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Give the American press two acts of protest and an easy way to link them up, and they'll give you a full-blown state of siege. Give them a reclusive evil genius and a drab pack of sad-sack renegades, and they'll give you a sagebrush revolution. Under the circumstances, that's ironic. For what really links these two Montana stories (it's certainly not the ideologies) is the alleged outlaws' shared contempt for just the sort of hyped-up city slickers they've managed to attract in record numbers. Kaczynski, who lived off the grid for decades, has swamped his beloved forest primeval with satellite uplinks, fax machines and cell phones. The Freemen have turned a mellow Western prairie that's as close to government-free as any American region can hope to be into a dense encampment of civil servants.
Folks will be happier once these strangers go. Montanans have a lot to hide, you see, beyond the odd cache of weapons or explosives. Our biggest secret is all this space we have to do pretty much what we please in. Endless space. The fear that fills the average Montanan these days isn't of black U.N. helicopters or dehumanizing technology, but that those stressed-out reporters from the coasts may just take a liking to driving 90, sleeping without the need for pills or earplugs and peeing in the woods. The fear is not that the tourists won't come this summer, scared away by tales of angry madmen, but that these springtime newcomers won't leave--that they'll come for the end of the world and stay. As I did.
Walter Kirn is a novelist and a book critic for New York magazine.