The outcome: the deepest shake-up for the American weapons industry since Colt and Smith & Wesson invented the mass consumer market in guns in the 19th century.

I first heard about this case, Hamilton vs. Accu-tek, in 1996. I was interested in crime victims-turned-social activists, and was interviewing Carolyn McCarthy, whose husband, Dennis, had been killed and whose son Kevin had been left partially paralyzed by Long Island Railroad gunman Colin Ferguson. McCarthy was running for Congress from Mineola, Long Island s — the gun-control candidate, as she was portrayed by friends and enemies alike.

But “gun control,” I found, didn’t quite capture where McCarthy’s thinking was headed. Although she had testified in favor of a law banning ownership of assault weapons in New York, she was more preoccupied with an issue conventional “gun control” wouldn’t touch: corporate accountability. “The question was, could this have been prevented?” she said to me. “I thought a lot about the people who made and sold those weapons without any sense of where they would end up.” Before running for Congress, McCarthy had brought a lawsuit against the manufacturers of Ferguson’s assault weapons. She won her election, but her suit was tossed out before trial.

McCarthy mentioned another survivor she’d heard of, who had filed her own lawsuit. The woman turned out to be Freddie Hamilton from Fort Greene, a Brooklyn neighborhood far removed from the suburban complacency of Mineola. Hamilton’s teenage son, Njuzi Ray, had been killed by accident in a Brooklyn drive-by shooting the same year as Ferguson’s rampage on the commuter train. And like McCarthy, Freddie Hamilton’s life had been transformed by the experience. The young man accused of shooting her son was acquitted, but Hamilton said she didn’t care: “I just want to prevent it from happening to someone else.” Hamilton was the head of a foster care agency, and she thought she understood what might have led a teenager little older than her own child to pick up a weapon: “We’re talking about power. The young man who killed my son didn’t have any power. He had a gun. That gave him the power.”

Hamilton — part of a too-little appreciated movement of crime victim-activists who have turned not into vengeance-seeking right-wingers but crusaders for constructive social change — formed a Brooklyn protest network called Parents United to Rally for Gun Elimination. And together with a Staten Island woman named Katina Johnstone, whose husband had been shot in 1991, she filed suit against 43 gun manufacturers and distributors — charging that the industry as a whole was responsible for negligently distributing a dangerous product. Eventually, Hamilton and Johnstone would be joined by five other families of people who’d been killed or wounded in New York.

Up until the Hamilton case, every lawsuit brought by a victim or survivor against a gun company had met the same fate as McCarthy’s suit in Brooklyn: They never even got to trial. Gun violence was seen by courts as the responsibility of the actual perpetrators. And because the whole issue seemed like a no-winner, high-powered law firms were not exactly lining up to take such suits.

The attorney who agreed to take Hamilton’s and Johnstone’s case seemed like an unlikely prospect to challenge an entire industry: Elisa Barnes, partner in a two-person (and eventually one-person) firm in lower Manhattan. But a few years earlier, Barnes had helped women win a suit against makers of the fertility drug DES, which had been based on companies’ negligent distribution of the product. And from that experience, she brought to the Hamilton case a theory untested in handgun litigation. Past lawsuits, she reasoned, often hinged on the idea that guns were dangerously designed. What if you bypassed the design and focused instead on distribution: on how those guns ended up on New York’s streets? Since legitimate adult gun-owners around the country were experiencing no shortage of weapons, the vast number of guns in the hands of New York teens and gangbangers and adult criminals meant that someone, somewhere, was producing firearms far in excess of what the legitimate commercial market could support. In other words, gun companies knew they were selling weapons destined for the criminal marketplace, like the weapon that killed Njuzi Ray. And that, she argued, ought to be punished.

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Still, Barnes’ theory might have gone nowhere but for two extraordinary breaks. The first: a whistle-blower — a former Smith & Wesson vice president named Robert Haas. Haas heard about Barnes’ suit and sought her out. He provided an affidavit declaring that his former employer and the entire gun industry knew about “the seepage of guns into the illegal market” from thousands of licensed but otherwise unsupervised dealers. (In fact, of 235,000 federally licensed firearms dealers in the country, only 30,000 are sporting goods shops or other storefront retailers. The remaining 205,000 sell their guns out of their kitchens or car trunks.)

