The United States of Paranoia (34 page)

It’s a bleak film that ends with Norris killing the would-be secretary of state. A friend in the CIA is complicit in the death and helps smooth things over; when the story is done, it’s hard to say whether you’ve seen a justification for revolutionary violence or just for another lawless covert operation. But the movie’s general opinion of the nation’s establishment is clear. When Norris and the grand conspirator have their first extended dialogue, the politician invokes a wilderness metaphor familiar from many tales of the Enemy Outside, then transfers it someplace new. “I understand, Major Booker, that you were quite a jungle fighter,” he tells Norris. “Well, this is my kind of jungle.”
19

In
First Blood Part II
, as in
Good Guys Wear Black
, we learn that Rambo was never supposed to find any prisoners; he rescues them only by ditching the authorities’ plan and setting off on his own. (Morrell’s novelization of the film is even more skeptical about the government, with a scene in which Rambo chuckles darkly as he informs the disbelieving POWs that Ronald Reagan has become president. He “couldn’t bring himself to tell them that Vietnam was about to change its name to Nicaragua.”)
20
Stallone doesn’t follow in Norris’s footsteps and have his character assassinate an American official. But Rambo does return to the computerized command center in the movie’s climax, and there he pumps pounds of ammo into its alienating array of machinery. It’s a violent, cathartic revision of an old sixties slogan.
I am a soldier. Do not fold, bend, spindle, or mutilate me.

Like the previous picture in the series,
First Blood Part II
owed a lot to the western.
21
But while the first film resembles those existential stories about a stranger entering a corrupt frontier town,
Part II
is about a cowboy who rides deep into the wilderness to save white captives from savage Indians. Complicating the racial dynamics, Rambo is now identified as a half-breed, part civilized and part wild: We learn that he’s half Native American himself (his other half—paging Gustav Hasford!—is German), and he has a brief affair with a Vietnamese woman. But you can still trace the core plot to the Indian captivity narratives that first flourished in seventeenth-century New England and have manifested themselves in the American imagination countless times since.

The movie may have had a more recent antecedent as well. In the late 1970s, a self-promoting soldier named Bo Gritz staged several unsuccessful efforts to rescue American POWs from Indochina. It is often claimed that Gritz’s exploits helped inspire
First Blood Part II
. Whether or not that’s true, the movie certainly had an impact on Gritz, who started to bill himself as the “real-life Rambo” after the film became a hit.

With that in mind, you can imagine two men walking away from the movie: Hollywood Rambo and Real-Life Rambo. Hollywood Rambo embodies the popular gloss on the eighties; he’s either a simpleminded jingoistic killer or a warrior-hero we can have faith in, depending on whether or not you like the Reagan years. Real-Life Rambo is a very different figure, a bridge from the Watergate seventies to the militia nineties.

Hollywood Rambo appeared in another picture, 1988’s
Rambo III
, in which he fights alongside the mujahideen in Afghanistan. It’s another bringing-Vietnam-home film, but this time Stallone is bringing it home to the Soviets. (In this one Colonel Trautman—the same man who warned Sheriff Teasle about those body bags—informs the Russians, “This war is your Vietnam, man. You can’t win!”)
22
Hollywood Rambo got his own TV cartoon,
Rambo and the Forces of Freedom
, in which he works for a military peacekeeping unit and battles a global conspiracy called S.A.V.A.G.E. This is the Rambo of “Rambo foreign policy,” the Rambo of popular memory; it is invoked by both the fans and the foes of Reagan’s bombing raid over Libya and Oliver North’s illicit efforts to aid the Nicaraguan Contras.

And Real-Life Rambo? In the late 1980s, Gritz continued to build on that suspicious post-Watergate mood, accusing the intelligence community of connections to the drug trade and speaking to audiences of both the radical Left and the radical Right. In 1992, he ran for president, drawing support from the precursors to the militia movement. His core constituency was a bunch of angry patriots, many of them veterans, who said they loved their country but feared their government. Later in the nineties, their rallying cry would be the confrontation between the Branch Davidians and federal police at Waco, a conflict that was retold in two very different ways. For the authorities and most of the media, it was another version of the captivity narrative, with the ATF and FBI unsuccessfully attempting to rescue children from a sexually depraved death cult. In the alternative story, the police were the villains and the confrontation was a massacre, part My Lai and part Wounded Knee. Like the Mormons of the nineteenth century, elements of the populist Right rewrote the American story with themselves in the role of the Indians.
23

