[.ca] Lone Patriot: The Short Career of an American Militiaman (ISBN 1400032326)

Only a glimpse of Whatcom militia movement...:
Publisher's Weekly review of this book is totally off base. The armed, anti-government movement in Whatcom County is not a bunch of rag-tag losers. While Kramer gives an accurate picture of this particular patriot, many of the fearful, gun-toting self-proclaimed patiots hold down jobs, vote, and sometimes run for public office. Local Whatcom residents know more outrageous examples of patriots' behavior than Kramer notes. Axes thrown through school officals' windows, pantomimes of hanging those who disagree with them, endless nuisance suits against elected officials- I can't begin to tell you the instances I know about. I know several of the people interviewed by Kramer, and I agree with the information they gave her. Kramer was quite snitty about Whatcom County. As is typical for 'New Yorker' writers, she is wittier than she is wise. Most of us do consider politics a social event. If we don't have anywhere to go on Saturday, we join another activist group. She laments that the residents ignore the patriot movement, but that isn't true. When militia meetings were held, we had a very effective way of dealing with it- many average people attended as observers which successfully shut down bizaare talk. They operate best in shadows. When they burned a cross in a migrant labor camp, we rallied, marched, and demanded our county council condemn them. Incidentally, at least one Whatcom County patriot is a Black man. He directed me to internet sites in order to convince me of the looming threat of the New World Order. He is by all other standards an intelligent, successful citizen. Kramer's book is an important insight into militia activity in Northwest Washington. But not all Whatcom County residents are crazy.

Interesting, but is it true ?:
What we have here is a journalistic report of a man who led a group of right-wing "Patriots" in the State of Washington for a period of several years. It was the self-styled Washington State Militia over which John Pitner presided in the early 1990's, and Jane Kramer gives us her impressions of his personality, his friends and family, and the larger circle of right-wing militants with which he was in touch. It is an important subject, especially in this period of terrorism on the left and the right. We know that there have been some home-grown right wingers who were involved in violence. But whether John Pitner was so involved remains moot. All we know is that he was convicted in a federal court of relatively minor weapons charges. Most of all, we don't know whether John Pitner is in any way representative of the really bad guys who probably are out there somewhere. Kramer does not claim that Pitner is representative, but if he is not, what exactly do we learn from this book ? Only that there was this fairly pathetic, ineffective resident of Whatcom county who got caught, and whose friends and associates promtly abandoned him. Do we learn anything at all about the movement of which he is said to be a part ? Kramer's prose suggests an all-knowing observer. But as she gives us the thoughts and something of an interior dialogue of her subject, she does not tell us how she knows what she says she knows about his mental life. And our confidence in her knowingness is not strengthened by her compulsive name-dropping. She refers to Max Weber, to Coleridge, to Durkheim, to Rousseau, to Clausewitz. Those of her readers who have also studied one or the other of these savants will not be impressed by these pretentious references. And neither does it inspire confidence in Kramer's research to see her confuse, several times, a federal circuit court of appeals with a federal district trial court.

Elitist meets militia group:
This book records the encounter between a representative of the militia "movement" living in Washington state and a genuine East Coast elitist (Vassar and Columbia graduate, New Yorker magazine writer and European correspondent, Council on Foreign Relations member). How nice that Jane Kramer could leave her regular beat in Paris and descend into darkest Whatcom County to record the strange ways of the mobile home denizens. Kramer was inspired to write this book after the Oklahoma City bombings, which shocked her. In searching for sources of this horrific event, Kramer made her way to Washington state (why didn't she go to Oklahoma?). After doing some research, Kramer finds John Pitner of the Washington State Militia who was charged by the FBI for "conspiracy to make and possess destructive devices." With his Armageddon rhetoric and hatred of the New World Order, Pitner comes across (with help from Kramer) as pathetic. As Kramer notes, groups like the Washington State Militia attract cranks and "losers" (Kramer's word), but isn't this what she expected to find? Hasn't there been something of a pack mentality when the press covers militia groups? The reader has to wonder just how much of a threat this and similar fringe groups are (isn't more violence caused by the war on drugs?) and if they really merit the hysteria and sometimes excessive methods of law enforcement this often generates. (For example, would the FBI have bothered to set up and confront Randy Weaver with overwhelming force if he had not belonged to a white supremacist group?). Kramer admits that the militia movement, which has more than its share of cranks and bigots, isn't just about racism. However she doesn't seem to get the reasons why low-income white men living in rural America would be unhappy with their government. Perhaps this is because in America most of the power and money is held by elites and the news is written by media elites like Kramer? Indeed, it is sad and telling that such a book has to be written by an American who seems to look at the US as though she were a foreigner. (A privileged foreigner, though. There's a funny moment when she fumes that it would be easier for her to interview the US president than the indifferent Whatcom County officials.) This book is a reminder that there is a similarity between the coverage of domestic fringe groups and Muslims. The press has a tendency to put an intense focus almost solely on racism or sexism and to lump people with grievances together whether they intend to do violence or not. Finally, there is a need to cast such groups as the "other" and let them be heard only through the conduit of the media. Kramer avoids doing some of these things, but, like almost all reporters, she can't empathize with Pitner and his militia men and their problems. This might help explain why there are fringe groups in the first place.

