Revolting Texans Who Can’t Get A Life

First time as tragedy, second time as farce.

A splinter faction of nut cases, a subset of the group of loons who call themselves the Republic of Texas, was holding two hostages this weekend near Fort Davis. The so-called Republic of Texas says the state was never legally a part of the union and wants it to act like an independent nation again. At this rate, we’re likely to get kicked out of the union by the other 49 states for having an impermissibly high percentage of hopeless dolts running loose.

It would be funny if these mush-brained dimwits weren’t so heavily armed. In one of the more surreal moments of the crisis (one has to make fine distinctions about degrees of surrealism in this episode), one of the fairly normal lunatics in the Republic of Texas announced that hostage taker Richard McLaren “has gone completely off the deep end.” Right. As opposed to the rest of them, who are perfect models of sanity.

Everyone in Fort Davis - in this case, the phrase is not an exaggeration - has known for months that something like this was going to happen. McLaren was spoiling for a showdown. Although the failure of local authorities to Do Something about him earlier will now be even more heavily criticized, the reason that law enforcement folks are so reluctant to create new martyrs on the gun-nut right is obvious. Judge Lucius Bunton of Midland did put McLaren in the clink for a month in Monahans for his habit of filing phony liens all over the lot, thus fouling up all kinds of commercial transactions. In fact, McLaren had filed a lien on Bunton’s courthouse.

Both houses of the Lege have passed legislation, now in conference committee, providing heavier penalties for filing false liens, using phony warrants and otherwise pretending to be a government. With any luck, the hostage-taking in Fort Davis will play in the media for what it is: the work of a squirrel. But if McLaren had not (in the immortal words of his former associates) “gone completely off the deep end,” if he had not been “impeached” in March as ambassador of the Republic of Texas, we would have the makings for another case of gun-nut martyrdom.

While listening to various “officials” of the Republic of Texas being interviewed about all this, I was struck by how much they resembled the kids who used to get heavily into the game Dungeons and Dragons. Imagination is a wonderful thing, but at what point does it become delusion? When lonely losers use computers to find other lonely losers and create a group fantasy that becomes their entire lives, how far are they from Heaven’s Gate?

The evolution of the Republic of Texas is instructive: The group is an offshoot of the property rights movement, which itself shades gradually from people who sound like every grump you’ve ever heard grousing about “the gummint” to the crackpots in the militias. And there you start finding people obsessed with “The Turner Diaries,” race war and blowing up government buildings.

It’s too easy to dismiss these folks with the old put-down “Get a life.” The problem is that they can’t get a life, and that’s precisely what accounts for the seething anger that then winds up taking such bizarre political turns.

It is a political-economic problem. Half the working population of this country has had falling or stagnant wages for almost 20 years. There is no future for young people who are not headed for college. And yet all one ever hears in the media is about how well people are doing, how the economy is booming, mansions are selling like hotcakes, and big cigars and choice steaks are back in. Tens of millions of people don’t have the right education or skills to participate in a high-technology, global economy, and no one is doing anything about it.

Any hope we ever had that the Clinton administration might do something for working-class people has long since disappeared. Clinton has been in Philadelphia announcing that government programs won’t solve our problems - what we need is … volunteers. Great - we cut support for low-income housing by more than 90 percent and then wonder why so many people are homeless. Jimmy Carter, who knows from volunteerism, is the first to tell you that the thousands of homes built by Habitat for Humanity aren’t even a drop in the bucket of what’s needed.

The original Clinton plan (anyone remember “Putting People First”?) of investing in people has long since given way to the interests of bond traders and deficit hawks. Former Labor Secretary Robert Reich’s wonderful new book, “Locked in the Cabinet,” is both very sad and very funny. In it, he tells what happened to “Putting People First,” to all those brave populist plans for investing $50 billion a year in putting people to work and giving them the skills they need to get jobs that will give them a life.

The jobs are going begging. High-tech firms offer on-site gyms and swimming pools to attract workers with the right skills; they send flowers and slather on the perks. But for almost half of America, those jobs might as well be on the moon.

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