There’s a big dissimilarity between the armed anti-government militias and the Tea Party upright around Ted Cruz,but they share many characteristics tooThe details of this week’s shootout near a remote US federal wildlife refuge in eastern Oregon under armed occupation read like something out of contemporary American fiction. Part Cormac McCarthy post-apocalypse western novel, part Tim LaHaye and Jerry B Jenkins stop-times rapture fantasy, or the gun-toting standoff at the appropriately named Malheur refuge turned tragic and bloody on Tuesday after three weeks of uneasy tension.
Yet this confrontation was not fiction but fact,weird though these events were. They were triggered by a deliberately stageddispute over the federal governments upright to charge rent for grazing land it has owned for years but which the armed militia see as a violent encroachment on private land and individual freedoms. The shootout seems to belong to the world of The Revenant rather than the slick urban modernity of Wall Street and the latest Apple sales figures. The fact that the events took place in one of the more liberal states in the US, albeit one with plenty of back country, and only adds to the weirdness.
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Source: theguardian.com