< PREVIOUS ] [ 1996 Index ] [ Ed Quillen HOME ] [ SEARCH ] [ NEXT >
What's with Montana? At one end of the state, they just arrested the prime suspect in the Unabomber case -- a rural eccentric with a Harvard degree living in a cabin without electricity or plumbing.
On the other side of Montana, the FBI has the Freemen surrounded on their Justus Township, and is sensibly waiting them out, rather than revving up the tanks.
How long the FBI will be allowed to remain prudent is a
frightening question. Think of all the network crews up
there, costing thousands of dollars a day. Every morning,
they're shoving microphones into the boss agent's face,
asking When are you guys going to do something?
It won't be just the agent. The local US attorney, the attorney general in Washington, the President -- they'll all get pushed at every press conference.
The networks don't like spending big money to get bleak images of windswept prairie, which is about as telegenic as watching nails rust. Eventually, they'll push the FBI into taking action. How else can they justify the network investment in coverage of the Freemen standoff?
Such are the demands of modern media coverage, and when
the tragedy occurs because the FBI felt compelled to act
precipitously, the real culprits will escape without blame:
We don't make the news, we just report it.
Sure.
The real issue is bigger than Montana, which makes it big indeed. Look around the West and you find Aryan Nation crackpots in Idaho, militias in Arizona, muscular Christianity in Colorado Springs, white-supremacist survivalists encamped along gulches almost everywhere.
It would be easy to dismiss these as mere aberrations in
a rather empty landscape where live and let live
is
a pretty good operating philosophy.
However, there's more to the recent increase in hinterland extremist groups. They're a direct reflection of how the Rural West is promoted and marketed elsewhere. It means we attract a certain kind of people who are disposed to be racist and anti-social.
Look at ads for mountain property and you often see
phrases like 35 acres adjacent to national
forest.
What does that really say? 35 acres
means a
parcel big enough so that you don't have any real
neighbors. You can live quite isolated from any form of
society, never interacting with other people unless you
choose to. You won't need to learn to deal with the Korean
grocer, the Laotians upstairs or the felons across the
street.
Adjacent to national forest
means that the
federal government, prodded by lawsuits from environmental
groups, will insure that you never will have to put up
neighbors.
You'll have a more-or-less private preserve, and if anybody threatens it with logging (brings in unsavory blue-collar types), controlled burns (you have a right to clean air, and to hell with the health of the forest) or even a hiking trail (you have a right to privacy) -- you can go to court.
People who want that sort of life see the ads and decide
to migrate. The rural West is becoming what I once called
the easternmost gated suburb of Los Angeles
(that
observation got me quoted in the Wall Street Journal a
couple of years ago), and a respectable pundit has recently
recognized this phenomenon.
The respectable writer is Joel Kotkin, and his piece
Beyond White Flight
appeared in the March 28 edition
of the Washington Post National Weekly Edition. Kotkin
calls this the Valhalla syndrome
and characterizes
it as a yearning for a heavenly retreat, with the
promised reward of a simpler, less complex
existence.
Kotkin notes that some observers thought that as sophisticated New Yorkers and Californians migrated into the conservative interior, the hinterlands might develop a more centrist political posture.
But he correctly concludes that the interior West does not, in general, attract humane and liberal types as its population grows. Instead, the typical immigrant is more likely a moneyed bigot who wants to live in a rich, white rural enclave.
Kotkin is in error in one place, though. He says the
Valhallans are a cultural movement back to an earlier,
perhaps largely imagined past of small towns, safe streets,
clean air and common cultural values.
But if this area is any indication, the Valhallans don't
want to live in small towns. They want to live in no towns,
out on their 35-acre parcels. Those who do live in town
aren't interested in streets -- they relax on backyard
patios, not front porches where they might have to greet
people walking down the street, and if some kids go by on
skateboards, they're on the phone to the police dispatcher
with a report of suspected gang activity.
In short, the Valhallans are busy destroying what they supposedly want -- any sense of community.
At any rate, as long as the interior West is marketed as a land of 35-acre parcels for the militantly anti-social, then the Freemen, Aryan Nations, Militias and similar dingbat groups will continue to settle here and multiply. Advertising works, and that's what our real-estate industry is advertising for.
< PREVIOUS ] [ 1996 Index ] [ Ed Quillen HOME ] [ SEARCH ] [ NEXT >