I always try to find out how the hotel works: How does it fit into the community? What do the local people think of it? What are its biggest problems? The culture of the hotel may be a
hybrid, but it often has its own integrity and charm.

I found just such a hotel recently, and am moved to write about it because it also has a truly amazing setting: an ancient Egyptian city in an isolated desert oasis just a few miles from the border of Libya. The name of the hotel goes right over the top: the Siwa Safari Paradise Resort.

The owners are an upper-middle-class Egyptian couple who started coming to Siwa because they love the desert. Mustapha Abdal Azid is an elegant, passionate man — a retired diplomat and banana farmer who was part of the junta of young army officers who overthrew King Farouk. His wife, Zakia, is a creamy-skinned Scandinavian woman he met 35 years ago in Italy. They say they don’t quite know how the resort got started: It just grew from a plan to build a compound for their extended family. Mustapha says he got caught up in what Egyptians call “Umbrella Architecture” — drawing lines with the point of an umbrella in the sand. He demonstrates this by following, with a pointed finger, the sinuous path that winds through a group of bungalows. “You know why I kept going?” he says. “I figured out how to build this many cottages without cutting down a single tree.”

I’m tempted to say that the very best thing about the hotel is its delicious food and especially its desserts, but in truth it’s the setting — the oasis of Siwa’s extraordinary place in time. Siwa was an important center for both the ancient Greek and Egyptian worlds around 500 B.C. Later it was populated by a tribe of Berbers who migrated from the western Sahara and stayed isolated from the rest of the world for 13 centuries. And now its growing population of 23,000 people is about to make perhaps the most dramatic change: the transition to the modern world.

It won’t be long until Siwa’s history will have to be roped off and managed for tourists, but right now you can go to the Oracle of Amoun — where Alexander the Great came with an army of men and horses to find out if he was the son of Zeus — and stand amid a pile of stones and carvings just lying around in the sand. And unlike other tourist spots in Egypt, you can walk around town without being hassled for money. Siwans, who speak their own unique language, exist with foreigners peacefully. At the same time, traditions persist: Women in Siwa get married at age 14 and afterwards practice a form of Purdah so extreme that no man other than a relative may ever see them. Olive oil in Siwa is still made for export by crushing olives with a grinding stone turned by a donkey.

Last winter, my husband, step-daughter and I left Cairo for Siwa early in the morning (before rush hour) and drove north to the Mediterranean and then west along the coast, passing some of the world’s most beautiful beaches. We didn’t stop much because what had happened to those beaches was pretty depressing: Thousands and thousands of half-built, architecturally undistinguished vacation apartments and condos were lined up like Lego structures on the sand. We were happy to reach the turn-off to Siwa and even happier when all signs of human habitation stopped. We drove the last 200 miles across a desert that seemed to have no geographical features. Although we were within shouting distance of one of America’s prime bogeyman — Moammar Gadhafi — we cruised through a land of stillness and light in a peaceful, happy trance.

We saw the first signs of civilization in the glow of a sunset and, in the far distance, a mirage: a huge lake, or even an ocean, shimmering on the horizon. By the side of the road were a few treeless mud and concrete buildings. If this was Siwa, we said, where were the springs? The palm trees? Almost without warning, we came to a bustling town square, with men and children riding around in donkey carts. Overlooking the square was the ruin of a 12th century mud fortress; we had indeed traveled back in time.

Despite the exoticness of the setting, I had a feeling of dij` vu. The few
tourists in town were young backpackers looking as they did when I was among them
in the l960s: impossibly gorgeous and unkempt. There were some small, funky hotels
and a couple of outdoor restaurants with menus (beefburger, french fries, etc.)
written on fading signs. For backpackers, I learned, Siwa is an exotic place to
relax and stay warm in the winter, live cheaply in an ancient and fascinating
culture and — because Siwa’s spring water is absolutely pure — recover from
various illnesses.

