perfidy

Mike Hendrix at Cold Fury has a great post up about Eric Rudolph, Domestic Terrorist. It's a response to an Andrew Sullivan piece dicussing the role of fundamentalism in fostering terrorism. Hendrix sez: 

"He's right on that as far as it goes, but he's missed something here, I think. He's assuming that most people around here share Rudolph's fundamentalist hatred of abortion, gays, blacks, etc. And while some most certainly do, Sullivan fails to consider the visceral mistrust and even outright hatred these country people feel for the Feds and especially the FBI, ATF, and IRS - institutions that they may not even know the names or acronyms for but can recognize employees of from a mile away. Anybody from those agencies would have a hard time getting the correct time of day if they had to rely on asking the locals to find out. You can double down on the veiled animosity and politely cooperative non-cooperation if the person asking does so with a Yankee accent. And most of those folks think I talk like a Yankee. If you've ever heard me speak, you know quite well that I do not."

On the same subject, the New York Times discussed yesterday how the people in Rudolph's home town helped him hide out for the last few years. Although done in that inimitable "awww, ain't they quaint" style the Times is so good at, the article deals fairly well with this deep-rooted distrust of outsiders. It mentions signs on restaurants, "Pray for Eric Rudolph," and quotes an old timer as saying "I didn't see him bomb nobody. You can't always trust the feds." Another man is quoted as saying, "He was a man who stood for what he believed in," said Bo Newton, a short-order cook in Andrews. "If he came to my door, I would've given him food and never said a word." A reasonable person might well ask, "What the hell? The guy's a terrorist!" 

This is exactly what I was talking about a few weeks ago (archives are probably hosed...again) when I said that "homeland" is not not not an intrinsically American concept, not like the Feds use it anyway. Like I said-- my homeland is Northeastern Ohio, not the USA. That's probably where I would end up if I were in bad trouble and needed help of the duffel bag and automatic rifle kind. In the same way, Eric Rudolph's homeland is Western North Carolina. In many areas, these ties are far tighter and more compelling than merely political or civil bonds. Family, clan, church, neighborhood, all of these take precedence over what the Federal Gubmint so laughably calls our "Homeland," and they would do well to remember that when they move to prosecute Rudolph. So why would North Carolinans harbor a known terrorist? Three reasons:

1. Because he's family. Sometimes blood is what matters most, for better or worse.
2. Because he bombed a gay bar, an abortion clinic, and the Olympics. I'd imagine a lot of people in the hills of NC, even if they aren't gonna go bomb a clinic themselves, can't find much to get worked up about if someone else holds back the tide of moral disorder and one-worldism.
3. Because f*** the damn Feds.

Final note: I'm with Hendrix-- good moonshine is hard to beat. I've had it exactly once, but daaaaamn. I need to find someone who goes to Tennessee on business from time to time. 

Another final note. Historian David Hackett Fisher devotes a few hundred pages to the origins of the culture Eric Rudolph comes from, in his book "Albion's Seed." Although overlong and overambitious, there's a lot to like and a lot to learn from it.