"We ain't right wing, we ain't left wing. We're trying to get the folks
to see the problem ain't left versus right, it's up versus down."

http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1932076,00.html
Saturday, Oct. 24, 2009
How the Beans of Egypt, Maine, Sprouted a Militia
By Christopher Ketcham / North Parsonsfield

In early October, the Second Maine Militia opened its meeting with the
traditional shooting of the televisions. The 50 or so "members" (there
are no rolls and no one pays dues) chatted quietly as the blasts rang
out. A small cannon was fired into the woods, parting the trees and
shaking the windows of the house nearby.

But no real televisions were harmed. The sets were just cardboard boxes
painted with inane smiley faces and decorated with slogans like "Feel
good!" "Proud to be USA!" "Safe in the homeland!" The aluminum-foil
antennas, however, did collapse miserably from the real gunfire.

The purpose of the annual meeting, the same as it has been since the
militia started in 1995, was to bring together the politics of left and
right over speeches, food, live music, and, of course, live ammo. The
attendees were a wildly diverse group: young activists and anarchists in
black, old beat-up Maine woodsmen with beards to their bellies, retired
white-haired college professors, Second Amendment zealots,
conservatives, libertarians, Marxists. But they all shared the belief
that the U.S. government has lost its moral authority, that both
political parties had "degenerated," as one attendee put it, "into
whores for wealth and arbiters of empire."

"From the beginning, we were the No-Wing Militia," said Michael Chute,
54, who served as range officer for the slaughter of the televisions.
"We ain't right wing, we ain't left wing. We're trying to get the folks
to see the problem ain't left versus right, it's up versus down." He
uses a tool analogy. "A Republican is a standard screw," said Chute. "A
Democrat is a Philips screws. So whichever way you vote you get the screw."

Michael Chute, the host of the event, which took place on the 17 acres
of his property in North Parsonsfield, happens to be married to one of
the better known writers of the last 20 years, Carolyn Chute, 62, author
of five novels. Her first book, The Beans of Egypt, Maine, sold 350,000
copies and made her a darling of the literary establishment in the
1980s. The critics compared her to Faulkner and Steinbeck, because what
she wrote about so well and so convincingly was the back-broken
underclass in Maine, the people who work, like Carolyn once did, in shoe
factories or scrubbing hospital floors or picking potatoes. Her
characters watch helplessly, like Carolyn did, as children die from lack
of healthcare. Indeed, Carolyn and Michael Chute lost a baby in 1982
after the local hospital refused to treat the complications from her
pregnancy.

The couple live in a drafty unfinished house with no hot water. "I
haven't had a hot water heater since 1970," she says. It also has no
septic system (they use an outhouse, even in the bitter Maine winters)
and has only a wood stove for heat. It goes without saying there is no
television, and certainly not a computer. Chute writes her books on
jangled old typewriters. Her husband sometimes hunts moose for their
protein.

A best-selling author, broke and eating moose? They ran short on money
years ago when Michael, due to illness, had to quit his job as the
caretaker of the local cemetery. Carolyn had shared the cash from her
book sales and big advances to help her daughter, mother, and several
friends. After the books no longer sold, what they had left, mostly,
were the family and the friends.

When the gunfire subsided at the October meeting, chili and cold beer
and whiskey came out and someone offered the guests a tall can of
marijuana cookies. For entertainment, Michael twanged his Jew's harp,
the instrument disappearing in his foot-long beard, as a young couple
strummed a song called "F--- You." The scene could have come from
Carolyn's latest book, The School on Heart's Content Road, which
features (among other things) a militia movement that brings
conservatives and hippies together (and polygamists, secessionists,
farmers, home-schoolers, intellectuals, vegans — her vision is
generously inclusive).

Earlier in the festivities, a few people had made speeches. One of the
presenters, a retired professor of economics from Duke University named
Thomas Naylor, 73, who heads up a secessionist movement in Vermont,
suggested that Maine secede from the union. I asked Naylor, who doesn't
own or particularly like guns, what he thought of the Second Maine
Militia. "It's a variation on the Swiss shooting club, with social and
political overlays," he explained. "It's a fairly benign way of
confronting one's powerlessness."

Naylor's secession call — an appeal for local control — went over well.
"F--- America," said Will Neils, 32, a Green Party activist from
Lincolnville, Me. "What have they done for us lately? Bush f---ed us,
Clinton f---ed us. Let's cut the United States loose and let it drift
downstream." Maine should stand up for Mainers, said Neils. In his view,
the common enemy uniting Mainers, especially in the impoverished
communities Neils grew up in, is government "run by and for the rich and
on the backs of the poor." "I live beside conservatives," said Neils,
"and there's no reason I can't find intense political ground with them.
When we get together, we talk about community, how to take care of our
people, feed our people. There's no place in that community for the
likes of J.P. Morgan and Goldman Sachs."

Michael Chute kindled a fire as night fell and the party was ending, and
I sat down with his wife, who wore big boots and a blue bandanna that
tied back long kinky hair. "We should secede," she said, almost to
herself. Over her jungle-camo jacket she strung a bandolier that held
what looked like the 7.62 mm rounds for her AK-47, the rifle she calls
"my baby" because "it kicks just a little bit and has a deep sound." But
there was nothing deadly about her ammo: the shell casings were affixed
with pencil points. "The point being," the novelist explained, "that we
should make our pencils our bullets."

--
Dan Clore

New book: _Weird Words: A Lovecraftian Lexicon_:
http://tinyurl.com/yd3bxkw
My collected fiction: _The Unspeakable and Others_
(Wait for the new edition: http://hplmythos.com/ )
Lord Weÿrdgliffe & Necronomicon Page:
http://tinyurl.com/292yz9
News & Views for Anarchists & Activists:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/smygo