In my 20s I would have preferred to stay in those $7-a-night hotels,
but now I was thrilled to find the Siwa Safari Paradise Resort just off the main
town square, down a dirt road lined with date palms. The resort was brand new and
deliciously empty, and featured a free-form, spring-fed swimming pool. A charming cottage
for two with a truly wonderful breakfast cost only $60 a night.

That night we gobbled down the fresh cucumbers, tomatoes, olives and cheese
we had been afraid to eat in the rest of Egypt, and then went into the garden to
play cards. There we found a group of Egyptian bureaucrats and businessmen in
suits and ties talking intently around a table. It didn’t take long to hear the
news: Within a year, the Egyptian government was going to open up a nearby
military airport to civilians. We were dismayed by the news, but at the same
time thankful that we had arrived in Siwa at the perfect moment in time.

For the next few days we rented bicycles from one of the cheap hotels in town
and headed off on journeys even further back in time. I am not a history buff,
but history in Siwa, as in all of Egypt, has a way of staring you in the face.
Greek, Egyptian, Bedouin and Berber artifacts and tales swirled around us in an exciting
stew. At the Oracle of Amoun, which was on a hill, we saw just how vast the place
was — over 23,000 people and 400,000 date and olive trees. The lake we’d seen
coming in turned out to be no mirage: It was a huge salt lake. Too huge. The
Egyptian government has a project in the works to get rid of Siwa’s rising
ground water by pumping it hundreds of miles away into something called the Quattar
Depression.

We stayed at the Oracle for a while, entranced by the mysteries that seem to
live in the very air of Egypt: Who is God? What
is our fate? And how perfect can the experience of eating a ripe tomato be? We
also found Siwa’s Mountain of the Dead, which had some tombs dating from the
Ptolemaic period (525-332 B.C.) and earlier. A guardian at the site showed us the
head (complete with hair) of a mummy.

Back at the hotel we learned that one of Mustapha and Zakia’s grown sons had come
home from a hospital in Alexandria, where he had gone after he had broken his arm in a
dune-buggy accident. Although we had figured out that non-Siwan Egyptians were outsiders in
Siwa much like ourselves, dozens of local people came by to offer Mustapha and
Zakia sympathy and help — some bringing not only food but money. We missed some
Siwa stories because of all the uproar, but Mustapha did find time to tell us a
few.

My favorite was about the Greek woman archaeologist named Liana Souvaltsis,
who spent many years excavating in Siwa, looking for Alexander’s burial site. It
seems to be an accepted fact that Alexander the Great wanted to be buried in Siwa,
but he was in Jerusalem when he died, and on the way back to Egypt his body was
kidnapped from its 2,000-member funeral procession. Some years ago, the
woman held a press conference in Siwa to announce that she had finally found
Alexander’s tomb. It was a huge discovery and there was much excitement in the
archaeological world, but then came the time for the second press conference in Cairo, where she
was going to reveal her proof. Souvaltsis never showed up.

We learned, too, that for the past
several years another unsuccessful archaeologist has been showing up, donating his
camels to the local people for a tasty barbecue. He is a German man who makes the
long trek from Luxor to Siwa each summer, crossing hundreds of miles of desert in
search of the remains of an army of 50,000 men. The men were sent to destroy
Siwa’s oracle by the king of Persia but were never heard from or seen again.

And we found out about one very intriguing local custom: Each October there is a three-day festival
during which Siwans must settle all of their past year’s disputes.

Mustapha also found time to talk to me about the problem of what was going to
happen to Siwa after the onslaught of tourism. “You tell me,” he said, “what
better way is there for the local people here to become economically independent?
Selfishly speaking, I’d like to see Siwans keep their culture intact — it’s good
for business. But how can you say that you hope people will remain poor and
uneducated? I think we just have to try to manage development. Keep it small
scale and in good taste.”

“But look at what’s happened to the north coast,” I said.

“I hate what’s happened to the whole north coast,” he agreed. “I just hate
it. I used to come to Marsa Matrouh (the closest town to Siwa, 190 miles
away) when it was the most beautiful place on earth — just some Bedouin tents and
a few fishermen on the white sand and that beautiful turquoise water. Now I don’t
even like to see what’s happened — I try to avoid looking at it whenever I drive
through.”

