Lone Patriot: The Short Career of an American Militiaman [Hardcover]

Jane Kramer (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 4, 2002

Mark Strand wrote of Jane Kramer’s book Europeans that it was “so effortless in its dispensations, so intelligent, so well written, that as journalism it’s in a class by itself.” In Lone Patriot, Kramer, who covers Europe for The New Yorker, now turns to America with an enthralling portrait of the commander-in-chief of an erstwhile Patriot army called the Washington State Militia.

In 1996 Kramer made the first of what would be many trips to Whatcom County, Washington, to talk to John Pitner and some of the veterans of Alpha One, his “leadership” squad. Through their voices, Pitner’s in particular, Kramer tells the story of a movement that surfaced in America in the nineties, as the millennium approached, and has continued—its resolve, if anything, strengthened by the events of the past year—into the new century. Her powerful evocations of Whatcom County could easily describe any number of rural communities in the Pacific Northwest today—a place of refuge to a strange assortment of conspiracy theorists, armed “constitutionalists,” white supremacists, county secessionists, Freemen, and Christian fanatics, and to the kind of groups that survive on their discontent.

Kramer has been described as a writer who combines the art of a novelist and the eye of a social historian. Lone Patriot, with its wayward characters and their “Patriot” obsessions, is a timely and compelling narrative from one of America’s most important writers.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Kramer offers insight less into the violent, extreme right-wing militia movement than into a ragtag band of losers who have sought refuge from the world in the backwoods of Whatcom County, Wash., and united under the dubious leadership of self-styled Patriot John Pitner. Among the group are Fred Fisher, a convicted child molester, and Doc Ellwanger, who, misled by a swindler into not paying taxes, lost his veterinary business to the IRS. The members of Pitner's Washington State Militia are angry and alienated from mainstream America and eager to play with pipe bombs and grenades. But the source of their anger seems to be more their inconsequence and unpleasant run-ins with the government than an ideology that they seem too dimwitted to grasp. Kramer's opening sentence brilliantly conveys a certain lack of seriousness afflicting Pitner and his gang: "The enemy took John Pitner, by subterfuge and surprise, on a hot midsummer Saturday when no one could really have been expected to stand and fight, and the result was that John lost his liberty before he had a chance to save America." The centerpiece of this account is a portrait of Pitner, a ne'er-do-well with a "goofy charm." But the most notable, and sympathetic, characters are two women: John's wife, Debbie, who finally ups and leaves him, and his good-hearted lesbian sister, Susan, who steps in to save him after his eventual arrest and pays a heavy price. Kramer's strengths are her inquisitiveness, insight and graceful prose (she's a longtime European correspondent for the New Yorker, which has excerpted this book). But one ends up wondering whether the FBI and Kramer mightn't have better spent time pursuing real militiamen rather than this sad band of malcontents.
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist

For students of political pathology, Kramer has dissected a textbook specimen: John Pitner, a right-wing militiaman committed to the same ideology of paranoia that inspired Timothy McVeigh. In Pitman's case, the ideals lead not to national tragedy but to regional farce. In recounting Pitner's tangled career as a Patriot leader in the Washington State Militia, Kramer opens for us a shadowy world in which hapless blue-collar whites gather furtively to indulge in wild conspiracy theories; to ventilate their hatred of Jews, blacks, and immigrants; to exchange phony code words; and to fantasize about martyrdom in an impending war against the New World Order. Though his talk often turns vicious, Pitner's campaign of action veers toward the innocuously silly: to finance covert operations, this daring soldier gets as far as planning yard sales. The empty lunacy of Pitner's bravado seems to disappoint Kramer herself, who ends up shifting her focus to the two long-suffering women Pitner gulls into years of selfless labor for his cause. In the end, this self-styled freedom fighter disenchants both his credulous followers and his investigative biographer. Bryce Christensen
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 272 pages
• Publisher: Pantheon; First Edition edition (June 4, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 067944873X
• ISBN-13: 978-0679448730
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.6 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 2.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (10 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,513,000 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Bumbling "Patriots", August 5, 2002

By 

R. Hardy "Rob Hardy" (Columbus, Mississippi USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Lone Patriot: The Short Career of an American Militiaman (Hardcover)

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.

7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Elitist meets militia group, July 13, 2002

By A Customer

This review is from: Lone Patriot: The Short Career of an American Militiaman (Hardcover)

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.

6 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Interesting, but is it true ?, August 9, 2002

By 

Werner Cohn (Brooklyn, NY USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Lone Patriot: The Short Career of an American Militiaman (Hardcover)

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.