Barnes’ second break came when she maneuvered her case into the courtroom of federal Judge Jack Weinstein. It probably helped Barnes’ case that Weinstein is generally known as an outspoken iconoclast on the temperamentally conservative federal bench, taking on a variety of sacred cows such as drug sentencing. Even more important, however, he was widely regarded as an innovator in mass-injury cases. Indeed, it was Judge Weinstein in those DES cases who first established the idea that on rare occasions, an entire industry might by liable for a negligently distributed product. If every company is involved, then every company is responsible — each according to his market share.

Barnes’ two-pronged strategy worked. In May 1996, Weinstein took the unprecedented step of letting the Hamilton case go to trial. It is “possible,” he wrote, that “a substantial cause of the killings” is “a large-scale underground market” created through the gun companies’ negligence.

It was that “large-scale underground market” that Barnes and the gun companies spent the last month debating before that Brooklyn jury. Barnes showed that 90 percent of handguns used in New York crimes are legally purchased out of state — half of them in Florida, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina and Georgia. What’s more, because the case was permitted to go to trial she was able to subpoena gun company records and found that through warranty registrations, the industry knows it is selling guns in these states far in excess of local demand. Instead, she argued, guns are going to “straw buyers” who transport them to the streets of Brooklyn and other restrictive cities and states. The gun companies didn’t dispute her figures, only her interpretation. Barnes also showed that gun companies fail to meet minimal standards for inventory control or tracking.

Barnes’ “oversupply” theory worked. Last Thursday, the jury found 15 of the nation’s largest gun companies negligent in marketing and distribution. Although the verdict was complex — 42 pages — and damages awarded by the jury were small — apparently to mollify one juror who worried about unleashing a flood of tobacco-like cases — there was no question about the message to firearms corporations: “I don’t think they felt they needed to care, and this verdict will have them rethinking that,” Hamilton told the press.

The Hamilton verdict comes, of course, within weeks of Chicago, Miami, New Orleans and Bridgeport, Conn., filing their own liability suits, with Atlanta in the wings. Suddenly, an industry that seemed invulnerable thanks to the strength of the gun-owner lobby is running scared. So convinced are industry leaders of their vulnerability to future suits that their only strategy seems to be to block such suits from ever being filed: In Georgia and Louisiana, the National Rifle Association has convinced friendly state legislators to propose laws of dubious constitutionality preventing Atlanta and New Orleans from pursuing their claims.

The obvious comparison of handgun suits to the recent tobacco cases has to a certain extent obscured the real political significance of these cases. For one thing, they mark the end of “gun control” as it has been traditionally known. Gun laws aimed mainly at gun buyers proved over many years to be a profoundly difficult strategy: It always looked like the heavy hand of government restricting individual consumers, making easy the NRA’s Second Amendment defense. And the lobbying power of the NRA itself made state legislatures — especially in rural regions — and Congress poor arenas for much gun regulation.

These lawsuits, on the other hand, are not about gun control. They are about corporate accountability. The Hamilton verdict says nothing about the Second Amendment. Rather, it calls upon gun makers to assert the same responsibility as the makers of hazardous products ranging from dynamite to scuba gear; to match supply to legitimate demand; to track inventory; to monitor the sales practices of dealers. Until now, gun companies have been the hidden villains of the gun market, secret beneficiaries of the nation’s crime rate. The Hamilton case, and the lawsuits sure to follow in its wake, offer an opportunity to re-conceive the debate over guns and crime violence into a wide-ranging attack on corporate predators.

The typical exchange left little room for compromise.

“Here’s whom I blame,” wrote one participant in the Usenet newsgroup talk.politics.guns, “two boys with redneck parents and guardians who kept guns at home and raised their little rednecks-to-be with firearms as central values in their lives.”

“If that teacher … had been packing,” riposted another, “she could’ve perhaps returned fire. Ditto for any other teacher or adult on site.”

Arguably, more words have been exchanged online on the topic of gun control than on any other single subject. And for what? To an observer surveying the wreckage of a forum like talk.politics.guns, where the ratio of Nazi references to actual messages approaches 1-to-1, the hopeless sound and fury of online gun fervor truly does seem to signify nothing. What good is the greatest medium of communication ever invented if all we do with it is scream at each other?

