Back in the halcyon
days of the Northwest militia movement in the mid-’90s, a curious
breed of man emerged from the moist backwoods and unemployment
lines of the disenfranchised West: the wannabe
Patriot.
In Whatcom County, Wash., the commander
in chief of the Washington State Militia, John Pitner, was
experiencing New World Order visions. The small militia group he
formed lasted roughly three years, until 1996, when the FBI crashed
the party and hauled Pitner off in handcuffs for “conspiracy to
make and possess destructive devices.” By the time the agents came
a-knocking, Pitner’s short-lived power had vanished among his own
group, which had grown impatient with his promise of a big battle
that never materialized.
Jane Kramer, a writer
for The New Yorker and a National Magazine Award
winner, writes in Lone Patriot that the unemployed Pitner
desperately wanted to be a bigshot in the hate hierarchy. She
deftly constructs a study of Pitner that reflects the motley,
dangerous contingent of Freemen, militias, con men, county
secessionists, skinheads, tax evaders and neo-Nazis (and the women
who loved them) that still populates the
West.
The conspiracy visions of Pitner’s
well-oiled imagination included a (now cliche) image of black
helicopters circling his yard, the notion that an evil band of
Jewish bankers took over the Federal Reserve, and the theory that
western Washington’s incessant rain was created by David
Rockefeller to “demoralize them so that they’d lose the will to
resist the New World Order.”
Perhaps the most
surprising indictment in Kramer’s book, however, is the one leveled
at mainstream folks in Whatcom County who ignored the militia
because of a hybrid mix of old Western Cowboy fence-respecting
culture, and an easy, nonconfrontational NPR-brand of “liberalness”
that tolerates aberrant behavior. Whatcom County is the home of
Bellingham and Western Washington State University, places that
take pride in what Kramer calls “the long view, assuming that
John’s moment would eventually pass, the way troubling moments
always passed in Whatcom County.”
This clash of
cultures should be read as a cautionary note for the entire West.
For “those people” are still out there and they have no plans to
leave. We’d better keep an eye on them.
Stephen J. Lyons
writes from the Midwest.
Copyright &2002 HCN and Stephen J.
Lyons
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline When good tax-evaders go bad.
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