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." [sic]. 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.
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.
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.