Such surface hostilities, however, obscure the real role of the Net in the gun control debate: as a tool for grass-roots political activism. The Net’s potential for fostering political change is well-hyped — but examples are hard to find. Gun politics deliver on the promise: Gun rights activists in the United States are effectively employing the Net as part of a state-by-state campaign to push for legislation that will make it easier for citizens to carry concealed weapons. While the yahoos on both sides blather on in the newsgroups and chat rooms, the gun rights activists are marching.

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The first thing one notices about guns and the Net is a gaping disparity: One side outnumbers the other.

“The information on the Net is overwhelmingly pro-gun,” says Bruce Gryniewski, executive director of Washington Ceasefire, a gun
control group in Washington state.

“There is a certain asymmetry,” says Jake Bassett, office manager for Californians for Responsible Gun Laws. “I think a lot of it is that the NRA has a long history of being a grass-roots movement that has been able to mobilize in every other medium, so the mobilization that they have achieved on the Internet is no surprise.”

Advocates of gun control are quick to attribute the preponderance of pro-gun information on the Net to their own lack of funding and dependence on volunteers, and they are eager to blame the deep pockets of the National Rifle Association for their own underdog status in cyberspace. To be sure, the NRA has an immense Web site, and NRA representatives have no qualms about taking credit for the high profile of gun owners on the Net.

But a good look at the Net shows that, if anything, there are far more dedicated volunteers active on the Net fighting against gun control than working for it. It isn’t just a matter of NRA funding; this passion runs deep.

“Many gun owners are absolutely driven by their gun ownership,” says Simon Chapman, a medical professor at the University of Sidney who maintains a set of pro-gun control pages in Australia. “It is almost a defining characteristic of their very being. I know very few people on the gun control side for whom it so dominates their lives. For many, gun ownership and the idea that there may be restrictions is fundamentally threatening to something profoundly psychological.”

The dominance of gun rights activists online is partly a result of the historical demographics of Net use. Until recently, the Net has been home to a disproportionately large number of libertarians for whom the right to bear arms is a first principle. According to Joe Olson, the organizer of a grass-roots group in Minnesota pushing for gun-friendly legislation, gun rights activism follows naturally from the computing background common to Net libertarians.

“It is incredible the number of people of our organization who list themselves as programmers, information managers and the like,” says Olson. “People who deal with factual information and make rational choices on the basis of real information tend to come down on our side of the issue, so I have a coterie of top-notch computer people who want to see the issue moved ahead.”

But demographics alone don’t explain the fervor of anti-gun control opinion on the Net. From the gun owner point of view, the Net offers the possibility to redress imbalances in how the gun control debate is presented by mainstream media.

“Gun control certainly is one of the issues on the Net,” says J. D. Tuccille, the “guide” for a Mining Company site devoted to civil liberties. “More than any other medium, the Net gave a voice to
supporters of the right to keep and bear arms. Most major newspapers, magazines and broadcast outlets tend to show sympathy to emotionally satisfying, if brain-dead, ‘ban ‘em now’ reactions to tragedies like the Jonesboro massacre. Philosophical arguments and academic studies that tend to favor gun rights get short shrift on CNN.”

“The simple fact is, there is a wealth of information supporting the idea of private gun ownership that is not discussed in major media,” says J. Neil Schulman, author of the recently published book “SELF CONTROL Not Gun Control.”

“But I don’t need the audience of the Los Angeles Times, or Dan Rather, or Tom Brokaw in order to put this information on the World Wide Web, or into Usenet newsgroups,” says Schulman. “Gun control advocates, when faced with these facts, dissemble and all but the most obstinately dishonest of them slink away in shame.”

But what are the facts? Even if consensus is impossible to achieve online — even if the medium does prove to be bankrupt as a forum for the swaying of undecided hearts and minds — that doesn’t mean that the Net, as a storehouse for information, can’t help facilitate a more informed debate, on or offline. But is there any connection between the deluge of factoids and infobytes available online and the real world of public policy and legislative change?

Tuccille thinks so.

