God Bless the Fringe of America

Amid the bounty and leisure of holidays, we were always told to think of others.

On this Independence Day, I am.

I am thinking of Timothy McVeigh, a believer in the Bigger Bang, spending the Fourth in a prison cell, without fireworks of any sort except the rearview-mirror memory of the big one he lighted in Oklahoma City--McVeigh, who spent the summer of 1993 blowing up peroxide and chromium, brake fluid and chlorine, God kablooie bless America.

I am thinking of G. Gordon Liddy, nutty as an Alpine wall clock, whom the nation’s publicity grinder has homogenized into a wacky radio celeb, Seinfeld with sidearms--a man whose idea of a fun Fourth was rifle practice on drawings of Bill and Hillary to “improve my aim.”

I am thinking of the Stanislaus County clerk who she refused to lift an IRS lien on a group called Juris Christian Assembly, and likewise wouldn’t file its fake liens against the IRS. She was told she’d be sorry. Someone hired a hit man to beat her, kick her, cut her neck and back, put an empty pistol to her head and pull the trigger.

I am thinking of militias, and of how such patriots can wrap their minds around a day that honors what they hate.

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Militias are as varied and opaque as the contents of the Jell-O mold of my childhood Fourth, ornamented with marshmallow stars and Cool Whip stripes.

You’ve got your no-tax militias, your no-Jews, no-UN, and so on. Some, I imagine watching “The Diary of Anne Frank” and hollering to the movie Nazis, “Behind the bookcase! They’re up behind the bookcase!” Those are the likely crowd at this weekend’s Michigan neo-Nazi gala, a White Power Woodstock for jackbooted and tattooed tough guys (but with a barn so they won’t get wet if it rains).

Some are no more organized than talk radio plebiscite platoons. Some seem to be in business just to keep Letterman in business: The KKK torched a 30-foot-high cross outside Modesto, sending not so much fear into our hearts as particulates into our lungs, and bringing down the wrath of the San Joaquin Valley Unified Air Pollution Control District. (Who are they fooling with those sheets? If this is the master race, then the master race is spending way too much time on the BarcaLounger eating frosted Pop Tarts.)

The Viper Militia, who spent the last Fourth in jail, now say their Armageddon rant was “macho chest-beating” by guys who named their machine gun Shirley and just like to blow up dirt.

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To overhear recent Internet gabble on the topic, July 4 doesn’t seem like a militia kind of holiday anyway, involving as it does words on paper instead of black powder in a barrel.

“BBrown” thought April 19 should be declared Minuteman Day. Now there’s a date to conjure with: not only the day, in 1775, of “the shot heard ‘round the world,” but of Waco, of Oklahoma City, and the day after Hitler’s birthday.

But “mrfuji” thought the Fourth would be a fine time to surround Congress and the White House, and blare a tape loop of “We Will Rock You/We Are the Champions” until they all give up. (It worked on Noriega, didn’t it?)

“Mrfuji” was reminded by “RARPOL” that the Fourth, being a holiday, “usually sees the Capitol empty of public officials”--something you’d think a patriot like “mrfuji” would remember.

Maybe he will remember not to leave the potato salad out all night; salmonella still kills more people, and bureaucrats, than militias.

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Sooner or later, the unified field theory kicks in, of a federal government both inept and cunning, authors of Waco and Roswell, craven henchmen of black helicopters and the New World Order.

But what first seems to radicalize mere mortals into militia stalwarts is . . . dough.

Terry Nichols, sued by two banks for tens of thousands in unpaid credit card debt, paid the judgment against him with a homemade check. A man who tried to arrest for extortion the judge who told him to pay child support from his veteran’s disability benefits formed a Tulare County militia.

Here’s a radical thought: How about paying child support? How about not practicing better living through plastic money?

But then the Nichols brothers could not opt out, calling themselves persecuted non-citizens of this nation. Which suggests an even more radical thought: Call off the IRS, call in the INS.

Paranoia and peevishness do not a patriot make. Much mischief has been wrought by Thomas Jefferson’s remark, “The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure.”

In the meantime, we get all the unnatural manure.

Jefferson and John Adams both died on July 4, 1826, 50 years after they had bullied and finessed the Declaration of Independence into existence. On July 4, 1832, in Boston, a new patriotic song was introduced, “America.” Its lasting triumph over Britain was in appropriating the tune of “God Save the King” to honor this kingless nation. Amazingly, in none of its four verses does anything blow up.