“So how can you want development?”

“Maybe one of the good international hotels will come. Maybe they can do it
right.”

“A Sheraton?”

“If Sheraton would build the right kind of hotel, why not? For years Siwa
has been dependent on aid. People cheered when Nassar came here in the l950s and
promised the people he’d build a road. Now we have electricity and even
television — the modern world has come in. We’re working with the local elders
here who want development; the young people want it too. There are only a very
few people in the middle who are resisting.”

On our last night in Siwa we heard some singing and drumming and I found out
that it was a “show” being put on at one of the backpacker hotels. I
tried to imagine a group of young Siwan men drumming and singing happily with the
laid-back young backpackers, but all I could think about was a refueling stopover
I once made on the island of Biak off the coast of Irian Jaya. It was 4 in the
morning and three men came into the airport waiting room dressed in grass skirts
and necklaces of bone. They walked over to a corner and started stomping their
feet and playing ukuleles. Out of embarrassment everyone eventually went over to
a duty-free shop and stared at the perfumes desultorily.

I’m rooting for Siwa, but still — go there as soon as you can.

And from here, the Clinton administration is being seen — even by its closest friends — as a muscle-bound naif, lacking the courage of its own often-stated political convictions to secure a true and lasting peace.

Arabs have not forgotten America’s pledge in 1991, after being helped by Arab allies to subdue a belligerent Iraq, to make an evenhanded effort toward an Arab-Israeli settlement. Here in Morocco, one of America’s oldest and closest allies in the region, that promise was symbolized by the 1994 Middle East Economic Summit in Casablanca, a gathering of Israeli and Arab leaders and business people that translated the hopeful rhetoric of regional peace and economic cooperation into something tangible.

Three years after the Casablanca summit, Arab expectations lie dashed. The only tangible result of the Gulf War victory seems to be the unrelieved suffering of the Iraqi people. No Arab leader trusts or supports Saddam Hussein, but a strong sense of Arab and Muslim solidarity compels them to side with their powerless Iraqi brethren. As a result, President Clinton’s bid for support for the use of military force to punish Saddam for his noncompliance with United Nations weapons inspectors is getting a very cool reception here. Even Kuwait, the victim of Saddam’s 1990 aggression, will not support the use of more U.S. force against Iraq.

Instead, Arabs are asking, where is the American president’s outrage over Israel’s dismal record of noncompliance in the Middle East peace accords? Ever since Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu assumed power in 1996, the U.S.-sponsored process has faltered and stalled, largely as a result of Israel’s continued construction of Jewish settlements, the wholesale demolition of Arab houses and other provocative acts. Netanyahu’s botched attempt to assassinate a Hamas political leader in Amman last month outraged Jordan’s moderate King Hussein, once Israel’s staunchest defender in the Arab world.

What has the Clinton administration done to protect its investment in Middle East peace, Arabs ask, other than to slap Israel with the mildest of rebukes? It should have come as no surprise to the White House that despite its best efforts only a smattering of low-level Arab officials attended this month’s Middle East Economic Summit in Qatar. Such regional gatherings, with all their attendant political symbolism, cannot be divorced from the glaring absence of any meaningful peace process, Arab officials say. To attend, they add, would have just given Netanyahu another concession he could pocket without offering anything in return.

Here in Morocco, the prevalence of such anger and frustration toward the United States is noteworthy. In 1777, before the outcome of the American Revolution was clear, Morocco became the first country in the world to recognize American independence, the foundation for the longest alliance with the United States in the entire Arab world. Before Egyptian President Anwar Sadat made his historic journey to Jerusalem in 1977, it was Morocco’s King Hassan who hosted the secret Israeli-Egyptian talks that made the visit possible. In addition to hosting the first Middle East economic summit, Hassan established low-level diplomatic relations with Israel and welcomed a permanent Israeli representative in Rabat. Other than the U.S. ambassador, no other foreign envoy enjoys such access to the Moroccan monarch.