There are people—real people, not archetypes—who stopped playing one Rambo role and took up the other. Tom Posey was the head of Civilian Material Assistance, a paramilitary group that trained and armed the Nicaraguan Contras in the 1980s. Both the CIA and the National Security Council were aware of Posey’s activities and encouraged them. But with the end of the Cold War, Posey’s anger shifted from the government in Managua to the government in Washington, and he started hatching plans for a revolution at home. He was thinking along these lines as early as 1990, but after the deaths at Waco his rage intensified.
24

Meanwhile, the 1997 documentary
Waco: The Rules of Engagement
includes footage of cops in camouflage gathered outside the Branch Davidians’ compound before the feds’ final assault. A Klansman turns up in the middle of the standoff to offer his services in stopping the group’s leader. “Give him an ultimatum, give him a deadline,” he suggests. One officer declares himself “honed to kill.” A buddy compares him to Rambo.
25

Which of the two Rambos prevailed? When the Cold War ended, Stallone’s movies lost their hold on the culture and decayed into eighties kitsch, while distrust of the government intensified and crossed what used to look like sharp ideological lines. When the wounds of 9/11 were fresh, the outrage of the heartland populists turned outward again; it was a moment made for Hollywood Rambo. After a while, the failures of the Iraq occupation drove many of them back to an antigovernment stance; the spirit of Real-Life Rambo was dominant again. And with the Obama era . . .

Sorry, we’re getting ahead of ourselves; we aren’t quite ready to cover the Obama years yet. But as long as we’ve taken a detour to the twenty-first century, let’s pause to consider the fourth Rambo movie, released in early 2008. The critics mostly disliked it, deploying such phrases as “enough jingoistic imperialism to make Kipling puff up his chest with pride”
26
and “the
Schindler’s List
of B-list butchery.”
27
(If you’re going to be compared to a movie about Nazis, I guess
Schindler’s List
beats
Triumph of the Will
.) David Morrell was more impressed, calling it “the first time that the tone of my novel
First Blood
has been used in any of the movies.”
28

For the most part I’ll have to join in the jeers. This is basically a paint-by-numbers action picture that has almost as little to say as its taciturn protagonist. But the film does show a brief glimmer of something thoughtful beneath the monosyllabic grunts and the CGI gore.

The fourth film in the Frankenstein series was called
The Ghost of Frankenstein
. The fourth film in the Rambo franchise is ghostly as well: After an absence of two decades, both the series and its protagonist feel a little undead. An early version of the script pitted Stallone’s alter ego against a right-wing American paramilitary group—sort of a
Rambo vs. Rambo
scenario. But the finished product takes us back to Southeast Asia instead. When we return to Stallone’s character, he is a numb man hunting snakes for a living in Thailand. Vietnam is deep in his past, and the country’s more recent wounds don’t seem to have touched him—the word
Iraq
appears nowhere in the movie, and neither does
Al Qaeda
,
Islam
,
9/11
, or
bin Laden
. The writer/director/star told
Ain’t It Cool News
that he had taken this approach because “the idea of Rambo dealing with Al-Qaeda, etc. would be an insult to our American forces that are actually dying trying to rid the world of this cancer. To have at the end of a 90 minute movie the character of Rambo seizing Osama bin Laden in a choke hold then dragging him into the Oval Office then tossing him in the President’s lap declaring ‘The world is now safe, Chief’ would be a bit insulting.”
29
I don’t doubt Stallone’s sincerity, though World War II–era GIs didn’t seem to mind the fact that Superman, Captain America, and the rest were fighting alongside them in the comic books.
30

Instead we get a one-man humanitarian intervention in Burma, where brutal soldiers have seized a group of missionaries tending to Christian villagers. Rambo sets out to rescue them, arriving just in time to save a young woman—the closest we have to a female lead—from a rape.