Did Jane Kramer's 7 year old daughter ghost write this book?:
What a terrible disappointment. Based on the reviews I was expecting something along the lines of James Corcoran's Masterful book about Gordon Kahl and the Posse' Comitatus: "Bitter Harvest"; but after reading this book I was dumbfounded by the rave reviews. Simply put this is one of the worst written books I have ever read. One can excuse the lack of material I guess, John Pitner's case wasn't a particularly noteworthy one comparatively speaking (charged with selling one automatic weapon and related conspiracy) so that may explain the ad nauseam and repetitious need to focus on Pitner and EVERYONE and ANYTHING associated with him: his friends, parents, neighbors, associates and their brothers, sisters, parents, etc etc.. in order to sustain this rambling narrative for over 250 pages. So it shouldn't be too terribly surprising that Kramer fails to develop much of anything that could be considered noteworthy about the Militia Movement itself. That having been said, it is difficult to excuse Jane Kramer's inexplicable ignorance of just about anything to do with basic journalism such as proper sentence and paragraph structure; as well as her lack of any sort of meaningful focus throughout this book. Chapters 'One' through 'Ten' are simply a single run-on screed jabbering about everyone who lives in Whatcom County WA and their related peculiarities, weight problems, living conditions etc. This chapter delineation itself should come as no surprise based on the book's other technical merit - Kramer's paragraph structure, for instance, seems to be dictated by some sort of tape measure run down the side of her manuscript with some pre-determined length (ten inches? twelve inches?) being the sole criteria for start and stop points. Kramer writes like someone who proudly overcame illiteracy at a very late age and embarked upon a career in journalism. Even her basic sentence structure is a travesty - this is a typical example: "John could legitimately claim to have been on leave from the militia since the end of May, and, whatever his involvement still was with the Seattle Freemen, it didn't take more than five minutes in his company to see that if he'd kept on introducing himself in public as the 'director of the Washington State Militia'-the way he had at his Seattle debate, a week before the arrest -it was vanity or even fantasy but 'not,' as he told the family,'my job description anymore." \osic\c. If this run-on sentence, peppered with random commas, hyphens and quotation marks makes any sense at all to you and is in any way compelling - this is definitely the book for you. Kramer notes in her forward that she spent several years writing this book; one would think she could have found at least an hour or two to run the manuscript past a qualified editor - or at the very least a Whatcom County Third Grade English Teacher who could have doubtlessly rendered it a substantially less embarrassing piece of work. Topically, the American Militia Movement is a perfectly valid focus for a book (although it seems as if the topic has been beaten to death at this point) but it is a shame when the sole criteria for rave reviews is the TOPIC of a book rather than any substantive or technical merit contained therein.

Bumbling "Patriots":
In the far northwest of our nation grew up a band of soldierly brethren who swore to take this country back to the basics for which it was founded. These soldiers were not the scary Nazis or the Klansmen who killed those they styled their enemies and who robbed and burgled for the good of their cause. They were not like the Unabomber, but were social beings united in a movement. They were also not like Timothy McVeigh, although McVeigh did have some dealings with them, for they never really got down to action. They were the Washington State Militia, part of a "movement that has come, grotesquely, to be called the Patriot movement," and they were armed for Armageddon. They were the Paul Reveres, ready to ride through the nation under attack by its enemies. They had explosives, they had camouflage, they had their beloved guns, they had God on their side, and they were rebels without a clue. If you enjoy laughing at the folly of others, _Lone Patriot: The Short Career of an American Militiaman_ (Pantheon) by Jane Kramer, will do nicely. It does, however, tell a darker tale. Kramer's main subject is John Pitner, a former ship-painter, unemployed, the self-described "founder, promoter, banker, quartermaster and commander in chief" of the militia. Kramer describes his beliefs and those of the militiamen around him in some detail. Pitner's mentor was John Trochmann, the leader of the Montana Militia. Trochmann, unlike most of the Patriots depicted here, made a good living from the movement. He sold hate literature and military supplies, and recruited men like Pitner to be the market for them. His credo, Christian Identity, "involved the conviction that God had made Negroes on the fifth day of His creation, along with the other beasts of the field, and not on the sixth day, when He made people." Pitner became expert at using the internet to learn the dark strategies of his particular enemy David Rockefeller, and the Rothschilds and the other Jewish bankers who ran everything. He knew about the vile machinations of the mysterious black helicopters which had hovered over his headquarters. He knew the unconstitutional nature of the income tax. He could rant about how the New World Order, with special help from former president Clinton, was closing lands to Americans in the name of ecology, and how they had sent "communist evolutionists" to the schools to teach biology. He could even manage to reveal these secrets after 44,000 volts of lasers had been fired into his brain, causing a blackout. Pitner somehow had an Amway salesman's gift for getting people involved in his movement. However, their style of paranoia cuts both ways. When his men became dissatisfied with the long wait for those UN troops to invade, and with only promises of hidden weapons rather than real weapons, they began to wonder if Pitner was perhaps on the side of the feds. No, he wasn't, but a couple of his recruits were. He went to jail for three years on a charge of owning and transferring a machine gun (not, as the government had wanted, conspiracy). Pitner was saved by his wife more than once, and was bonded out by his sister Susan, who had a lesbian partner in the sort of relationship the religious militias would have strongly disapproved of. The sister's take on this delusional and charismatic man is key; she says that despite his desire for his militia to be taken seriously, the only ones to believe him in the end were the FBI. This is a tale of bumblers, told by a reporter with a novelist's flair for displaying comic characters. The scary part is that it is not hard to imagine that there are more competent sociopaths out there who might bring us the next Murrah Federal Building.