The man who put together the Casablanca summit is Andre Azulay, Hassan’s top economic counselor, an elegantly tailored, French-speaking Morrocan Jew with close friends and family in Israel. “Today, I feel like all my work has been in vain,” he told Salon. “You can see the distance from where we were before, how everything has been broken and hurt. Today, because of Israel’s policies, there is no more momentum.” Azulay pauses, then adds: “We have special credentials in this matter. When we say that the peace process is in trouble, people have to listen to us.”

King Hassan places the blame for that lack of momentum squarely at Clinton’s feet. During a meeting last month in which U.S. Middle East envoy Dennis Ross urged the king to send a delegation to the Qatar economic summit, Hassan angrily accused the Clinton administration of blithely standing by while Netanyahu was allowed to backslide on one commitment after another, and of violating Washington’s solemn promise to remain evenhanded.

“This is a guy who went out on a limb for peace long before any other Arab leader,” departing U.S. Ambassador Marc Ginsberg told Salon. “He can’t understand why the United States won’t protect its own investment in the region, why it’s letting Netanyahu change the rules of the game. This is a guy who doesn’t like the look of the limb anymore. It’s a limb where he can get shot.”

The same goes for other moderate Arab leaders who realize that the future depends on their ability to lift their people out of the crushing poverty that fuels Islamic extremism. How do they explain the lack of dividends from what is being seen in the coffeehouses and bazaars as a blatantly unfair peace process — a point the extremists are quick to exploit?

They are also looking with increasing scorn at Clinton’s apparent reluctance to get tougher with Netanyahu. According to a recent poll, more than 80 percent of American Jews support further Israeli withdrawals from the occupied West Bank land to further the peace process. Moreover, American Jews, 90 percent of whom belong to the Reform or Conservative denominations, are outraged over Netanyahu’s plans to support a proposed religious law that will effectively disenfranchise them in Israel. And when the chairman of the congressional appropriations committee warned Netanyahu’s government that the $3 billion of U.S. aid would be cut unless it handed over an American Jew suspected of a murder outside Washington, D.C., there was barely a peep of protest either in Congress or among American Jewish groups. So, goes the thinking here, isn’t it time for Clinton to take on an Israeli government that not only inspires contempt almost everywhere, but even speaks for less and less Jews?

A tougher U.S. posture toward Netanyahu would be greatly welcomed in the dispirited Arab world. There are risks: American Jews and Congress could circle the wagons (and hurt Al Gore’s chances in 2000). But after President Clinton’s constant reminders about the need for the Arabs to take risks for peace, he would be well-advised to take a few of his own. Lest the kind of sideshow seen this week in Luxor become the main event.

Are we about to see more and even more violent terrorist attacks in Egypt, which has been a relative model of political stability in the Arab world? Salon spoke with Judith Miller, former Cairo bureau chief for the New York Times, and author of “God Has Ninety-Nine Names: Reporting From a Militant Middle East” (Touchstone, 1997).

Who is this group, the Gama’a al-Islamiya, which reportedly claimed responsibility for the attack, and what does it want?

They very much want what most of the militant Islamic groups want: They want power; they want Sharia (Islamic holy law) as the law of the land. They want an end to the peace treaty with Israel, they want an end to American aid, and to any American presence in the country. They want a “radical Islamic state,” like Sudan or Iran. It’s your standard Islamic militant movement.

Why attack foreign tourists? That alone won’t bring down the government, will it?

Tourism is one of Egypt’s biggest industries. Their thinking is, if they can bring tourism to its knees, that will make the poverty in the country more unbearable than it is, so the people will rise up against the state. This attack strikes at the heart of the system, no doubt about that.

The Egyptian government is reported to be “in shock” about the attack. Why?

Because the group had been pushed out of Cairo to the “periphery” of the country. But as you can see from this astonishing operation, they have deep roots, in the south, in Upper Egypt, or they wouldn’t have been able to pull anything like this off.