“The best example of the impact of the Net is the ‘Crime, Deterrence, and Right-to-Carry Concealed Handguns’ study by John R. Lott and David B. Mustard of the University of Chicago School of Law,” says Tuccille. “The Lott-Mustard piece basically showed that letting people legally carry pistols helps to drive violent crime rates down. Now, that’s counter-intuitive if you’re a regular reader of Time magazine, but it’s a good, solid study. And when it came out it was buried deep inside of the New York Times, never to be heard from again.”

“The study’s power lies in the fact that it is, dare I say it, ammunition for gun rights advocates that appeared just as the Net was becoming the sort of mass medium that could spread such information far and wide,” says Tuccille. “Whereas 10 years ago you might’ve got into a chat with a good ol’ boy about guns and heard him tell you the old ‘you can have my gun when you pry it from my cold, dead fingers,’ which isn’t the most soothing argument ever heard, now he’s as likely to cite a few choice statistics from the Lott-Mustard study and other papers that he’s run across online. I actually had this happen to me at the counter of a gun shop — the clerk beat me to the punch with the study cites.”

The Lott-Mustard study examines crime data from thousands of U.S. counties from 1977 to 1992. The study examined what
happens to crime rates in counties that have passed laws letting citizens carry concealed weapons. It found that “allowing citizens to carry concealed weapons deters violent crimes, without increasing accidental deaths.”

The implications of this study intersect with the Jonesboro tragedy. When the talk.politics.guns regulars started declaiming how lives could have been saved in Jonesboro if the teachers had been “packing” guns, those unfamiliar with the intricacies of the gun control debate might be excused for deeming the assertions ludicrous, if not criminally insane. But in a Wall Street Journal op-ed piece published a week after the Jonesboro shootings, John Lott observed that the shootings had occurred in one of the “few places in Arkansas where possessing a gun is illegal” — within 1,000 feet of a public school. Lott then cited his own study as evidence supporting the thesis that if teachers in Arkansas could have borne concealed weapons, they might have been able to defend the students against attack.

The fight over the right to carry concealed weapons is perhaps the most hotly contested battleground in the gun world today. And while on the national level it may appear as if gun control advocates have been winning the gun control battle — with the passage of the Brady Bill and the ban on importation of certain models of semiautomatic weapons as the primary exhibits — on the state level, gun rights activists have been increasingly successful in getting “right-to-carry” legislation passed. According to Tanya Metaksa, chief lobbyist for the NRA, in the last three years alone, “We have doubled the number of states that have right-to-carry laws.”

And the publication of the Lott-Mustard study on the Net has played a role in that success, say both gun control and gun rights activists.

“I think it is very much being utilized by proponents of right-to-carry in those states that don’t have it as a further justification of why that legislation is needed,” says Metaksa.

“I think, on a grass-roots level, [the Lott-Mustard study] has had a great impact,” agrees Washington Ceasefire’s Gryniewski. “People always refer to it. I think there is a direct connection.”

The Lott-Mustard study is impossible to miss. It is widely linked (even by its opponents) and widely copied. According to Lott, its primary author, there were 46,000 downloads of the paper in the five months following its August 1996 Web publication.

“For me as an academic, lots of times you feel lucky if 10 people read your paper,” says Lott. “When you are talking about tens of thousands downloading a paper, it’s pretty overwhelming.”

“To the extent that people are better informed about an issue, and given that [this could be] the most debated topic on the Net, I think it helps dispel myths. I think it makes it harder for people to pass laws that may be well-intentioned but may actually accomplish the opposite of
what they want to do,” says Lott, whose book, “More Guns Less Crime,” is forthcoming from the University of Chicago Press.

There is a downside to Net publication, of course. It’s easy to disseminate information but it’s just as easy to rebut it (although it must be noted that the rebuttals to Lott-Mustard are much scarcer than references and links to the study itself). Anyone who seriously digs into a hotly contested issue is likely to find more questions than answers.

Researchers at the Johns Hopkins Gun Policy and Research Center and at Georgetown University have attacked the Lott-Mustard study on numerous methodological grounds. Gun control advocacy organizations have taken the fight even closer to home. According to the Violence Policy Center, John Lott is a “biased” activist researcher who has also authored papers that attack environmentalism and promote smoker’s rights.

