AN EQUAL AND OPPOSITE DARKNESS

By LANCE MORROW

The first eye is the amateur's video camera. it has the milling people in shorts and T shirts, the hot Atlanta night, then--blast and blast wave (no video hallucination, you can feel it), heads in unison dip-duck-flinching, abruptly frozen time (an instant that seems terribly long), until at last the crowd's comprehension comes to a scurrying critical mass, and then--the surge just short of panic (young mother and father each crouching-hurrying to push a child's stroller away from the violent whatever-it-was); and, crisscrossing the screen, center to right, a young man with an inappropriate smile and turned-around baseball cap, his smile expressing, perhaps, a kind of macho embarrassment.

Thus the concussion passes through the medium of media. The accidental video's evil instant becomes a sudden, globally repeated icon, replayed insistently until it erases the 1996 Olympics' prior signature of celebration and courage, the image of a young gymnast performing through her pain. In a split second, the story changes utterly, and so, for the moment at least, does the moral of the story. That's what bombs are for--to redirect the story line, or obliterate its earlier meaning.

The Atlanta bomb was not Munich 1972, which was Black September's awful masterpiece. By comparison, Atlanta was amateur night. But Atlanta came in the immediate aftermath of TWA Flight 800, and close enough in history to Oklahoma City, to leave in Americans' minds a conviction, developing like a Polaroid picture, that their nation is somehow in the process of losing whatever may be left of its old immunity. For a long time, Americans have nervously congratulated themselves that terror was an evil native to other lands. The complacent thought picked up, almost unconsciously, on the founding American premise of a new world divinely sponsored, a sort of immaculate conception.

It is not a risk-free world, Bill Clinton said after the Atlanta bomb. It has certainly never been a risk-free country. Risk, in fact, is supposed to be the official American game. The American story has always been able to accommodate the irreconcilable narrative lines of 1) considerable American violence and 2) the virtuous American exemption from terror and such "foreign" evils.

But the medium of the media is a global saturation and does not grant moral exemptions. The Atlanta bomb has now caused the electronic atmosphere to buzz in the mind in an unpleasant way. The gaudily hyped Olympics were suddenly overcome by their media countershadow--so that the brightness now trails an equal and opposite darkness. Is it that terror and the media were implicated in some interconnected, overcommercialized Heisenberg effect? Did the media focus on the Games invite a terrorist to fasten his fatal attention where the lights were brightest? Perhaps. (On the other hand, the Ku Klux Klan in Georgia and elsewhere carried on its terror with no lights or cameras on hand. The Klan never heard of Werner Heisenberg.)

Media hype is ahistorical. Intimate electronic magnification causes the present vividness and trauma to override memory and the rational sense of historical proportion. We have all lived with the media effect for a long time and have made our inner adjustments to it. The trouble is that the left brain reads and the right brain watches television. The TV-watching eye takes in the explosion in Atlanta and the fireball over the ocean and the crater in Oklahoma City, and relays the shocking images to the center of the brain, which by reflex extrapolates a world menaced by terrorists at every intersection.

But the side of the brain that reads and remembers thinks back a bit, to the '70s, say, and recalls not only Munich but also a procession of equally bloody terrorist horrors--airliners hijacked to the desert or to Entebbe, airports blown apart by bombs in Tel Aviv and Rome, the Red Brigades and the Baader-Meinhof gang and all their telegenic stunts. These spectacles occurred outside the U.S., of course. On the other hand, in April 1968, after Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, it looked as if every city in America was on fire. So much for immunities.

It is likely that when right brain and left brain consult with each other and add up the damage, they find that the sum of human terrorism--even of evil--remains eerily constant.