In other words, Stallone has returned to the classic Indian captivity narrative. Remember Richard Slotkin’s summary of the archetypal captivity story:

a single individual, usually a woman, stands passively under the strokes of evil, awaiting rescue by the grace of God. . . . In the Indian’s devilish clutches, the captive had to meet and reject the temptation of Indian marriage and/or the Indian’s “cannibal” Eucharist. To partake of the Indian’s love or his equivalent of bread and wine was to debase, to un-English the very soul.
31

There are films that intelligently explore the racial and sexual anxieties that underlie this tale. The most famous is John Ford’s 1956 film
The Searchers
, in which the captive woman does not want to leave the Indian community; her would-be rescuer, a complex antihero played by John Wayne, would rather kill her than watch her become an Indian.
32
The 2008
Rambo
, by contrast, merely adopts those old anxieties as its own. The woman prisoner is almost comically pure, kind, white, and blonde, while every Asian character except one—a thoroughly Westernized mercenary who was obviously raised in the United States—is either a victim or a savage. When the original Indian captivity narratives enjoyed their peak of popularity, Slotkin writes, “It almost seems as if the only experience of intimacy with the Indians that New England readers would accept was the experience of the captive (and possibly that of the missionary).”
33
Rambo
gives us both, and little more. It doesn’t seem to have anything to say about the country’s scars in Vietnam or the Middle East. Or rather, it doesn’t until the final scene, when Stallone does something unexpected.

The Searchers
concludes with John Wayne’s character turning his back on home and hearth and walking into the western landscape, unable to join the civilized world. Stallone’s movie inverts that: Rambo returns to civilization, hiking down an Arizona road toward the house where he grew up. As the old soldier strides down a driveway to his family homestead, the film finally seems to say something that resonates in an era of occupation and empire.

Come back from that violent foreign wilderness
, it tells us.
Come home
.

11

THE DEMONIC CAFETERIA

The Cold War was supposed to end in a nuclear inferno that killed everyone. It wasn’t supposed to just have the air go out of it. And a deferred eschaton has unusual power. Culturally, we spent decades expecting that we were all going to die. The reprieve didn’t suddenly make everybody less pessimistic. It just turned that pessimism inward.

—Philip Sandifer
1

I
t is June 1994, and Anthony J. Hilder is selling tapes at a convocation called The New World Order. Hilder, whom we last spotted passing out right-wing literature the night Robert Kennedy was shot, is now the host of two talk shows,
Radio Free America
and
Radio Free World
, that continue in the vein of the anti-Illuminati records he produced in the 1960s. Above him, two overhead projectors beam the covers of books about Masonic conspiracies onto the walls of the smoke-filled room.

It might sound like a gathering of the xenophobic Right. In fact it was a multiracial rap/rock concert in downtown Los Angeles, featuring Fishbone, Ice Cube, Ice T, and Body Count, among other performers. The event was organized not by a white man decked out in camouflage but by a black DJ called Afrika Islam, and the smoke thickening the air was not burning tobacco but burning marijuana.

In the 1990s, as the world’s cultures and subcultures traded and blended more easily than ever before, so did its schools of fear. Militiamen, hippies, black nationalists, ufologists: one group’s legends flowed freely into another’s. Figures on the right found ways to work flying saucers into their litany of official crimes and cover-ups. Activists opposed to drug-war abuses extended their outrage to Waco. Alienated African Americans discovered the conspiracy theories and curious legal doctrines of the sovereign citizens, a subculture that also overlapped with the world of white separatists.
2

The 1990s were boom years for Enemy Above theories, even more than the 1970s had been. But while paranoia had reached the public eye through the front door in the seventies, enshrined by congressional committees and investigations in the country’s leading newspapers, two decades later it was a side-door affair, a phenomenon not of broadcasting but of narrowcasting. Its greatest engine was the Internet, which did not merely enable theories from outside the mainstream to reach a much larger audience; it gave those theories new opportunities to mix. The conspiracy subculture that had been developing since the Nixon era was now in full bloom. It was in the 1990s that Michael Kelly coined the phrase
fusion paranoia
, and it was in the 1990s that Michael Barkun identified a phenomenon that he came to call
improvisational millennialism
. Once it had been typical for a conspiratorial or apocalyptic vision to stick to a single tradition, Barkun wrote, but the eclectic new breed could “draw simultaneously on Eastern and Western religion, New Age ideas and esotericism, and radical politics, without any sense that the resulting mélange contains incompatible elements.”
3

For decades, religious leaders had been complaining about “cafeteria spirituality,” a mentality in which people customized their beliefs, jettisoning doctrines that didn’t appeal to them and mixing in elements from other faiths. With the 1990s, cafeteria demonology came of age.

