Posted on 07/13/2002 5:47:16 PM PDT by Valin
In 'Lone Patriot,' Writer Jane Kramer Seeks To Understand a Militiaman's 'Loser' Gospel Of Guns, Isolationism and Rural White Anger
I recently met a man in Tucumcari, N.M., the owner of a respected small business and the unofficial town photographer, an animated fellow with a fondness for strangers and stories, who considered it common knowledge that a vast conspiracy of Latinos aims to set up a "brown" dictatorship that will stretch from the southernmost tip of Patagonia all the way north to — where else? —Tucumcari, N.M.!
One of the odder traits of conspiracy theorists is that despite their penchant for seeing big pictures, they often project their fears onto hometown screens. Such was the case with my Tucumcari acquaintance; such was the case with David Koresh, who believed that his compound in Waco, Texas, was to be the staging ground for the final battle between good and evil, and such was the case for John Pitner, a would-be inventor who believed that his home in rural Washington state would be the flashpoint for the next war of independence. In "Lone Patriot: The Short Career of an American Militiaman," New Yorker writer Jane Kramer chronicles Pitner's rise and fall. It's a fascinating portrait of an American type, and it's also a case study in the kind of liberal condescension that so enrages people like Pitner.
This is in no small part because Pitner can rightly claim that there'd be no story for Kramer to tell if he wasn't partly correct in his fears. After all, the United States government has often demonstrated a disturbing willingness to play along with the apocalyptic fantasies of the fringe — sending robot snipers to kill white supremacist Randy Weaver's family at Ruby Ridge because he'd sold a sawed-off shotgun (to a federal agent, who suggested the transaction), rolling tanks up to the door of the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, sending in an army to take on the Montana "Freemen," a small group of tax dodgers whose grand plan consisted mainly of avoiding other people.
In the case of Pitner, the U.S. government went a step further, actually helping to build the movement it then prosecuted him for leading. "The enemy took John Pitner, by subterfuge and surprise," Kramer begins, "on a hot midsummer Saturday [in 1996], when no one could really have been expected to stand and fight, and the result was that John lost his liberty before he had a chance to save America."
But by the time the FBI came for Pitner, he'd been mostly displaced as leader of his own militia by a younger, smarter, more charismatic man called Rock who had the added advantage of a regular supply of guns with which to impress and titillate Pitner's followers. Rock was so much more popular than Pitner that on the day the enemy came for Pitner, they found him at home mainly because he had nothing to do — no drills to run, semi-automatics to convert or crackpot playmates with whom to play war games. Rock had stolen all his fun. And the worst part, it turned out, was that Rock didn't even want to take on the New World Order; Rock was an undercover agent for the FBI.
But "Lone Patriot" isn't about Rock, or about FBI abuses of power; it's about Pitner. Kramer, the author of some of the most nuanced and intelligent books of literary non-fiction of the past two decades, approaches her story with too much compassion for lonely Pitner, and too fine a sense of how to present a character, for her book to be dismissed as a caricature. It's probably closer to parable — and as such, it's a story that tells us as much about the world of its author as that of its subject. Since readers of the book will generally fall into the former — sophisticated, urban or suburban, affluent, "concerned" — it's Kramer's myopia that possibly ought to concern us more than her militiaman's.
She began her investigation because, she writes, after years of reporting on resurgent nationalism in Europe, nothing had prepared her for the intensity of hatred that lit the fuse in Oklahoma City. Perhaps nothing could have — both the levels of all-inclusive resentment and the practical resourcefulness required for such an operation are, "Lone Patriot" implicitly suggests, generally lacking in what adherents call the "patriot movement." Like the hero of one of Kramer's early books, "The Last Cowboy," Pitner and his friends haven't so much misunderstood the American dream as they have imbibed too much of it; drunk on a toxic mix of rugged individualism, honor and mythic ideals, they spend more time talking about their guns than firing them.
Pitner understood this better than most. He "had a shrewd sense of what he was offering the losers and loonies of Whatcom County," Kramer writes. "He understood that the reason a few of his men weren't out on the highway, shooting, was that they've got a place to call now, to talk out, to come to meetings."