What does the group have “deep roots” in?

They are rooted in the kind of misery and poverty of the villages surrounding these great monuments, like at Luxor. The militants have always been strong in Upper Egypt, which is more tribal and just about every family has one member who has some kind of Islamist connection. It’s much harder for the police to root them out than in Cairo.

President Mubarak’s cabinet went into emergency session Monday night. How are they going to explain what happened?

Obviously, Gama’a al-Islamiya is not under control, like the government has claimed. But let’s be clear here. As terrible as this attack is, I don’t think we’re anywhere close to the situation in ’93 and ’94, when they were operating at will, blowing up cafe drinkers in Cairo. As terrible as this attack was, and I don’t mean to diminish it, it’s not a systemic problem, like the wave of terrorism that gripped the country in 1994. As far as we know, at this point, it’s a tragic, but isolated incident.

So we’re not looking at an Algerian situation here?

No. In Algeria, you have a kind of civil war. This is not a civil war in Egypt. Most Egyptians do not support this kind of terror. They are appalled by it. And much of their livelihood depends on tourism. In that sense, this was a counterproductive attack.

Don’t they have any support outside the south — in the military, or in schools?

We haven’t heard that they have support in the military. They did have tremendous support among teachers, but one of the things that Mubarak has been doing — quietly — is to go after Islamists within the school system. The government realized that they could be winning the battle against the armed group but losing the war if you have Islamic militants teaching your young people. About a third of Egypt’s children still go to school in a kind of religious separate school system where they get a much stronger dose of Islamic orthodoxy. That tends to be a problem.

The other, bigger Islamist group is the Muslim Brotherhood. How does it relate to Gama’a al-Islamiya?

Gama’a al-Islamiya is a spinoff group from the Muslim Brotherhood — which is the largest Islamist movement in the world. I am certain that the Brotherhood will condemn this action. They are not the same people who did it.

How influential is the Muslim Brotherhood?

They have to be very careful how they operate. They are not really permitted to function politically on their own; they have to ally themselves with other parties in order to gain a voice. But if there were a real, free election, the Muslim Brotherhood would do very, very well. Some people say they would even win.

Apart from stoking the fears of tourists, what effect could this attack have on foreign investment. Do the Japanese, for example, have significant holdings in Egypt?

Yes, especially in oil and gas. Amoco is bigger. But I don’t think foreign businesses will be especially shaken by this attack. I mean, Amoco has even gone into Algeria.

Welcome to the spirited second meeting of Chute’s 2nd Maine Militia, a
loosely-organized and decidedly non-partisan group of pro-gun, anti-big
business citizens that just may give American politics a much-needed poke
in the ass.

Carolyn Chute, at age 49, isn’t running for anything, nor is her
“Wicked Good Militia,” as she likes to call it, backing any candidates. But
this shy, genial woman, dressed as usual in a frumpy skirt, mud boots and
bandana, seems committed to reminding voters that the real divide in
American politics isn’t Left vs. Right — it’s Up vs. Down. Chute likens
the grim American economic climate to a “burning house,” and worries that
too many people have quit trying to run rescue missions, instead standing
off to the side talking about tangential issues: “gay rights, guns, welfare
mums, and drugs.” Her brand of optimistic, let’s-band-together economic
populism neatly skirts Buchanan’s bigotry and exploitative fear, and takes
direct aim at the kind of class issues that make most politicians flee in
blind panic.

Chute’s ideas are clearly resonating in ingrown, isolated rural Maine,
where unemployment is high, where most have been left behind by the tech
revolution, and where logging companies, Chute says, “are threatening to
turn the land into a moonscape.” When you mix in Chute’s innate sense of
theater — meetings begin with a bang on a tin trash can lid, the hall is
strewn with placards and signs listing the sins of various CEOs, and her
stern, bearded, rifle-bearing husband Michael greets visitors at the door
wearing a tricornered patriot’s hat — the militia’s hardscrabble appeal is
just about undeniable.

