I’m sorry to disagree with Gabriel Garcia Marquez, but I have to take issue with his disdain for the tape recorder. When I visited the Bundy ranch earlier this month, I was unable to see the story in it. The tape saved me.
I went to Nevada to produce a radio piece on resource wars in the desert Southwest. When I landed in Bunkerville, the quantity of contradiction, rumor, and misinformation demolished all sense of story. Even the politicians, on the ground to lend their support, knew nothing about the facts of the case: the environmental lawsuit, the court order to evict Bundy, even, at the time, the fact that he hadn’t been paying his grazing fees.
There was nothing to hold onto. There were no ideas to discuss. If you can’t agree that the BLM is a federal agency, you can’t talk about how to deal with drought; if Obama is a secret Muslim, tracking the populace with microchips, you can’t talk about political disenfranchisement. At a certain point, dizzy with sun and conspiracy, I just sat down and let people say how they felt.
Once the Times piece dropped, I realized that no one had any idea just how out there the statements from the Bundy camp were. Or how they were being cultivated and nurtured by politicians and pundits who were “just asking for the truth.”
I went back through my tapes from Bundy’s rally, which had dragged on so long in the hot sun that even the militia members were abandoning their folding chairs. I re-listened to Cliven’s almost unintelligible half-hour ramble and realized that he really meant that he was receiving revelations from God. Not in the figurative sense.
From thence sprung this quote soup over at Esquire. I wrote it up very quickly, as a crazy-stuff dispatch, the afternoon it was published.
I don’t think I did the scene or the issues justice. I’m a big fan of Jon Ronson’s writings on the fringe, where he manages to get close enough to the extreme and the marginalized to convey their humanity.
I don’t know that I did that here, and the people who are stuck there deserve that.
Someone on a blog wondered how I’d managed to walk into that camp and get people to spill their weird guts. The fact is, they want their stories to be told. They don’t see anything they’re saying as radical or outrageous or impolitic. They fully believe that their cause is urgent, and they were grateful to have someone who wanted to listen. One woman put her hand on my shoulder and cried. “I’m sorry, sweetie. You’re so young. I’m sorry for the world we’ve left you.”
I didn’t want to dismiss everyone there as deluded. I spent the next few days looking into a few of theories I heard—the U.N. operating the BLM; Harry Reid building a solar farm; the possibility that I have a microchip in my brain. (No smoke without fire, right?) By the end of the week, mysteries debunked, I called Brendan Nyhan, a researcher in political conspiracy theories at Dartmouth to try to figure out why so many disparate theories could coalesce around a single event.
“The world being chaotic and risky and hard to understand is disconcerting,” he said. “People who believe a single conspiracy theory are likely to believe multiple conspiracy theories. It’s thought they help people feel better.
“One of the most common tactics in the media is to say, I’m just asking questions, and to use that to suggest conspiracies that cannot be supported. Mainstreaming can potentially broaden its reach.”
Bundy’s followers are a group of people living on the margins. They have tough lives. Many of those I met were veterans; a number were ex-cops; people out of work; people injured or on disability.
And no one is listening to them. No media, they said, except FOX News. Their production van had been parked there for days by the time I arrived, and doubtless stayed there for the week of Sean Hannity dispatches that followed. Their crew likely heard everything that I heard, and then some. And they knew how to capitalize on it without giving voice to any of it.
Only when you hear the fears of the people supporting Bundy do you understand what Hannity is tying to insinuate here. He’s speaking a language that is native to a growing segment of the population that was once considered fringe. Listening to the recordings, I had another chance to understand.