Ideally, the Net allows interested parties to research any topic endlessly. Not only are rebuttals available, but there are also rebuttals to the rebuttals, ad infinitum. The charge of bias can be reversed in a flash: The researchers at Johns Hopkins, for example, are primarily funded by the Joyce Foundation, which specifically grants funds from its “gun violence” program to “foster broader public understanding of the health implications of gun violence, including an understanding that will lead to strategies that emphasize prevention and do not rely solely on punishment.”

The more information, the less truth? Ultimately, there is support for every argument somewhere on the Net. That, in turn, makes it more important to examine how the information is used than to simply celebrate the Net’s ability to make all that information available.

“[The Lott-Mustard study] puts steel in the spines of gun rights supporters,” says Tuccille. “Now, they don’t just have strong feelings at odds with the talking heads on TV. They have access to studies, research, online publications and information that might have been missed by the major media. It’s a community that reaches everywhere that somebody has a .22 rifle, a PC and a phone line.”

Joe Olson, whose Minnesota right-to-carry Web site has a prominent link to the Lott-Mustard study, says, “We now have the ability, for example, to contact about 300 people directly in an instant and their turnaround is to contact an average of 50 each. We can generate an enormous number of phone calls in an afternoon. We now reach close to 20,000 people, and those people reach their legislators, and we couldn’t have done it without the Net. An average mailing is 50 cents a piece. It would cost $900 to send out a mailing, and take a week to 10 days to get it there. The problem in the past with political activism has been cost and time, and the Internet resolves both of those very favorably.”

There is no Web page devoted to gun control advocacy in Minnesota. Jake Barnett, of Californians for Responsible Gun Laws, admits that gun control activists lag far behind their gun rights competitors.

“There’s a long way to go,” says Barnett. “They need to catch up on a number of fronts, and the Internet is merely one of them. The NRA is a model of what grass-roots activism can do — to get legislation passed and interest in these issues as widely distributed as possible.”

Indeed, that is the lesson to be learned from the gun control debate –
beyond the discouraging stalemate in the endless flame wars over the issue online, political action is taking place. Whether you agree with the gun rights activists or not, you can’t ignore that they have recognized this vital power of online communication, and are among the first to make effective use of it.

“What it boils down to is that the Net favors freedom,” says Tuccille. “By empowering individuals, making communication easier and easing the dissemination of information, the Net bypasses political and media gatekeepers and advances the cause of personal liberty. Free speech, medical marijuana, encryption, financial information — it’s not just guns; it’s everything that we use guns to defend.”

Tuccille’s rhetoric will make gun control advocates wince. But if they hope to prevail, they’ll need to learn to use the Net as adroitly as their opponents.

Indeed, given Gates’ current obsession with prying the Department of Justice off of his corporate back, one might assume that if the man has any political sympathies, they would most likely be of the techno-libertarian bent. Certainly, his struggle with the federal government has been adopted as a cause cilhbre by many Net-based libertarians.

But for once let’s try to separate the man from the Microsoft. Look at the personal checkbook record: pro taxes, pro birth control, against guns. The evidence is clear — Bill Gates is a bleeding heart do-gooder liberal.

Of course, you’ll never hear him say so, nor are you likely to find any of the recipients of his largesse eager to utter the dreaded L-word. His own father, Bill Gates Sr., who administers the approximately $300 million William H. Gates III Foundation, summed up the situation most succinctly: “If you think you’re going to get me to characterize what he does as liberal or conservative, you’re crazy.” Bill Jr.’s politics are not for public consumption. (Ignore those Roman numerals after Bill’s name; to avoid confusion we’ll refer here to Gates pere as Sr. and Gates fils as Jr.)

It’s the very opacity of Bill Jr.’s politics that makes them intriguing, and the money trail of his gift-giving sheds the only light available on them. Gates’ more grandiose gestures — $20 million for a computer center here, $12 million for a biotechnology building there and a whopping $200 million for wiring up rural libraries to the Internet — get the headlines. But his smaller philanthropic statements give us the few clues we have to what Gates, the man — as opposed to Gates, the software marketing machine — really cares about. And we ought to pay attention to what the richest man in the world thinks is socially important — especially if he lives up to his own oft-made promise to give away nearly all of his wealth before he dies.

