Its roots in our politics are deep and tangled.
"If
three years ago any person had told me that at this day, I should see
such a formidable rebellion against the laws & constitutions of our
own making as now appears I should have thought him a bedlamite—a fit subject for a mad house."
—George Washington to Henry Knox, on the subject of Shays Rebellion, February 3, 1787
You
have to give Captain Daniel Shays this: When he launched his armed
sedition against lawful authority, he at least was invited in. Overnight
on Saturday, in an obscure corner of the Oregon wilderness, and
contrary to the law, and in defiance of democratic authority, both
federal and local, another act of armed sedition was committed. It
seems to me that this ought to be a bigger story than, say, the belated
prosecution of Bill Cosby, or whatever most recently came out of the
mouth of the vulgar talking yam. In a small place in Oregon, the
essential compact of the United States of America has come apart.
The Bundy family of Nevada joined with hard-core militiamen Saturday to take over the headquarters of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge, vowing to occupy the remote federal outpost 30 miles southeast of Burns for years. The occupation came shortly after an estimated 300 marchers—militia and local citizens both—paraded through Burns to protest the prosecution of two Harney County ranchers, Dwight Hammond Jr. and Steven Hammond, who are to report to prison on Monday. Among the occupiers is Ammon Bundy, son of Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy, and two of his brothers. Militia members at the refuge claimed they had as many as 100 supporters with them. The refuge, federal property managed by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, was closed and unoccupied for the holiday weekend.
(This
is also something you have to give to Captain Daniel Shays. He put a
little more of his ass on the line. His act of armed sedition aimed a
little higher than the occupation of the vacant headquarters of a bird
sanctuary.)
Before
moving on to the larger issues, it's important to note that the local
authorities, and the local citizenry, want no part of this noisy claque of armed meatheads.
It is popular among these people who apparently have brains wired like
short-wave radios broadcasting from upper Michigan to say that the real
constitutional authority in this country resides in its local sheriffs.
Well, the local sheriff in this case would like it very much if this
particular invasive species would abandon his jurisdiction and go back
to freeloading on federal lands in Nevada.
Harney County Sheriff Dave Ward told people to stay away from the building as authorities work to defuse the situation, The Oregonian reported."A collective effort from multiple agencies is currently working on a solution. For the time being please stay away from that area. More information will be provided as it becomes available. Please maintain a peaceful and united front and allow us to work through this situation," Ward said in a statement.
Hell,
even the convicted arsonists on whose behalf this action allegedly was
undertaken have distanced themselves from these clowns.
The Hammonds said they have not welcomed the Bundy's help. "Neither Ammon Bundy nor anyone within his group/organization speak for the Hammond Family," the Hammonds' lawyer W. Alan Schroeder wrote to Sheriff David Ward.
This is an act of armed sedition against lawful authority. That is all that it is, and that is quite enough. This is not "an expression of anti-government sentiment." Flipping
off the governor as he drives by is "an expression of anti-government
sentiment." What Alex Jones does every day is "an expression of
anti-government sentiment," and god bless them all for it. That's what
the Founders had in mind. This is not an "occupation" following "a peaceful protest." That
would be all those folks who got bludgeoned and pepper-sprayed out of
Zuccotti Park a couple of years back. (And when exactly did ABC News
decide it wasn't a news organization anymore?) These are men with guns
who have declared themselves outside the law. These are men with guns
who have taken something that belongs to all of us. These are traitors
and thieves who got away with this dangerous nonsense once, and have
been encouraged to get away with it again, and they draw their
inspiration not solely from the wilder fringes of our politics,
either. Ammon Bundy and his brothers should have been thrown in jail
after they gathered themselves in rebellion the first time.
This
is another step down the road that leads to the broken shell of the
Murrah Building in Oklahoma City. There are respectable people in our
respectable politics who have been shamefully silent on the subject, and
there are respectable people in our respectable media who seem
terrified of calling this what it is. You want an example of the
deadening effect of "political correctness" in our politics? Watch what
the people running for president have to say about this episode. Look at
how it is being framed already—or ignored entirely—by the elite
political media. There is a constituency for armed rebellion in this
country that is larger than any of our respectable political and social
institutions want to admit. It is fueled by reckless, ambitious people
who engage in reckless, ambitious rhetoric.
It
did not begin in Burns. It did not begin on the Bundy Ranch, either. In
its most modern form, and in the form most relevant to recent events,
it began, as so many noxious elements of our politics did, with the
Reagan Administration. It began with a man named Ron Arnold,
and a Secretary of the Interior named James Watt, and in something
called the Wise Use movement with which the Republican party (and the
conservative movement that became its fundamental life force) allied
itself for its political advantage in the western part of the country.
Much of this popularity can be explained by the lingering economic recession of the early 1980s, which provided a receptive grassroots audience for the Wise Use claim that it is easier to force nature to adapt to current corporate policies than to encourage the growth of more environmentally sound ways of doing business. Wise Use pamphlets argue that extinction is a natural process; some species weren't meant to survive. The movement's signature public relations tactic is to frame complex environmental and economic issues in simple, scapegoating terms that benefit its corporate backers. In the movement's Pacific Northwest birthplace, Wise Users harp on a supposed battle for survival between spotted owls and the families of the men and women who make their livings harvesting and milling the old growth timber that is the owl's habitat. In preparation for President Clinton's forest summit in Portland, Oregon, Wise Use public relations experts ran seminars to teach loggers how to speak in sound bites. Messages such as "jobs versus owls" have been adapted to a variety of environmental issues and have helped spark an anti-green backlash that has defeated river protection efforts and threatens to open millions of acres of wilderness to resource extraction.
That
was the respectable—if undeniably destructive—part of the movement. Its
philosophy, however, was embraced by the growing militia movement in
the same part of the country. Its philosophy ran in poisoned tributaries
to all points of the political compass until it gathered itself into a
great reservoir of toxic fantasy, and that is where the essential
compact of the United States of America was encouraged to break down.
There
is no actual tyranny in this country against which to take up arms.
There is bureaucratic inertia. There is pigheaded bureaucracy. There
even is political chicanery. But there is no actual tyranny in the
Endangered Species Act, or in the Bureau of Land Management, or in the
Environmental Protection Agency, or in the Affordable Care Act, or in
IRS dumbassery, or even in whatever it is that the president plans to
say about guns in the next week or so. Anyone who argues that actual
tyranny exists is a dangerous charlatan who should be mocked from the
public square. Anyone who argues that there is out of political
ambition, or for their own personal profit, should be shunned by decent
people until they regain whatever moral compass they once had.
It
does us no good to ignore what is going on in this obscure little
corner of the Pacific Northwest. It does us no good to refuse to hold to
account the politics that led to this, and the politicians who sought
to profit from it. It does us no good to deny that there is a
substantial constituency for armed sedition in this country, and to deny
the necessity of delegitimizing that constituency in our politics, and
the first step in that process is to face it and to call it what it is.
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