This Noble Land (21 page)

From listening to their rhetoric I judge that many of their members believe that concessions to minorities have gone too far too fast, and that ordinary white men like themselves have been penalized by affirmative action. They believe that specific advantages given the minorities should be halted and that the general trend in that direction should be reversed.

Passionately they believe they have been organized to save the nation from revolution and expect to be called to arms in the foreseeable future. In religion they are often believers in the Book of Revelation and its turgid nonsense, but they do not take sides in any debate between Catholicism and Protestantism; a goodly number of their rabid members claim to be born-again right-wing Christians.

Listening to the preachings of the self-styled leaders of the militia movement I suspect that there is a high percentage of weirdos and semipsychopaths in the ranks, but I have also found no evidence that they actually preach overt rebellion and certainly they do not equate their violent speech with treason. They passionately believe that they are striving to save the United States from itself.

But law-abiding though they claim themselves to be, the heart of their movement is the gun. The forces that keep them cohesive are the military drills, the bivouacs in the open field and the simulated defeat of an imaginary enemy defined as the government itself.

They sponsor macho values to an almost ridiculous degree, and seem inherently either to fear women or to hold them in benign contempt. They are becoming a silent force in American life; once restricted to our western states, especially those beyond the Mississippi, they have in recent years established footholds in the South and East.

Do they do much harm? Do they pose a major threat to our social and political structure? I hope not. They are a minor social
aberration, which sees plots against them and their ideals in the most ordinary acts of government. One spokesman even views the move of our government to produce paper money that cannot be easily counterfeited as a plot to destroy our money system and wrest their savings from them. And all the groups preach that the government’s criminal behavior in wiping out the Branch Davidian cult at Waco, Texas, was a warning of what the militiamen might expect in the future. Waco is a rallying cry of the militia movement.

In politics the militias do not choose sides, but one supposes that 90 percent of the membership votes Republican and heartily endorses recent swings toward the center or even back to the extreme right. And these are people who
will
vote when they fear their interests are threatened.

When an old friend, whom I will call Bud Kelly, from Iowa soloed down to Texas in his private plane, he brought me a new interpretation of the militia movement. He was choleric about the dictatorial behavior of the air traffic control officials who had given him a bad time when he was in his approach. His face reddening, he growled: ‘No wonder people are flocking to the militia units. If I ran into one of the members right now, I’d join.’

‘Wait a minute, Bud!’ I protested. ‘Don’t talk nonsense. You’re a born-again Republican businessman, one of the most confirmed conservatives I know and a sensible observer of politics and business economics. You’re not the militia type.’

‘You miss the point, Jim. I’m just the type that’s been joining their movement, because my contacts with government are all sour. Two-bit tyrants tell me how to fly my plane. They tell me who I can hire in my office—so many of these, so many of those—and they intrude maliciously in every damned thing I want to do. I’m ready for the militia, because they talk sense.’

‘Maybe so, but you aren’t. Bud, you aren’t the type.’

‘That’s the point. I am. I’m the outraged citizen who feels the pressure of government, the tyranny, if you will, and I’m getting sick of it. The militia is the only way I can strike back.’

After a long evening exploring his rage, I concluded: ‘If a man like you can seriously consider volunteering for the militia, this nation is in trouble.’ And he replied: ‘Yes, we are. The oppression has to be stopped.’

But I hope people like Bud will come to realize that the way to stop what he calls the oppression is to work for government reform in a responsible way.

C
oincident with the growth of the militia movement, although not specifically related to it, has been the phenomenal explosion of radio talk shows. They have become today’s public forum, the New England town meeting of the past. They reach into all corners of the nation and are more addictive than nicotine. One would think that such public discussion would be beneficial, but instead of a legitimate airing of issues it is a macho, one-sided diatribe almost exclusively right-wing in orientation. Many are masterminded at the microphones by those who are not afraid to indulge in a virulence not heard before over the airwaves. The violence of their discourse and their lack of civility are part and parcel of their macho posturings, and it is not uncommon to hear what can only be interpreted as veiled invitations to murder the president. Character assassination is the daily stock-in-trade; by the very nature of the format, the victim has no recourse to any form of rebuttal.

During periods when I have been temporarily incapacitated, I have listened to many hours of talk radio and have been appalled at the flagrant attacks on decency and the unfounded accusations against our political leaders. At least 90 percent of those
practicing this new art form are strong right-wing advocates. Normal discourse is impossible, and the listener is seduced into believing that the entire drift of the nation is to the extreme right with an obligation to abolish the liberal legislation of the past decades.

Talk radio has been enormously effective in branding liberals as either addlepated do-gooders or downright subversives out to destroy the republic. Since there has been no powerful rejection of this charge against the liberals, there is a strong possibility that this skewed interpretation of legitimate liberalism will become the conventional wisdom of the future. How our nation has allowed and even applauded this sudden reversal of its long traditions bewilders me. It is not healthy for our society and, if allowed to fully take root, will lead to an American version of fascism.

