I have actually been trying to avoid the Oregon militia story, not because I don't know anything about it but because it hits pretty close to home. I live in Oregon, and I have family in Burns. My grandparents used to live there, and my aunt and her partner live there now. Having spent a fair amount of time in Oregon east of the Cascades, I know the people there. They are quintessential Western folk. The mythos of the rugged individual is strong with them, and the stereotypes of the Oregon hipster so brilliantly lampooned in Portlandia cease to apply outside the Willamette Valley. Eastern Oregonians live in small towns and outside of towns on ranches and in some cases farms. They drive trucks. They hunt. They fish. In the case of my grandparents, they drive around looking for rattlesnakes to skin and eat. The walls of my grandfather's machine shop in Burns were decorated with some of the skins.
It doesn't matter that the story of the West would be impossible without the federal government playing the role of idiot landlord as described in this piece from the New York Times, giving away its holdings for nothing or nearly nothing in the 19th and early 20th centuries and still now charging too little for the use of its vast tracts of land. It doesn't matter that conservation benefits everyone. To the people of Eastern Oregon and the other parts of the West from which the militia hail, the government in Washington, D.C. are bumbling idiots at best, tyrannical eco-socialists totally out of touch with the reality of the lives of the locals at worst. In the case of Oregon, the same holds true for their view of the state government, which is under firmly Democratic control due to the heavy concentration of population in deep blue Portland and its suburbs.
Josh Marhsall of Talking Points Memo describes the actions of Ammon Bundy and his buddies as “white privilege performance art”, and I agree completely. The people of the rural West are indeed overwhelmingly white, and were it a group of racial minorities with guns storming a federal building—even, I suspect, one in Harney County, Oregon—I have no doubt that the locals would be demanding the place be stormed at once.
But there is more than white privilege at work. The militiamen personify the great contradiction between the myth of the West, of the toughest of the tough eking a living out of marginal land with no help from anyone outside the local community, and the reality that they have always been dependent of federal largess and, historically, federal troops to protect them from the previous occupants.
I just hope that the occupation won't go on for much longer. It is causing real harm to the community, where schools are closed and people are terrified of being hurt in a violent showdown. The people of Burns want the militia gone. The sheriff's department wants them gone. [Update: The local Native people want them gone from what they consider their land.] They have long since made their point. It's time to go home. You aren't patriots nobly defending helpless people against a tyrannical government. You are privileged assholes with no sense of how you came to acquire that privilege. You are welfare queens demanding the power to give yourselves more unearned benefits.