To be sure, judging Bill Gates’ politics by what he gives away is an exercise in tea-leaf reading that teeters on the brink of absurdity. After all, 35 grand for gun control adds up to about .000001 percent of his total current wealth. Until just a few years ago, the rap on Gates had always been that of the skinflint supreme, our nation’s leading subscriber to the miser persuasion. Especially locally.

“There has been a lot of pressure to have him make donations that impact the region that has allowed him to become so wealthy,” said Don Chalmers, a fund-raising consultant and editor of the Northwest Nonprofit newsletter.

Few people in a position to know the details will go on record criticizing the pattern, or lack thereof, of Gatesian charity. Seattle Foundation president Anne Farrell dismisses local sniping as generated “more out of ignorance than anything else.” But the facts are hard to ignore. Sure, Bill Gates has given away close to $600 million. But more than 90 percent of that sum has been disbursed since 1994, and more than half the total was given away in 1997 alone.

1994, incidentally, was the year Bill Gates’ mother, Mary Gates, died of breast cancer. A longtime United Way board member, Mary Gates, by all accounts, persistently encouraged her son to do more with his wealth than simply accumulate it. After years of single-minded, voracious focus on the Microsoft bottom line, Bill Gates appears to finally be heeding his mom’s advice. Charity does, it seems, begin at home.

Since 1994, the philanthropy tap has been jacked wide open. Hardly a soul in the wired world can have escaped hearing the much-ballyhooed pledge from Bill and Melinda Gates to spend $200 million over the next five years on library Internet access. Less well publicized has been Bill’s 1997 gift of $115 million worth of Microsoft stock to the Gates Foundation, which has brought the total endowment of the foundation up to around $300 million. After a slow start, the foundation gave away some $40 million in 1997, a big jump from 1996′s $6.5 million.

Microsoft spokesman Greg Shaw said that in addition to the library grant and the foundation endowment, Gates has also given away at least another $100 million. This includes large-scale donations, such as $12 million for a law school library at the University of Washington (to be named after his father), $10 million for student scholarships in the name of his mother (also at Washington) and $1 million to Ursuline Academy in Dallas (where his wife, Melinda French Gates, was high school valedictorian) and smaller scale grants to museums, theaters, playgrounds and even a Seattle area rowing club.

The big-ticket donations do not come without associated waves of skepticism from Gates’ stable of critics. That $12 million grant for the new biotech building at the University of Washington? Just the price tag necessary to lure a star biotech professor to the Seattle area, where he can serve as Gates’ informal advisor on biotech investments. Last year’s $20 million pledge (through the Gates Foundation) to Cambridge University for a new computing center? A fine way to keep a close eye on one of the world’s most illustrious centers for cryptography research — and an investment sure to pay huge dividends as digital security becomes ever more paramount. And that oh-so-noble deal to wire up the libraries? An insidious scheme: Hook the poor kids on the Net, and then make sure that they’re all using Internet Explorer as the browser of choice. Future generations of Microsoft market domination will be assured.

No businessman as famous for being as ultra-competitive as Bill Gates can ever escape cynical accusations that his every move is motivated by greed. Nor should he. But the smaller details of Gates’ giving lead us to a different truth. It is much more difficult to discern strategic Microsoft advantage in his support for handgun safety. And his cold-cash concern for family planning could even be construed as asking for trouble. The groups that the Gates Foundation is giving money to have close ideological and organizational ties with pro-choice bastions like Planned Parenthood. Religious right zealots are already beginning to pay attention. Who needs that kind of controversy today?

The first overtly political statement on the Bill Gates balance sheet is his $80,000 contribution to a coalition working against the passage of Washington state ballot initiative 602. Robert Edie, a lobbyist for the University of Washington who also fought the initiative, recalled that its demand of an immediate, “really large” tax rollback was overwhelmingly supported by Washington business leaders.

But not by educators, who led the fight against 602, worried that passage of the initiative would hurt the quality of public education in Washington — just as Proposition 13 had similarly gutted public schools in California decades earlier.

Bill Gates has frequently emphasized the importance of education — both in speeches and in his book “The Road Ahead.” Seattle political reporter Mark Gardner argues that even here his motivations were selfish: Microsoft needs quality programmers and expects universities to provide them, and will oppose anything that could hamstring the university system. Gardner even suggests that all of Gates’ huge donations to universities are aimed at improving relations with potential sources of programming talent.

