourned the loss of Yitzhak Rabin: prime minister, Nobel Peace Prize winner, and cunning soldier who turned his genius to peacemaking in recent years.
Rabin, 73, was a hero to the 100,000 who gathered for a Nov. 4 peace rally in Kings Of Israel Square. But to Yigal Amir, a religious ultranationalist, Rabin had betrayed Israel by working toward peace with the Palestinians.
At the rally, Rabin joined happily in a song of peace. Minutes later, as he walked toward his car, he was shot three times by Amir.
``The world has lost one of its greatest men,'' President Bill Clinton said. ``Because words cannot express my true feelings, let me just say shalom, haver - goodbye, friend.''
We said goodbye to other stars among us. Mickey Mantle left the ballpark, dead of cancer at 63. Jerry Garcia ended his long, strange trip at 53, signaling tie-dyed Grateful Dead fans that the '60s finally were over. We barely knew Selena, the rising Tejano music star shot dead at 23 by the president of her fan club.
But we said hello, again, to Monica Seles, who returned to pro tennis two years after being stabbed by a crazed fan. The Beatles were back. And Michael Jordan ended his fling with baseball, rejoining the Chicago Bulls to soar the lower atmosphere between floorboards and hoop.
The newly Republican Congress rode into 1995 on a white steed, trumpeting its Contract With America. Some of us looked for heroes there, thinking this time politics would be different.
It wasn't, much. By November, when stalled budget talks shut down federal offices, polls suggested most Americans thought Congress was actually making President Clinton look good - a feat he had seldom managed himself.
House Speaker Newt Gingrich lost his shine, sinking in the polls as he whined about getting a bad seat on Air Force One.
Other political figures fell even further.
A sexual harassment scandal forced Oregon Sen. Bob Packwood to resign, putting his seat up for grabs. (``There's a switch,'' Jay Leno quipped). Illinois Rep. Mel Reynolds went to prison for having sex with an underage campaign worker and obstructing justice. The husband of Rep. Enid Waldholtz went on the lam, leaving the Utah Republican with a 10-week-old baby and an office full of federal investigators asking about her campaign finances.
It was a year in which even politicians found politics tiresome. Twelve U.S. senators - eight Democrats and four Republicans - announced they would retire next year, the greatest turnover since 1896.
``We live in a time when, on a basic level, politics is broken,'' said exiting Sen. Bill Bradley, D-N.J.
Yet we kept on hoping for heroes. How else to explain the Powell phenomenon?
As a pack of Republican presidential hopefuls started circling each other, we paid little heed, crowding instead into bookstores for an autographed copy of ``My American Journey,'' by retired Gen. Colin Powell.
To many, he seemed a voice of moderation in a polarized nation, a natural leader with a Democrat's compassion and a Republican's sense of justice, a black man who had succeeded in a white man's world.
The possibility that such a heroic figure might run for president was tantalizing. Yet ultimately Powell disappointed, saying he had no heart for the ``test of fire'' that is presidential politics.
Had he been reading Emerson? ``Every hero becomes a bore at last,'' the poet wrote, and in 1995, that went for villains, too. We valued our saints and sinners for our own moral instruction - but never for too long, hungrily chewing through one to the next.
We know there will be more. We'll create them if we must. And perhaps in 1996, we'll be able to tell them apart.
LENGTH: Long : 169 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: AP. 1. Israel mourns the death of Prime Minister Yitzakby CNBRabin, the victim of an assassination, in Jerusalem. 2. Timothy
McVeigh is the prime suspect in the bombing of the courthouse in
Oklahoma City. KEYWORDS: YEAR 1995