Here in the shadow of the federal government, against which militias in the provinces are arming themselves, some people are worried about Waco and Oklahoma City.
But, this being the Washington area, the response has been
decidedly
lobby-like and passionately process-oriented. Citizen guerrillas
are not
training in Rock Creek Park.
The weapons of choice are the fax machine, the Rolodex and
the modest
posting on the Internet.
"The proper response would be hearings," says Alan
Forschler, a member of the Committee for Waco Justice in the District.
"I want to get all the facts."
The Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City was
bombed on April 19, the second anniversary of the immolation of
the Branch Davidian religious cult near Waco, Tex. The federal
raid on David Koresh's compound heightened distrust of the federal
government in a lot of folks. In places such as Montana, Michigan
and Texas, they donned camouflage and joined do-it-yourself militias.
In Northern Virginia, they planned commemorative vigils.
"We must speak out in a rational manner," says Carol
Valentine, of Burke, a
founder of Waco Remembrance, which staged a peaceful "lunchtime
observance" outside FBI Headquarters on April 19.
Bombing suspect Timothy James McVeigh's alleged sympathy for
militia-style anti-government fervor has resulted in 15 minutes
of fame for extreme paramilitary groups. The most extreme of the
extreme are invited onto national television.
They believe the United Nations plans to conquer the world.
They are not
from the Washington area.
"I don't hear a lot of gun owners say, I'm going to shoot
back,' " says
Richard Pennington, a suburban Baltimore advocate of the right
to bear arms.
"The only place I hear that is one or two screwballs on television."
Nearly one in five workers in the region is employed by the
federal
government, not counting those in the military. That may be why
it's hard for
many people in these parts to believe there's a conspiracy afoot
to suspend
the Constitution and set up a dictatorship, as the self-styled
patriots preach
on shortwave radio.
Not that the Washington area is without suspicious musings,
of course.
Conspiracy theorizing is a favorite pastime, but near the Beltway,
some people try to be more witty than way out.
Dave Sharp and his rock band, Enemies of the People, have been
promoting a new CD that includes the tune "Children of Waco."
Sample lyric: "After the
fire, politics took hold. The Donkey and the Elephant reversed
their roles.
Even Janet Reno went up in the polls."
"If I play it at a blue-collar drinking bar, people really
like it," says
Sharp, 39. "If I play it in a more sophisticated place"
(he names a veggie
hangout in Dupont Circle), "with that type of crowd it doesn't
go over."
Carol Moore, 44, of the District, author of a coming book on
the raid,
helped form the Committee for Waco Justice after the Branch Davidian
incident. The group, with about 10 core members, has held four
demonstrations on the anniversaries of both the initial raid and
the climactic inferno. Committeemembers also planted 82 crosses
for the dead Davidians on the Ellipse, hoping President Clinton
would look out his White House window and see them. Moore stops
short of accusing the government of murder or seeing a sinister
government conspiracy linking Waco, the Oklahoma City bombing
and the New World Order. In fact, Moore and several other local
Waco activists are busy debunking the more exotic theories floated
by militia spokesmen.
Valentine, 52, of Waco Remembrance, who passes out Waco-related
pamphlets at downtown Metro stops and on Capitol Hill, uses more
radical rhetoric. "Clearly, murder and mayhem were committed
at Waco," and Clinton is exploiting the Oklahoma City bombing
as a convenient pretext for cracking down on civil liberties,
she says.
But her proposed remedy is in the grand Washington tradition:
hearings,
special prosecutors and, if necessary, indictments.
William Thomas, another Waco skeptic and leader of the peace
protesters in Lafayette Square, says of Clinton and Reno, the
attorney general: "I don't
think they're evil folks. They're just really confused."
Says John Judge, of the Committee for Open Archives, an
anti-government-secrets group, "I think {Waco} is part of
a broader problem .
. . the militarization of the police and the crossover of the
military into a
police function."
That's anti-government radicalism Washington-style: not a good
fit for a
bumper sticker or talk radio.
More extreme voices can be heard -- barely -- in the region.
Armed citizen
militias are absent from Maryland and the District, according
to law
enforcement officials.
"We don't have anything" in the way of paramilitary
groups, says Lt. Dallas
Pope, chief of the Maryland State Police intelligence unit.
None has surfaced in Northern Virginia, although small groups
have appeared in the central and southern parts of the state.
Virginia State Police
Superintendent M. Wayne Huggins said recently that the only confirmed
militia is a 15-member group in Pulaski.
In Westminster, in central Maryland, a group of self-styled
"tax patriots"
and "constitutional revivalists" called the Save-A-Patriot
Fellowship espouses some of the same views as militia extremists,
without the call to arms.
Roger Lee Kelly, imperial wizard of the Invincible Empire,
Knights of the
Ku Klux Klan, Maryland's largest Klan faction, says the Oklahoma
City bombing has stirred no additional interest among people thinking
of joining.
That is not surprising, says Kelly, 41, of Frederick County.
While some
Klan groups may be "into violence and military training,"
Kelly says, his
organization, which is active in 10 states, works "strictly
to oppose
immigration and keep the separation of the races."
Not to be left out, the area's far left has its own theories.
Even though authorities believe the Oklahoma City bombing was
a right-wing action, the federal government in times of political
tension "historically has targeted the left," says Tim
Wheeler, 55, a longtime Baltimore-based activist in the Communist
Party USA and editor of its newspaper, People's Weekly World.
"We don't know who set the fire {near Waco} or blew up
the Oklahoma City federal building," Wheeler says. "But
it really played into the hands of the cultists, because they
rely so much on paranoia."
But what if it's all true? What if the United Nations activates
the
microchips planted in everyone's buttocks, suspends the Constitution
and
occupies America?
Many Washington area Waco watchers think the militias have
it wrong. Guns won't help.
"Suppose the tanks come down my street and the helicopters
start shooting
overhead," says Valentine, of Waco Remembrance. "What
am I supposed to do?"