Meanwhile, the transition from one Rambo to the other took place. The Cold War came to an end, removing a potent Enemy Outside from the country’s psychic landscape and allowing many Americans to shift their fears toward the Enemy Above. The confrontations at Ruby Ridge and Waco hastened the process, as suspicions that had once been directed at Communists abroad and their alleged agents at home were redirected at federal police agencies. The Enemy Outside didn’t disappear, but it became more diffuse: a ghostly, shape-shifting presence, more a generalized dread about globalization than a fear of a specific foreign power.

In the militia world, the most popular conspiracy theories held that Waco was a trial run for future assaults on independent Americans; that concentration camps were being built within the country’s borders; that foreign troops were being imported to impose the new authoritarian order; and that the destruction of local self-government by federal forces would be conjoined with the destruction of national self-government by global forces. When President George H. W. Bush described the post–Cold War world with the phrase “new world order,” a phrase that many conspiracy theorists had long associated with a plot to impose a one-world government, suspicious populists saw it as a sign that individual liberty and U.S. independence faced an imminent threat. If conspiracy theories reflect the anxieties and experiences of the people who believe them, these theories were what you’d expect from Americans concerned about a loss of freedom and sovereignty.

Those rising fears of the Enemy Above were met by a growing concern about the Enemy Within and the Enemy Below, as the centrist establishment adopted its own conspiracy theories about militias and other radical groups. Those worries went into overdrive in 1995, when Timothy McVeigh, a Desert Storm vet enraged by Waco, bombed the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, killing 168 people, including more than a dozen kids in a day care center.

In the popular imagination, the militia movement was a paranoid pack of racists plotting McVeigh-style attacks. The historian Robert Churchill has called this “the narrative of 1995,” a story line in which “the militias and the Patriot movement took on the guise of a perfect, racist ‘other,’ and the threat they posed was best articulated by Morris Dees’ apocalyptic vision of a ‘gathering storm.’ ”
4

That vision was promoted by a collection of groups dedicated to tracking the radical Right, notably the Anti-Defamation League and Dees’s Southern Poverty Law Center. Their narrative dominated the media. “In news coverage, popular novels, episodes of
Law and Order
, and movies such as
Arlington Road
,” Churchill wrote, “the public became well acquainted with the archetypal militiaman, usually portrayed as warped by racial hatred, obsessed with bizarre conspiracy theories, and hungry for violent retribution.”
5
In
Searching for a Demon
, a 2002 study of how the media portrayed the militias, the sociologist Steven Chermak summed up their image: They were “irrational terrorists—a dangerous, growing outsider threat that needed eradicating.”
6

The figures who promoted that image often traced the militia movement to a weekend meeting in 1992, when Peter J. Peters, an anti-Semitic preacher associated with the Christian Identity movement, organized a gathering of the far-right tribes in Estes Park, Colorado. About 160 people reportedly attended, including one, John Trochmann, who later played a significant role in the militia milieu. (Trochmann denies that he was there.) By that account, the militias were a direct sequel to the violent racist underground of the 1980s, represented by such groups as the Aryan Nations and the Order, a terrorist gang that robbed banks, counterfeited money, and murdered a Jewish talk-show host. For writers such as the Seattle-based journalist David Neiwert, the militias were “specifically geared toward mainstreaming some of the basic tenets of [the racist Right’s] worldview.”
7
If the militias didn’t seem to express the same set of concerns as those predecessors, that was merely a mask.

Churchill offered a more persuasive origin story. He agrees that the militias overlapped with the older, broader populist Right—the sorts of people who gathered around Bo Gritz’s presidential campaign—but he also distinguishes the militias from those precursors. The movement began to congeal not in 1992 but in the early months of 1994, as activists reacted to the lethal federal raid on the Branch Davidians. Rather than tracing the phenomenon back to groups such as the Order, Churchill used a series of case studies to explore the long American tradition of armed resistance to intrusive government.

The militias of the 1990s, he argued, were reacting primarily to the rise of paramilitary police tactics. Their causes célèbres—the standoffs in Waco and Ruby Ridge—were only the most visible examples of what could go wrong when policemen regarded themselves as soldiers rather than peace officers. The militias formed and grew, Churchill wrote, as their members “came to the conclusion that the federalization and militarization of law enforcement had created a paramilitary culture of violence.”
8
He backed up his interpretation with many quotes from militia figures, including denunciations of the beating of Rodney King in Los Angeles and the rape of Abner Louima, a Haitian man whom New York police sodomized with a broomstick in 1997. Churchill also cited militia publications that covered botched paramilitary police raids. Ohio’s
E Pluribus Unum
once listed fifteen raids gone wrong, including three that had left civilians dead, under the headline “Just Who Are the Terrorists?”
9

