This Noble Land

by James A. Michener

  The most instructive proof of our nation’s increasingly vigorous move toward a macho society can be seen in our unique fascination with guns, our insistence on having them and our willingness to accept murder as a result of the huge number we allow and even encourage private citizens to own.

  Bob Herbert, a columnist for The New York Times, in his Op-Ed piece for March 2, 1994, offered some shattering statistics: ‘In 1992, handguns were used in the murders of 33 people in Great Britain, 36 in Sweden, 97 in Switzerland, 128 in Canada, 13 in Australia, 60 in Japan, and 13,220 in the United States.’ We are the murder capital of the world; most of our killings are done by persons using handguns. Herbert continued with other astonishing data: that one year’s total of 38,317 citizens killed by firearms was more than the total number of American troops killed in battle in the Korean War.

  In American history the weapon of choice has been the handgun in attempts to assassinate U.S. presidents. Here is the record:

  1865: President Abraham Lincoln shot to death by John Wilkes Booth.

  1881: President James Garfield shot to death by Charles Guiteau.

  1901: President William McKinley shot to death by Leon Czolgosz.

  1963: President John F. Kennedy shot to death by Lee Harvey Oswald.

  In addition, in 1933 President-elect Franklin Roosevelt was nearly murdered when a bricklayer named Giuseppe Zangara shot at him but killed Mayor Anton Joseph Cermak of Chicago instead. In 1950 President Harry Truman was shot at by Puerto Rican radicals. President Gerald Ford was shot at twice in 1975 by deranged women, and in 1981 President Ronald Reagan was nearly assassinated by John Hinckley, Jr.

  This is a record of shame that no other civilized nation can even approach. The national outcry against the killing and the near misses has not been sustained; it has been tempered by absurd claims that a loss of our rights to own handguns, even machine guns, might destroy the U.S. Constitution. One is tempted to conclude: ‘Americans are willing to have their presidents murdered if it means that citizens can keep their guns. It’s a risk that goes with the job.’

  The data just cited regarding the proliferation of guns in our country and our record of assassinating our presidents, let alone such distinguished citizens as Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy, can perhaps be explained by the fact that we remain a frontier society. When I lived in Pennsylvania, Massachusetts or New York, I could not understand the American passion for guns, but when I lived in Colorado and Texas I saw that otherwise sensible men could have monomaniacal fixations on their firearms. To a man in Wyoming or Montana, a gun is an entirely different weapon from what it is in Pennsylvania. In the western states it is a badge of honor, a memorial of the good old days when men defended their isolated homes against the threats of the wilderness. Their firearms are the ultimate proof of their machismo. I knew ranchers who confessed that they would give up their wives rather than surrender their guns. I also watched as they became fanatical supporters of the National Rifle Association and relied upon it as the protector of their rights as a man.

  The National Rifle Association, with its brilliant public relations, is one of the prime forces in establishing and augmenting our devotion to the gun. After the 1994 election it issued a handsome pamphlet showing on one page the portraits of thirty-two politicians who had dared to vote for gun control, and on the second page the same thirty-two portraits, each stamped across the face with a red-letter DEFEATED.

  If you doubt the power of the NRA I suggest that you write for a copy of their Ten Myths about Gun Control, a twenty-nine-page pamphlet that brilliantly rebuts every argument put forward against guns or advocating their control. The writing is first-rate, and the possession of a gun is equated with patriotism. There is an amusing argument that the 87 gun murders in Japan in 1990 are really equivalent to the 10,567 killed in the United States. Further, the proliferation of guns in our country has nothing to do with the murders; the murder rate is merely a difference between national cultures.

  I hear the same arguments from the gun owners I know. If I try to recite the appalling statistics on accidental deaths from gunfire, they counter with statements difficult to refute: ‘Guns are the American way They differentiate us from weaker nations like France or Belgium.’ By implication the speakers reveal that they think the difference lies in the historic fact that we honor the existence of a macho ideal, while other nations do not.

  From such experiences I have concluded that there is nothing we can do to staunch the bloodshed caused by the gun. As a nation, too many of us want it that way We want any citizen other than a criminal already in jail to have the right to own an automatic crowd-killer that can mow down patrons dining peacefully in a McDonald’s hamburger joint (twenty-one dead) or a Killeen, Texas, cafeteria (twenty-three dead).

  There have been too many ‘hunting’ accidents. In Maine a wife went out into her own backyard wearing white mittens. A hunter saw the flash of white and, concluding he had a deer in his sights, blazed away and killed her. When the gunman was belatedly brought to trial, the Maine jury refused to find him guilty: ‘It was her fault. She should have known better than to wear those white gloves.’