Pitner also had a keen sense of what he was offering Kramer. "You don't have to be a rocket scientist," he told her at one point, "or a really talented chopper and whopper in the news room to put together footage to make someone look dangerous." And yet Pitner puts himself in her hands, consciously making a monkey of himself for a member of the Eastern elite — Kramer really is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations — in exchange for a platform from which to preach his gospel of guns and isolationism. He's not afraid to look dangerous because he believes we live in dangerous times. Only, Kramer doesn't make him look dangerous. She presents him not as American gothic, but American absurd.
Not that Pitner, who claims that David Rockefeller can't sleep at night for worrying about John Pitner of Whatcom County, needed much help. But in treating Pitner as just another loser (a term Kramer resorts to several times), albeit an eccentric one, she dismisses the core of his grievances — the deep frustration of the rural poor, men and women who find their local economies bypassed by multinational corporations, their voices ignored even by the conservative politicians who claim them as a base, their lives reduced to the stuff of nostalgia marketing at chain outlets such as Cracker Barrel.
To which many of us say, "Tough luck. You brought it on yourselves by going on about new world orders and Jewish bankers." And yet, one of the surprises of "Lone Patriot" is how small a role the bigotries with which urban sophisticates explain away the militia movement actually play in the brewing of its anger. Yes, there are racists and antisemites among Pitner's followers, but their concerns seem to be their own, rather than core principles of the broader movement. Pitner himself believes that Jews control much of the media, but he doesn't have much to say about it one way or the other. One of his lieutenants tries to ostracize a militia member because of his antisemitism, and many militiamen imagine that when the big showdown with the federal government comes, their all-white rural armies will join forces with Jewish "patriots" and black militants as angry as they are at a government they think cares more for international corporations than people.
And yet, just as white "moderates" paper over the brutal consequences of their own de facto racism with denunciations of Louis Farrakhan's antisemitism, urban America dismisses the anger of the white rural poor by pigeon-holing them as antisemites and Klansmen or, at best, slotting them into folk archetypes suitable for newspaper profiles — i.e., the last man in town who can whittle worth a damn.
Too few in number to riot and with no neighborhoods to burn, would-be revolutionaries such as Pitner turn to other expressions of anger — the low boil of conspiracy-mongering and gun-collecting. Ill-equipped by poverty, isolation and poor education to grasp — in either sense of the word — real power, they unconsciously take their cues from groups such as the Black Panthers, reveling in their self-delusional creation of superman warriors ready to wrestle with the federal government.
All too often, the government accepts the challenge — sending in assassins to kill Black Panthers and men in black to burn Branch Davidians. Lowbrow media wallows in the wake of such clashes, screeching about the horror, ignoring the causes; the highbrow Kramer offers Freudian explanations for political rage — at least two of Pitner's followers are convicted child molesters, she reports — and proceeds to explain that what Pitner's daughter refers to as a "burgundy" theme at her wedding is actually red. These people, she might as well say, can't even be counted on to get one color right, much less the red, white and blue.
Kramer occasionally muses on how such ignorance came to be. Pitner, she reveals, grew up in a strange parallel universe of "working-class children, kicking aside the rules in small, poor, punishing towns." When thinking about Pitner's past, she writes, she had to "remind" herself that here was actually a person for whom the Columbia sit-ins of 1968 or the Paris barricades had not been significant events. Imagine. Such a man probably doesn't even know about Latin America's plans for Tucumcari.
Near the end of "Lone Patriot," Kramer finds herself adrift in the petty bureaucracy of Whatcom County. Small-town officials fail to return her calls, and the local district attorney seems unimpressed by her credentials. "It would have been a lot easier for me to make an appointment with the president, in the other Washington, than it was to get past the door of some of the public servants in the Washington I was in now," she writes. "I seemed to have wandered deep into Hofstadter country," she concludes, referring to the late historian Richard Hofstadter's theory of the "paranoid style" of American culture. Then again, she muses, the yokels' failure to cooperate in her dissection of anti-government activists might just as easily be explained by provincialism.
Provincialism indeed. Even writers from the big city sometimes miss the big picture.
Jeff Sharlet is co-editor of www.KillingTheBuddha.com, a weekly magazine of religion, culture and politics, and a co-author of the forthcoming book, "Killing the Buddha: A Heretic's Bible" (Free Press).
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