Meanwhile, neither McVeigh nor his accomplice Terry Nichols turned out to be a member of a militia. After the Oklahoma City attack, a Michigan Militia spokesman said that his group’s closest contact with the bombers had come when James Nichols, Terry’s brother, showed up to speak during the open-forum portion of a meeting. As the spokesman told it, Nichols attempted to distribute some literature, urged those present to cut up their driver’s licenses, and was eventually asked to leave. (There are conflicting accounts as to whether McVeigh attended a Michigan Militia meeting, but even the witness who believes he was there states that he attended as a guest, not a member. And although some media outlets reported that McVeigh once served as a bodyguard to Michigan Militia leader Mark Koernke, that turned out to be a case of mistaken identity: The man in question was named
McKay
.)
10

In the years between Oklahoma City and 9/11, some would-be terrorists on the fringes of the militia milieu were nabbed for planning attacks. (By the most generous definition of
militia
, there were about a dozen plots.)
11
Such events bolstered the narrative of 1995, but the details of the schemes reveal a much more complicated picture. Several of the plans originated with the government’s own infiltrators. Many of the “militias” involved were tiny operations run by hotheads who’d been expelled from more established militia groups. In at least three cases—a plan to assault a series of government and media targets in Michigan; a plot to bomb gay bars, abortion clinics, and antimilitia groups in Oklahoma; and a strange scheme to prevent a Chinese invasion by attacking Fort Hood, Texas—the conspirators were arrested after militia members themselves got wind of the plans and alerted the police.

Even the identification of the militias with the far Right isn’t entirely stable. The Left/Right crossovers that we saw bubbling beneath the paramilitary movies of the 1980s went even further in the following decade, as the fusion paranoia that Michael Kelly described found a receptive audience in much of the militia world. “We don’t want to hear about left and right, conservative and liberal, all these bullshit labels,” Militia of Montana activist Bob Fletcher told Kelly. “Let’s get back to the idea of good guys and bad guys, righteous governments—the honest, fair, proper, American government that all of us have been fooled into believing was being maintained.”
12

The fusionist style had continued to develop in the previous decade, with different figures putting their own stamps on the sensibility. When a new journal called
Critique
debuted in 1980, mixing articles about conspiracies and social control with essays on mysticism and the paranormal, it became clear just how eclectic the conspiracy subculture could be.

Critique
was created by Bob Banner, a young man who first stumbled into the conspiracy world at Santa Rosa Junior College in the mid-1970s. He was in his early twenties, and his life felt aimless: “I was drinking a quart of beer, fucking as many women as I could possibly find, and I was in a spiritual crisis, a psychological crisis.”
13
Then he took a course in comparative religion from an instructor named Norman Livergood. When Banner found out that Livergood had a small center of his own—“it was like a secret society, it was like a mystery school”—he asked if he could join. They told him he had to get a haircut, shave his beard, buy a suit, and a find a full-time job. He did all of the above, and Livergood let him into the group: about a dozen people sharing a house and studying esoteric ideas.

According to Banner, Livergood’s eclectic interests ranged from the mysticism of G. I. Gurdjieff to the political theories of Lyndon LaRouche, and he had a shelf full of publications from the Institute for Historical Review, an organization infamous for arguing that the Holocaust never happened. Banner adds that Livergood was intrigued by UFOs and by Wilhelm Reich’s ideas about sex. At one point, Banner told me, there was talk of “using our sexual attractiveness to other people to possibly bring them into the group.” Here Banner paused. “It sounds like I was in a cult. And yes, to a certain degree I was. We were a cult trying to figure out what the fuck we were.”
14

Livergood eventually kicked Banner out, but he left a mark on his former student. The first issue of Banner’s magazine included an editorial that seemed simultaneously to reflect Livergood’s social critique and to turn it against Livergood himself:

During the 60s there were created “movements” which infiltrated American culture and politics. We were living in an emotionally strife era where racism, sexism, ageism, imperialism, corporatism, psychiatrism, patriotism and nuclear familyism were being attacked ruthlessly and irresponsibly. Movements were created overnight to destroy any new “disease” located in our cultural psyches. People who had the slightest degree of leadership capability amassed alien, atomized individuals to commit their time, rage, money and energy for purposes which these self-appointed leaders assumed to be meaningful.