But the personal reasons explaining Gates’ support of the fight against the 602 tax cut turn out to be somewhat more complex. Gates has always been protective of the University of Washington: Both of his parents attended, and his mother served as a member of the Board of Regents. Furthermore, Teresa Moore, a spokeswoman for the Washington Education Association, remembered that Gates had been alerted to 602′s potential negative impact on the University of Washington by a professor named Leroy Hood.

And who is Leroy Hood? None other than the William H. Gates III chair of the UW biotechnology department — which is housed in the brand new biotech building that stands as Gates’ first multimillion-dollar act of philanthropy.

Was Gates just trying to keep Hood happy? Or was he really concerned about ensuring state support for public education? Microsoft spokesman Shaw couldn’t respond to the question and Gates himself was unavailable for comment, so there’s no real way to know. But the pattern is clear: The direction in which Gates’ money flows satisfies a network of personal connections and concerns; it is as natural as water going downhill.

The anti-602 campaign was victorious. Gates’ next foray into initiative politics met with less success. Initiative 676, a handgun safety bill in 1997 that would have increased licensing and training requirements for new handgun purchasers, went down to overwhelming defeat. In a campaign where the National Rifle Association spent $4 million, $35,000 turned out not to be enough. Still, Gates had made his stand on a classic hot-button issue — gun control.

Did that classify Gates as a liberal? Joe Waldron, chairman of WeCARE, a coalition of anti-gun control activists that led the local opposition to 676, refused to speculate.

“I don’t want to put it in those terms,” said Waldron. “It’s like kicking Superman in the kneecap: You can do it, but you may not like the consequences.”

And $35,000 doesn’t add up to chump change for Bill Gates, anyway, added Waldron. “I wouldn’t read too much into it. You must recognize that with the money that Mr. Gates has, that he is going to give to any number of causes, and in this case the amount of money is relatively small.”

Yes, the sum was small. But no, Gates does not give to “any number of causes.” Although the past few years have seen him rapidly increase dollar totals devoted to building computing centers, wiring up libraries or funding student scholarships, the instances in which one could say he was contributing to a cause are extremely rare. And there is absolutely no evidence of Gatesian financial support for measures that could be considered “conservative” in a political sense.

But again the specter of personal motivation rises. Was this really Bill Gates’ own issue? After all, his own father contributed $150,000 to support Initiative 676 — more than four times as much he did.

“I suspect it was as much his father asking for it as anything else,” said Waldron.

“That’s dead wrong,” snapped Gates Sr. when asked about Waldron’s speculation — clearly unappreciative of any supposition that Gates Jr. isn’t his own philanthropic man.

But Gates Sr. did acknowledge that he and Mary Gates exerted pressure on their son to do more with all his billions.

“His mother and I always pushed a little,” said Gates Sr. Like Mary Gates, Gates Sr. has long been involved in philanthropy — ever since “I first gave a nickel to the Salvation Army man,” he joked.

Ultimately, separating out what is attributable to the parents and what to the son may be pointless. It’s a joint venture. Nothing better illustrates that fact than the William H. Gates III Foundation.

Gates Jr. created the foundation in 1994, the same year his mother died of breast cancer. One of the first two grants made by the foundation was to the Swedish Medical Center in Seattle, for a “cancer pain management” study.

Bill Gates Sr., with the part-time help of one private secretary, administers the foundation from the comfort of his home. It is, he said, “the thing that occupies the largest percentage of my time.”

The foundation does not accept unsolicited requests for funding nor does it give out grant-giving guidelines. But a review of its tax returns, which are public record, reveal some clear points of social concern.

All told, the foundation has disbursed about $55 million, with some $40 million, according to Gates Sr., having been “committed” in 1997, mainly for the establishment of academic computing centers.

The grants fall into three categories. First, there are the big-ticket donations — the general fund grants, the grants allocated to building improvements and all the money distributed to institutions that the Gates family has personal connections with (like Gates’ own high school, or the Seattle Art Museum, where Gates has sponsored an exhibition of Leonardo Da Vinci’s notebooks). Second, there are a large number of penny-ante donations — $10,000 for refugee relief, $6,000 to the Magnolia Adult Day Center in Seattle and so on. But the third and smallest group, medium-sized donations, stands out: They’re the only ones with political import.