Perhaps an agency with adequate funding could be established to report to the general public exactly what it is that talk radio is sponsoring and how it pollutes the air in which it reigns supreme at the moment. The most offensive statements, such as the following, could be identified and rebutted.

During the TV talk shows I viewed in my enforced idleness, I, like most of the uninitiated, was sickened by the parade of social deviates, malcontents and revolutionaries: two sisters sleeping with the same man, another man sleeping with both mother and daughter, and almost every other combination of sleeping arrangements. But I was frightened by the constant supply of hard revolutionaries like the skinheads, the white supremacists, the angry men who said they would fight to halt quota hiring for blacks, Hispanics and women, and the confused young men and women who could not identify a specific enemy but who lashed out against society in general. They displayed such an array of social dysfunction, and they were in such constant supply day after day, that I sometimes thought they represented a new nation in which I was a stranger.

What surprised me about this collection of society’s avowed enemies was that no matter how preposterous their accusations against the government or traditional society, and no matter how violent the remedies they envisioned, whatever they said tended to bring enthusiastic applause from a large portion of the audience. It is possible that this viewer applause is nothing more than a cathartic release from the tedium of a humdrum life, but more likely it represents support for the insane ideas being promulgated.

After one ugly morning when skinheads vilified Jews, liberals and women to loud applause I thought: This is frightening. If
a viewer is already on the border of deviate or destructive behavior he could be lured over the edge by such a constant reinforcement of his suspicions. I am convinced that these sick manifestations of despair can have dangerous repercussions. But when I voice my apprehensions to others, they tend to say that all the violent talk is harmless because it has little or no effect on the listener.

I fear such reasoning is comparable to the specious argument that children are not influenced by the onslaught of violence, mayhem and murder they see on television. If hearing a great symphony or seeing a fine play can have a positive, calming and constructive effect, watching a parade of brutality can certainly have a deleteriously negative effect. For its own self-defense, the federal government should monitor the worst of these brutal shows, but it obviously cannot because it would be accused of censorship.

One of the saddest consequences of our surrender to exaggerated macho exhibitionism has been the debasement of the American motion picture in which sheer brutality takes the place of orderly storytelling and reasonable character development. Again the roots of the violent movie reach back to our past. Almost from the first we had shoot-em-up westerns in which cowboys postured with guns, but soon the genre graduated to the enormously attractive films of John Wayne, who brought common sense and believable characters to his roles. Such films as
The Hunters
, which depicted Wayne and his sidekick tracking down the evil men who had stolen Wayne’s sister when she was a child, were compelling pictures, while
Stage Coach
is universally considered a classic.

But relatively soon the genre again degenerated into pure macho exhibitionism, and sensible patrons stayed home and played videos of past masterpieces in their living rooms. To see those excellent films with first-class actors and actresses filling
even minor roles can be a real treat.
Dinner at Eight
and
The Informer
are still wonderful to see, as are such past blockbusters as
Gone with the Wind
and
My Fair Lady.
We lose a wealth of great entertainment when we turn our movies over to mayhem and casual murders like the James Bond thrillers and Rambo epics. We could use in their place more movies like
The Grapes of Wrath
, which illuminate pages of our real history.

The motion picture industry must accept the fact that it can be equated with violence in sports, proliferation of handguns and vitriolic talk shows. It cannot escape its part of the blame for the ugly violence that is becoming so prevalent in America as a result of our glorification of the macho.

1. We must diminish the violence in college and professional sports.

2. Despite our national love affair with the gun, we must keep firearms out of our schools.

3. The FBI should be not only allowed but encouraged to infiltrate the militia groups and maintain watch on them. (I say this as a graduate of Swarthmore College, who is aware of what J. Edgar Hoover did to our college when he deemed it a hotbed of subversion.)

4. The excesses of talk radio should be muted, while preserving the First Amendment guarantees for free speech. But let us be mindful of Justice Holmes’s often cited judgment: ‘The most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man in falsely shouting fire in a theater and causing a panic.’

5. The morning and afternoon talk shows should be discouraged from providing the avowed enemies of society a platform on which to parade their hideous views and gain converts while doing so.

6. In the endless struggle for the soul of our nation, let us think more of Athens than of Sparta.

H
aving spent most of my life studying the arts and having devoted much of my income to their furtherance, I have acquired strong feelings about their place in a democracy. When I say ‘arts’ I speak of the entire spectrum of the field: from ceramics and dance in the ancient world, to the flowering of the visual arts during the Renaissance, to the wonderful world of music in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, to the glories of Impressionism at the close of the last century, to the explosion of new visual forms in the best work done by the New York School starting in the 1950s. I specifically include motion pictures and drama, opera and architecture.