Recently the small town of Jasper, Texas, was faced with a situation that might have been much worse than Drumcree. A history much more brutal and memories much more deeply scarred by injustice than anything that even Northern Ireland can muster had been animated by a vile hate crime.
On Huff Creek Road outside the town, three white men had dragged a black man, James Byrd, by the ankles behind their pick-up truck, scattering his blood, head, limbs and torso over a stretch of 2 1/2 miles. This gesture was not just a gruesome murder, it was a political statement, meant to stab at the rawest nerves of the black people who make up a large minority (as it happens, about 40 per cent) of the local population: slavery, lynching and racial contempt. If you want roads symbolic of murderous tribal malevolence, Huff Creek can stand up against Garvaghy any time. For a while, the gesture seemed likely to work. The Ku Klux Klan emerged from whatever cesspit it normally inhabits and declared its intention to stage a demonstration in Jasper. Having learned the rhetoric of contemporary media relations, of course, it said the demo would be held to "condemn the killing, not endorse it", and the klan succeeded in getting some self-appointed black militants to take the bait. A group calling itself the New Black Panther Party announced that it would arm the black population of Jasper with shotguns so that they could resist the klan.
Each of these groups deployed the kind of language that is all too familiar in Portadown. The klansmen painted themselves as martyrs to free expression, the oppressed victims of attempts to stifle their way of life. Its spokesmen insisted they were peace-loving people, who would only resort to violence if they were "met with violence". The panthers, equally hip to the groove of victimhood, said: "We want to say to the KKK that your days of intimidating, harassing and instigating violence against black people are all over." Their own guns, of course, were merely the instruments of peace, justice and equality.
So far, so familiar and, on the appointed day of the klan demonstration, the world's media descended on Jasper, Texas. They came from New York and New Orleans, from London, Tokyo and Paris. Everything was ready: a disgusting crime, a matching set of visceral hatreds, a racially mixed town in which to stage this great psychodrama and, above all, the all-seeing eye of the television cameras to record it all blow-by-blow. Violence was utterly inevitable.
Except that the people of Jasper, black and white, did an extraordinary thing. They left. Not in any concerted mass exodus, but quietly and as individuals. They simply found reasons to be elsewhere. The cameras were left with almost nothing to film. As David Grann reported from the scene for the New Republic, the journalists "swarmed from one side of the square to the other, searching for angry white men or black men or any men to film. "This is a joke," said a journalist holding a mike. "Where's all the fuckin' bloodshed?" When a lone klansman finally arrived with a young boy, carrying Confederate flags, an army of reporters surrounded him. "That's it," prodded one cameraman, "show us the tattoo . . . can you give us a side shot? Perfect . . . perfect."
The evening news programmes that night carried some of these shots. You could see the few dozen klansmen who eventually turned up, looking stupid in their white sheets. You could see a small phalanx of rifle-toting panthers shouting insults at them and pushing up against the riot police who separated the two groups with that telltale "let me at 'em/hold me back" gesture so typical of blusterers everywhere.
What you couldn't see were the real protagonists, the black and white people of Jasper who were supposed to be the fodder for this "inevitable" tribal confrontation and, because they weren't there, the story just fizzled out. The networks got a couple of minutes of usable footage of the klan and the panthers looking ridiculous. Then they all went home. End of story.
Never having been anywhere near Jasper, I don't know what gave its people the grace and dignity to know how much freedom ordinary people have in the midst of apparently inescapable situations, but one thing that must have helped was the fact that, after the murder of James Byrd, black and white political leaders and churchmen behaved with considerable dignity.
They found words to express their anger at the crime that had been committed without encouraging further violence. They treated the murder as a sacrilege that demanded a restitution of humanity, reason and mutual understanding.
Contrast this with, for instance, Ian Paisley's address to the Independent Orange Order last Monday, after the equally horrible murder of the Quinn children in Ballymoney. The boys, he said, had been "devilishly done to death" and they ought to be remembered by all "right-thinking people" celebrating the Twelfth. Fine. He then went on, however, to show that this act of barbarism had not affected his own rhetoric at all. He talked of Drumcree as a war, "a battle for civil and religious liberty and a battle which Ulster cannot afford to lose". What does he think people do in wars they can't afford to lose?
The great moral message that this man of God had drawn from the devilish murders was: I told you so. Even while associating them with Satan, he claimed the killings as a vindication of his own foresight. "We warned that [banning the march down the Garvaghy Road] would bring about chaos and violence. We warned that it would be the catalyst for creating an uncontrollable situation that would result in mayhem."
He did not quite have the courage to make explicit what is implicit in this rhetoric: that if there had not been chaos, violence and mayhem, he himself would have been proven wrong. Without some kind of horror, the Big Man would ap pear to be a false prophet. Does it never occur to him that some of his admirers would do their best to make sure this would not happen or that they might interpret their own actions as merely the inevitable outcome of the decision to ban the march?
The point is not that Paisley wanted those little boys to die. It is that he and too many like him on both sides of the divide are still addicted to a rhetoric of unavoidable consequences in which atrocities are automatic responses to somebody else's behaviour. It is always the fault of the situation, the system, history, "the root causes of the conflict", whatever; it is never the fault of those who claim to be able to predict the mayhem yet do nothing but pump in the rhetorical fuel.
Since it's all going to happen anyway, words are free of charge. There are no moral agents, no human beings trying to seize whatever amount of freedom they have and use it for the best. If the blacks of the American south, a people who really know the difference between freedom and slavery, were blessed with such leaders, we would now be reading all about the great Texas race war of 1998.
Fintan O'Toole is temporarily based in New York