  At the bottom of my lane in Pennsylvania, a child waiting for a school bus was shot to death and the hunter’s excuse was: ‘He moved, didn’t he?’

  Sometime later I was sitting at my desk in my house at the top of the hill when a phone call came that took me to another room. In my absence from my desk, a hunter saw a reflection in my window and, thinking it was a deer, fired two bullets through my window Had I still been sitting there, I would have been murdered.

  There were other shooting incidents that were more chilling because the killing was intentional. While working on a manuscript in Miami I became aware that my daily newspaper was carrying a sequence of stories that were almost identical with this one: ‘Rafael Lopez, football star and straight-A student at Wellover High, was shot to death in chemistry lab by a fifteen-year-old boy who felt that Lopez did not pay him adequate respect.’

  When I started to ask about these killings during school hours, I learned that in my county alone over the period of a year, eighteen schoolchildren had been slain by guns while attending classes, more than the total number of gun killings in the entire nation of Australia. Bob Herbert in his previously cited New York Times article reported: ‘An average of fourteen children and teenagers are killed with guns each day. Firearms kill more people between the ages of fifteen and twenty-four than all other causes combined.’

  It seems to me that this particular form of firearm death could be easily controlled because, after all, most children could be easily protected in their school buildings. But an experienced teacher corrected me: ‘Not so. Hoodlums sneak into the school to execute revenge murders. Since a shocking number of schoolchildren bring hidden guns to class with them, the deaths will continue.’ As if to confirm that prediction, a few weeks after that conversation the Supreme Court reversed a law that had banned guns within a thousand yards of any school. In effect the justices said that gun owners have constitutional rights that take precedence over the rights of children to continue living.

  I believe that guns are such an integral part of American society, so deeply ingrained in our national psyche, that we will never be able to bring them under control. The people west of the Mississippi will not allow it. We have chosen the path of Sparta, not Athens, and we may not be able to rectify that wrong decision.

  A disturbing development is the proliferation, especially in the West and the South, of so-called militia units. These are paramilitary groups of men and women with guns and uniforms who train like soldiers in the countryside, practicing against the day when they may have to defend themselves against the tyranny of the government.

  Historically their roots reach far back in American history. When I was a boy in a Pennsylvania town the highlight of the year so far as public spectacles were concerned was the Fourth of July parade in which the marchers included veterans of the
Civil War. In a neighboring town we had a man whose proud accomplishment was his membership in the time-honored Philadelphia Cavalry, which dated back to the Revolutionary War. His uniform was a dazzling affair seen to good advantage whenever the Cavalry formed the guard of honor for notables who visited Philadelphia.

  There were also the men’s organizations that reenacted Civil War battles wearing uniforms of the period, but the one that capped them all was the re-creation of George Washington’s crossing the Delaware River on December 26 to take the British army by surprise in the Battle of Trenton. We had a man who looked a spitting image of Washington, we had the boat and the cadre of patriots who crossed the river at the exact spot where Washington did. One winter I was Colonel Knox, Washington’s aide, and nearly froze in the bitter cold.

  None of these military reenactments did any harm; they simply reminded us of our glorious history. But about 1960 a different element of society took over the celebrations and injected a darker agenda. Across the nation this element was able to convert many of the harmless military celebrations into celebrations of the so-called militia with its doctrine of hatred of our civil government and its plan to take control when enough militias functioned in the states, especially west of the Mississippi. They constitute a perversion of our American heritage; it is true that the colonial militia organizations such as the minutemen took up arms in defiance of their government, but the monarchical government in England was truly oppressive and the colonies could not resort to the ballot box in order to improve their lot.

  The members of the militias are intensely patriotic, and they yearn to return to the good old days of family solidarity. They despise our present government, especially if it happens to be in Democratic hands; they are committed both to their beliefs that the government is secretly plotting to deprive them of their freedoms and to their intrigues against the government. While they are not openly racist, they are preponderantly white Anglo-Saxons and their ranks provide a haven for those who fear the ultimate domination of the races of color, whether the imagined enemy happens to be black, brown or yellow.

  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.

  Coincident 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.

  The exhortation that the listener should shoot any government official in uniform who tries to enforce government laws in one’s vicinity. This general suggestion was later refined with advice not to aim at the chest, because agents wear bulletproof vests—aim at the head.

  The charge that President Clinton masterminded the murder of a political foe back in Arkansas.

  The accusation that Hillary Clinton is leading a secret plot to deny medical doctors their fees and their freedoms.

  The charge that a band of secretive congressmen run the government and pay heed to foreign interests rather than our own.

  The accusation that ‘they’ are subversively gaining control of our national water supplies with the aim of determining how much food can be grown on our farms.