The Ragged Edge Taking Up Where Thomas Paine Left Off
Profile: Richard Brown
Five trillion dollars of debt. Trade policies that drive jobs out of the country. The United Nations calling member nations “states.”
Like breaking glass on the porch, these brought Richard T. Brown out of his Republican recliner three years ago, anxious and afraid.
Ross Perot spoke for him first, but Brown, 72, soon found his own voice: the Patriots’ Notebook published from his Spokane home since March.
So this is how he’s spending his retirement: $125 for toner for the printer humming on his porch; $40 to mail the free monthly newsletter to 120 readers; $30 for books like “How Unelected Central Bankers are Governing the Changed World Economy.”
He reads the Wall Street Journal, Business Week, Ralph Nader’s Public Citizen, what he likes from the John Birch Society and, always, the monthly, single-spaced report from the Treasury Department, tallying the public debt of the United States: $4,970,756,000,000.
Where to begin on that? At home, he says. His home. Eliminate cost of living increases for entitlements - like military retirement - and automatic pay raises for government workers.
Since retiring as a lieutenant colonel in 1964, Brown has collected nearly three times what he made in the Air Force. It’s been a “bonanza,” he says, allowing him to work as a commodities trader and researcher, raise three children and settle in a 1911 South Hill home.
“The government’s been good to me, too good,” he says.
“If you call yourself a patriot, you should, at this time, make your personal desires secondary to preserving the nation,” he writes.
After Oklahoma City exploded, friends wondered exactly what he meant by the word “patriot” in his mailer.
Brown has always meant the oldfashioned kind: those buried with Marquis de LaFayette’s soldiers in his boyhood town of Norwich, Conn., where Benedict Arnold lived and homes retain the white chimneys with green tops marking British sympathizers.
No such signs identify threats today. So the Mensa member lists them himself: NAFTA, GATT, Bill Clinton and every Republican presidential candidate except Pat Buchanan, whom he likes for his protectionist stance.
Brown fears the steady loss of jobs - by export and obsolescence - will break families apart and boost crime, creating a frightened populace vulnerable to a police state or dictatorship. When the jobs disappear, so will middle-class America.
Left will be a “world plantation” where the rich have their riches and the poor have each other.
“I have long resisted the conspiracy-type mentality but I think I’m finally convinced that there are people who act in concert to guide us toward a ‘one-world’ involvement with other nations,” he says.
It hardly helps when a U.N. delegation declares Yellowstone Park a “World Heritage Area.”
So Brown keeps printing his Notebook, practicing original thinking and patriotism.
“I think a patriot is a person who treats his country the same way he treats his family. He cares for it, protects it, provides for it and defends it if necessary.”
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