The Militias Hit the Big Time

I'm told the O.J. Simpson trial might be over before fall semester. No, I don't believe that either.

Still, it makes you wonder. The prosecution is concluding this case. We might just see a verdict months before Court TV's sweeps week! What then are we as a nation, and the press (as a multi-million dollar entertainment industry) to do, without the Bloody Glove, the White Ford Bronco and Kato the House Guest? What are we to do, scanning our 57 channels, without the live broadcasts from CNN and Court TV, without the nightly updates on the networks, without Kato co-hosting the USA Network's "Up-All-Night?"

You might expect that once celebrity has quitted the courtroom, we could find solace in the lurid details of Susan Smith's infanticide. But no. A South Carolina judge has ruled that there will be no cameras in the courtroom, thus denying Americans from sea to shining sea the opportunity to relive those brutal moments straight from the alleged killer's tear-stained testimony (and all in convenient 30-second sound bites).

Well then, enter Terry Nichols and Timothy McVeigh. These two alleged terrorists have walked in just in time to busy the media while the lawyers search the hospitals for jurors who have awoken from their comas to hear O.J.'s retrial. But Nichols and McVeigh bring with them a strange part of the American landscape that has lingered and festered outside the spotlight. Their trial illuminates the dozen or so "citizen's militas," which may very well reveal something deeper about the American psyche than Al Cowling's 900-number or Fox's made-for-TV movie.

There is something disturbingly American about these irregular cadres who drill endlessly in preparation for Washington's attempt to suppress our liberty.

Mistrust of government is as American as July 4. Go down the Bill of Rights and you see protections enumerated to prevent the people's republic from degenerating into tyranny. You see a Constitution that divides its powers so that one would-be tyrant faces another in a competition that preserves the power of the electorate.

These militia members begin with America's innate suspicion of the government and take it to the level of the paranoid. Their nuttiness makes it difficult to take these guys seriously, fertilizer bombs and assault rifles notwithstanding.

Speaking before Congress, several of these militia members lined up to explain the threats that compel them to arm and prepare for the eventual confrontation with a government gone mad. Along with murdering innocent civilians (and Vince Foster), the federal government, reports one militia leader, operates diabolical machines to create tornadoes to "confuse" midwesterners. That sounds reasonable. It looks like these wackos have been to Oz and back.

It was the United States government, and not Japanese cultists, who murdered commuters in a Tokyo subway. And it was the Japanese government, of course, and not militia crazies, who blew up the Oklahoma City Federal Building in retaliation.

One might query why the United States is so interested in creating terror on the streets of Tokyo? While the militia members advance several theories, the truth is the answer is moot. You wouldn't ask Lucifer for a motive, would you?

Lest you suspect a shred of credibility behind this mental mentalite, let me reveal the real Satan behind the new world-conspiracy. Do you suspect the military-industrial complex? Or international Financiers? The Bolsheviks? Or is it the Jews?

Well, of course they all have a hand in it, but the black widow at the center of this web of conspiracy turns out to be the United Nations. Which U.N. are they talking about, you might ask? Is this the U.N. that turns and runs before Mohammed Aidid? Or is this the U.N. that stands by wringing its hands as the Bosnian Serb artillery launches rockets into the U.N. head-quarters?

Nietzsche asked that one judge a man by his enemies. What then are we to say about a group of people who picture Boutros Boutros-Ghali as the Antichrist?

The truth is very few members of the Michigan Militia, or most of the other armed cadres out there, pose a threat to the security of the U.S. These groups are generally made up of harmless weekend warriors who like to parade around in military gear, relive war memories and pretend that their weapons give them some real control of their lives.

The militias contain a virulent strain, however. And it is these few who take preemptive strikes against the imagined shadow government. It is these few who plant bombs that murder innocent children and innocent federal employees. And it is these few who really are the enemies of the people.

The militias and their terrorist strain share one thing with millions of Americans, and that is the insecurity of our times. Call it the economic insecurity of the post-industrial economy: the falling wages of those without college degrees and their search to find meaningful work in the information age. Or call it the ideological insecurity of the post Cold war era: the shades of gray that have covered a world that once appeared to be divided in two.

Large, impersonal forces have conspired to create real insecurity for large numbers of Americans. The McVeighs and the Nichols merely try to put faces behind the world-historical movements. When the whole becomes too big to see, some people create a twisted world that appears to make sense, as senseless as their world is to the rest of us. And to those fringes alienated in the Heartland, in small towns far from the powers in Washington and Wall Street, their world may become stranger and stranger.

The world is a big and strange place. For some people it is their connections to their family and to their friends that save them from the alienation that others must bear. And maybe for many others, the only way to keep one's wits is to retreat from the larger picture and enter a more comprehensible segment. Maybe that's what leads so many of us to look for a place where everybody knows your name, or lacking that, to Judge Ito's courtroom--where you're sure to know everybody's name even if you're not so sure what's in the Mystery Envelope.