Going nuts

When examining cases of extremist violence, I usually restrict myself to measured terms that accurately describe the conditions that lead to such acts. But sometimes, the only thing that can accurately be said is that the perpetrator simply went nuts.

That was the case with last Friday's rampage with an armored bulldozer by an enraged Colorado man who destroyed a number of businesses in the little town of Granby before finally becoming trapped. The man, a 52-year-old muffler-shop owner named Marvin Heemeyer, then shot himself.

By now, of course, this story is more than a week old (I was out of contact when it happened), which means it has already faded from public memory. But there is a quality to it that is worth a longer look -- particularly in certain aspects of the reaction to it.

There was relatively little discussion of the incident among bloggers, but over at the right-wing transmitter site Free Republic, there have been several threads devoted to discussing Heemeyer's rampage. Many of those posting have, of course, expressed their disgust with Heemeyer. But others, interestingly enough, have tried to make him out a martyr.

One thread in particular is devoted to painting Heemeyer as a victim of tyrannical local government officials:

Local resident and former muffler shop owner Marvin Heemeyer had finally had enough of being pushed around and told to go to hell by local politicians and public servants, who refer to themselves as "public officials" -- the people in charge!

Many of the commenters of on this thread continued in this vein, comparing Heemeyer to the Founding Fathers and other "patriots." A poster at another thread compared Heemeyer to Carl Drega (and this same thread at one time contained a link to "The Ballad of Carl Drega," but it has been since removed).

Carl Drega, you may recall, made headlines in 1997 when he went on a killing rampage in the little New Hampshire town of Columbia. He murdered four people -- a judge, a newspaper editor, and two state troopers -- at with a shotgun at point blank range before he was himself shot down. At his property, investigators "found at least 600 pounds of ammonium nitrate 'in a fairly elaborate system of tunnels' built beneath and adjacent to" Drega's home.

In short order, Drega -- who was a devotee of a variety of right-wing conspiracy theories -- became a martyr figure for the far right, a "true patriot" who decided he'd had enough and struck out on his own against government tyranny. These kinds of martyrs are the stock in trade for radical right-wing propagandists, both among white supremacists and Patriot/militia "constitutionalists" -- for earlier versions, see Gordon Kahl, Robert Mathews, Randy Weaver, David Koresh, and Benjamin Smith.

Drega's tale was even touted in the title of a book by Vin Suprynowycz that was a collection of extremist anti-government essays. Since then, Drega's name crops up whenever the far right talks about local zoning and land-use issues.

It appears the same sort of hero status will be Marvin Heemeyer's fate. See, for instance, this longer essay at the conspiracist site Rense.com (by the same author as the material that appeared at Free Republic) building a case for Heemeyer as a "Patriot" martyr.

Thus, it probably won't be surprising to see, in a little while, books and songs devoted to Heemeyer as the "little guy" who stood up to government tyranny by welding himself into a large machine and detroying his neighbors' businesses. Likewise, don't be surprised if we see a few more homemade "killdozers" cropping up around the landscape. Nothing inspires copycats, after all, like a good media event.