Those who’ve come to hear her, on this recent Sunday, run the
ideological gamut from bespectacled former union organizers to stooped,
demure local janitors. But as she speaks, Chute pointedly keeps one eye on
a gaggle of big, beefy, unkempt men loitering by the door — men who seem
to have sprung up directly from her now-classic first novel, a vivid
chronicle of rural poverty titled “The Beans of Egypt, Maine.” (“If it
runs, a Bean will shoot it,” Chute wrote of these brawling backwoods men.
“If it falls, a Bean will eat it.”)

“I know some of you people here are shy,” she says, glancing over at
the would-be Beans. They’re what Chute likes to think of as her core
constituency — round, spikily-bearded men who’ve emerged from the
surrounding woods and trailer parks, dressed in so many grimy layers of
clothing that they seem almost like black denim artichokes. “We want shy
people in this militia. We want you to show up when we confront
politicians, and to bring your grave silence along with you. Grave silence
is far more powerful than the same old voices yapping away.”

The men nod and stare back at her, suddenly graver and silenter than
ever.

Carolyn Chute clearly doesn’t mind, as militia member and Maine
journalist Catherine Sengel puts it, “scaring off yuppies.” In fact, Sengel
feels that Chute’s focus on guns serves a pair of distinct purposes –
beyond the fact that Chute’s husband loves backyard target practice. “It
keeps away the same old tired bohemian intelligentsia types,” she says.
“And it attracts the Mainers she really wants. Up here, the disenfranchised
are generally the people with guns.”

Chute puts it another way. “It’s a constitutional and a cultural
issue,” she says, in an interview shortly before the meeting. “People
around here have guns, both for hunting and to protect themselves. And
frankly, we don’t want the government to have guns and not us. We don’t
want the government to have anything we don’t have, because government
isn’t We The People anymore. And guns won’t go away, anymore than abortion
ever has, or marijuana.”

Coming from anyone else — Pat Buchanan, let’s say — such a
pro-buckshot posture would seem coolly cynical. But little about Chute or
her life seems in any way calculated; she has lived the kind of grinding
poverty she writes about in her three earthy and plainspoken novels, “The
Beans of Egypt, Maine” (1985), “Letourneau’s Used Auto Parts” (1988) and
“Merry Men” (1994).

A high school dropout at age 16, Chute married
almost immediately and
gave birth to her first child, a daughter. The marriage ended in divorce;
Chute survived with her daughter by working a long series of dead-end jobs
– including plucking chickens, driving a school bus, and working on a
potato farm, rarely making more than $2,000 a year. It was only after marrying her current husband, an illiterate jack-of-all-trades named
Michael Chute, in 1978, that she completed high school at night and began
taking classes at the University of Maine. She began writing stories while
attending a writing workshop there, and eventually had fiction published in
magazines like “Grand Street” and “Ploughshares” before beginning work on
“The Beans of Egypt, Maine.” “This book was involuntarily researched,” she
said in an interview at the time. “I have lived poverty. I didn’t choose
it. No one would choose humiliation, pain, and rage.”

Over the years, Chute has poured that humiliation, pain and rage into
her fiction. But she has retained a peppery political streak, dashing off
heated Op-Ed pieces to New England newspapers, and (famously) teaching one
of her dogs to growl at the mention of the name Reagan.

These days, she says, she’s rather be working on her fourth novel,
which she has partially completed, than talking politics. But for now, the
militia is taking nearly all of her time. “I’ve spent $1,000 on all this
photocopying and whatnot, and I’m broke,” she says. “But it’s worth it.
There is no candidate out there who is addressing these issues, and who
isn’t taking corporate gifts, who isn’t owned,” she says. “Voting isn’t
enough anymore. We can only vote for the clowns that are put up there. I
don’t expect anything to change soon — we’re talking about the kind of
revolution that will take place over decades, not in the next election.”

