Author Carolyn Chute reads letters while her husband cleans her AK-47.
This year's meeting of the Second Maine Militia opened on a clear October day with the traditional shooting of the televisions. Fifty or so members stood around chatting quietly as the blasts rang out. A small cannon was fired into the woods, shaking the windows of a house nearby. No real televisions were harmed; the sets were merely cardboard boxes painted with inane smiley faces and slogans like FEEL GOOD!, SAFE IN THE HOMELAND! and PROUD TO BE USA!, their aluminum-foil antennas withering in the gunfire.
The militia was started in 1995 as a political action group that organized protests against corporate power in Maine government. The event's attendees were a wildly diverse bunch: black-clad anarchists and bearded Maine woodsmen; retired college professors and Second Amendment zealots; conservatives, libertarians and Marxists. They all shared the belief that the U.S. government has lost its moral authority--that both political parties have "degenerated," as an attendee put it, "into whores for wealth and arbiters of empire."
"From the beginning, we were the 'no wing' militia," said Michael Chute, 54, a co-host of the event and range officer for the TV massacre. "We ain't right wing, we ain't left wing. We're trying to get the folks to see the problem ain't left vs. right; it's up vs. down." To use an analogy: "A Republican is a standard screw," said Chute. "A Democrat is a Phillips screw. So whichever way you vote, you get the screw."
Chute owns his property--17 acres of woodland near the New Hampshire border--with his wife, author Carolyn Chute, 62. Her first book, The Beans of Egypt, Maine, sold 350,000 copies and made her a darling of the literary establishment in the 1980s. Critics compared her to Faulkner and Steinbeck for her depiction of Maine's backbroken underclass--the people who work, as Carolyn once did, in shoe factories or by scrubbing hospital floors or picking potatoes, whose children die from lack of health insurance. (The Chutes lost a baby in 1982 after the local hospital refused to treat complications from her pregnancy.)
The couple ran short on money years ago when Michael had to quit his job as caretaker of the local cemetery because of illness. Carolyn had shared the cash from her advances and book sales to help her daughter, mother and several friends. The couple now lives in a drafty unfinished house with no hot water or septic system. Carolyn writes her books on jangly old typewriters. Her husband sometimes hunts moose for their protein. It goes without saying that there is no television.
After the gunfire subsided, chili and cold beer and whiskey came out; someone passed around a tall can of marijuana cookies. For entertainment, Michael twanged his Jew's harp, the instrument disappearing into his foot-long beard, as a young folksinger strummed a song called "F___ You." In a year of economic hardship in the heartland and vein-popping bonuses on Wall Street, the message hit home for many attendees. "I live beside conservatives," said Will Neils, a 32-year-old Green Party activist from Lincolnville, Maine, "and there's no reason I can't find intense political ground with them. When we get together, we talk about community, how to take care of our people, feed our people. There's no place in that community for the likes of JPMorgan and Goldman Sachs."