Slicing it fine

Eileen Pollack has an article in The New York Times about fine distinctions:

I moved to Michigan eight months before Timothy McVeigh blew up the Murrah Federal Building. Although he wasn’t a member of the Michigan Militia, he did attend one of their meetings and practiced building bombs at a farm 120 miles northeast of Ann Arbor. One of McVeigh’s most fervent supporters, Mark Koernke, worked as a janitor at the University of Michigan, where I teach, and in his off hours hosted a vitriolic radio show on which he espoused the militia’s most radical, violent views.
After the carnage in Oklahoma City and President Bill Clinton’s exit from the White House, much of the militia activity in Michigan and elsewhere seemed to subside. Mr. Koernke was sent to prison for fleeing the scene of a robbery he didn’t commit and resisting the efforts of the police to question him.
But I knew the extremists were still out there. One afternoon in 2003, I was reading about a particularly racist and anti-Semitic group called the Christian Identity movement when I received a call from Zingerman’s Deli to come and finalize plans for my son’s bar mitzvah. A block from the deli, I noticed several Christian Identity bumper stickers on the truck in front of me.
Then came the 2008 presidential campaign and the militias regained strength. Last month, nine members of the Hutaree, a band of self-styled Christian revolutionaries, were arrested in and around Ann Arbor for allegedly plotting to kill police officers and any non-members who happened upon their “reconnaissance operations” in the woods. A few days later, I came across a Webcast of the The Intelligence Report, on which Mark Koernke, who had served his time, was treating his listeners to the ominous click of a bullet being loaded in a gun and the warning that anyone who breached his “perimeter” would be shot.
Today thousands of militia members from around the country, many of them armed, plan to march in the capital and in Virginia to “celebrate” the 15th anniversary of the Oklahoma City bombing and “restore the Constitution”.
The problem here in Michigan is knowing which militia members are dangerous and which aren’t. Not long ago, I attended Tax Blast, an annual event put on by the Southeast Michigan Volunteer Militia. Families chowed down on pulled pork sandwiches and a tiny girl in pink clutched a stuffed dinosaur. The lid on one chafing dish read Kosher Meals Available; it stood empty until a man wearing a pistol and a black t-shirt reading When I Snap You’ll Be the First to Go filled it with Hebrew National hot dogs.
True, the militia member at the registration table was selling copies of the IRS’s Form 1040 to be used as targets for the shooting contest that afternoon. And army boots, fatigues, and hip-holstered black pistols were the style of the day. But attendees seemed more interested in demonstrating that they were in no way affiliated with the Hutaree than in shooting up tax forms. The Southeastern Michigan Volunteer Militia spokesman even hinted to me that he and his guys had alerted the FBI to the Hutaree’s agenda, a suggestion later confirmed in news reports.
I don’t usually feel threatened by the militias. Most members are just indulging their fantasies of being warriors without having to sign up for the Army. They want to be heroes and save their neighbors from disaster. Many of the guys in the yuppie southeast Michigan branch of the militia consider themselves socially progressive libertarians and welcome anyone— Jews, blacks, and Muslims included— who are willing to defend Michigan from invasion, whether by the federal government or foreign forces.
But when I read on the Hutaree’s website that they were prepared to use violence “to defend all those who belong to Christ and save those who aren’t”, I wondered what they intended to “save” me and my Jewish and Muslim neighbors from.
And so, despite my desire to preserve my civil liberties, I can’t help but be grateful that the federal government has the power to keep an eye on extremists of all kinds. I only hope it remains able to figure out which members of which militias are harmless, and which are serious about assassinating police officers, or shooting people like me who might wander into the woods while they train for Armageddon.

Eileen Pollack, the director of the creative writing program at the University of Michigan, is the author of the forthcoming book Breaking and Entering, a novel about the militia movement.