It doesn’t help the militia speed things up, some members grumble,
that Chute doesn’t own a telephone, and that people are forced to write or
drive out to her house to contact her. “Not having a phone is her defense
mechanism,” Sengel says. “She’s too kind. If she has a phone, she’ll talk
for an hour to whomever calls.”

Thus far, the 2nd Maine Militia’s official membership totals only a
few dozen, and it isn’t clear, beyond a few scheduled rallies and meetings,
where exactly its energies will be directed.

Watching Chute in action, however, you quickly come to understand why
she has touched a chord in so many Mainers, including a 61-year-old local
boiler operator named Carl Adams from nearby Buxton. “It’s good to see
people finally getting together and standing up for something,” Adams says.
“It’s time to talk about some new, different ideas. This woman has the kind
of spirit we really need.”

Watching from the back row with Adams, Chute’s message comes off as a
funky mixture of homespun humor and more serious economic analysis. One
minute she plays to the crowd, suggesting that everyone pry themselves off
the “big green paper nipple” and drawing laughs with riffs on how products
are getting progressively worse. “Everything’s getting cheesier,” she says,
laughing. “I just bought a new snow shovel, and it broke! I admit it was a
heavy snow day, but what’s going on? It was probably made in Hawaii.” In
the next, however, she’s quoting economist Milton Friedman (“A corporation
cannot be ethical; its only responsibility is to turn a profit”) and
bashing Labor Secretary Robert Reich.

Chute passes around a copy of a New York Times Op-Ed piece by Reich,
in which he advocates giving corporations incentives to be socially
responsible. Chute has penciled the word “Yikes” in the margins. “These
corporations don’t need incentives,” she says. “What we need to do is throw
their corporate charters in the trash. People will get the idea, and you
know the shareholders will.”

Chute’s politics have attracted the attention of — and have been
influenced by — the ideas of the well-known Maine union organizer Peter
Kellman, who heads the Maine Chapter of the Program on Corporations, Law
and Democracy, as well as the group’s national leader, Rich Grossman. All
three carry a fervent populist vision, and are fond of quoting Thomas Paine
citizen’s lament: “Beneath the shade of our own vines we are attacked; in
our own house, and on our own lands, is the violence committed against us.”

In the end, however, it’s clear that Chute idiosyncratic views are no
one’s but her own. The 2nd Maine Militia’s “first document” lists some of
her bedrock objectives, including: extending the right of free speech and
assembly to work sites and shopping malls; banning lobbyists from the
political process; banning paid political ads in favor of requiring the
electronic media to devote air time to candidates; limiting campaign
contributions to $100 per citizen; and limiting the number of newspapers or
magazines that can be owned by any single person or corporation to one.

The militia document also criticizes at length the Supreme Court’s
ruling, in the 1886 Santa Clara case, that corporations could be granted
various rights that citizens have, including free speech protections.
Corporations “now dominate the public and private life of our society,” the
fiery document reads, “defining the economic, cultural and political agenda
for humans and all other living things.”

Chute’s distinct brand of non-partisan populism fits in well with New
England’s persistent independent streak. Maine has the country’s only
independent governor in Angus King, and nearby Vermont has the country’s
only independent/socialist congressman in maverick Bernie Sanders. Like
Sanders, Chute has an earthy appeal — it’s populism with a very human
face.

The militia meeting is winding down, and outside the day has turned
blustery, and smoky clouds alternate with moments of what Chute has
described, in “The Beans of Egypt, Maine,” as “birdless airplaneless
sunless cloudless leafless sky … warm steaming blue.”

Inside, Chute is steaming as well. “Do you ever feel amazed when
people tell you it’s not as bad here as in other countries?” she asks,
pulling back a strand of her wispy brown hair from her eyes. “You want to
ask: Where have they been? Certainly not in Maine.”

But her message is, as always, ultimately consoling. “We need to stay
together, to spread the truth like religion,” she says. “It’s a lonely,
scary road, and we’ve got to walk it together.”

Over by the door, the largest of the grave, silent woodsmen looks up
and says, quietly, “Amen.”