The Gates Foundation has given $750,000 over three years to the Seattle-based PATH (Program for Appropriate Technology in Health) — funding that has in part been used for such work as “a quality assurance survey of contraceptives in 22 countries.” The Alan Guttmacher Institute received $1 million over three years for “an international examination of issues facing young women around the world.” And finally, most recently, the Department of Population Dynamics at Johns Hopkins University received $2.3 million for an array of programs aimed at training international specialists in “reproductive health and family planning.”

“Reproductive health and family planning” is a buzz phrase that emerged out of the 1994 United Nations Cairo conference on population issues, said Dr. Gordon Perkin, president of PATH. In the past, the research topic used to be referred to as “population control” — though, said Dr. Perkin, “the words ‘population control’ are not used any more, except by people who don’t know the field.”

Billionaires have always had a fond spot in their hearts for population control: Ted Turner is a big supporter, as is Warren Buffett, a Gates family friend.

“If you think about what people like Buffett, Turner and Gates all have in common — they are more global in their thinking, more risk-taking, more revolutionary in their business practices,” said Beth Frederick, development director at the Alan Guttmacher Institute, “and as such they look for larger answers to some of the problems that seem so close to home.”

But whatever you call it — “population control” or “family planning” — this isn’t just a billionaire fad for the Gates family.

“Bill Gates Sr. has been deeply involved in this issue for decades,” says Laurie S. Zabin, a professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health. Zabin, who served with Gates Sr. on the national board of Planned Parenthood, was instrumental in getting the Gates Foundation grant for Johns Hopkins.

But that doesn’t mean Gates Sr. is the only one who cares about overpopulation, said Zabin: Gates Jr. “has supported issues of real social concern and certainly this is one of them.”

Gates Sr. agreed: “It’s an interest he has had since he was a kid. And he has friends who are interested in supporting research into world population problems, people whom he admires — it’s just a matter of a fit between his proclivities and mine.”

A “proclivity fit” is one way to put it. Or one could surmise that Bill Gates is growing up to be the man his parents raised him to be.

“His parents were involved in charitable activity, and I’ve heard him talk about it quite a bit,” said Microsoft spokesman Shaw. “I think that set a strong tradition and ethic of giving back and I should say that we are only seeing the beginning of that now.”

One can always count on corporate public relations executives for a positive spin, but Shaw’s point is not without merit. Gates has spoken many times about how he intends to give away 95 percent of his wealth before he dies. So far, he has loosened the reins on a mere fraction of his massive bank account. But just this week, on a Silicon Valley tour, he repeated his promise: “I’m just a steward of this wealth and someday I will return it to society.”

The Gates Foundation is likely to be the vehicle for most future Gatesian philanthropy, at least according to Gates Sr. If it continues to give away money according to the principles by which it was established, the possibilities for social impact are spectacular.

“The potential is enormous,” said Anne Farrell, president of the Seattle Foundation.

We may never definitively pin Gates down as “liberal” — but actions speak louder than words.

“When we start to look at labels we miss the significance of individual action,” says Bryce Gryniewski, executive director of Washington CeaseFire, the leading sponsor of Initiative 676. “Obviously he is concerned about the society he lives in. He’s not only a business owner but he’s a father and a family man, and he’s concerned about the kind of world he’s going to raise his daughter in.”

Chiang Mai, a city of 156,000 in Northern Thailand, is where MTV stops. MTV Asia blares in Hong Kong high-rises and Bangkok brothels, in Kuala Lumpur discos and Macau casinos, but Chiang Mai is beyond the reach of the Asianet satellite that broadcasts MTV. And when MTV Asia — Japanese idol singers, Indian heavy metal bands, Kylie Minogue and all — isn’t on the tube, you really feel remote. (There is something reassuring about a VJ, any VJ, even if he speaks half in Chinese and his name is Woo.) Where MTV ends, the Golden Triangle begins.

it was the introduction of the opium poppy for cultivation by British and French merchants in the mid-19th century that changed Chiang Mai from a prosperous center for Theravada Buddhism to the booming economic heart of northern Thailand. Before 1800, opium smoking in Burma, Laos and Thailand, the three countries whose border regions make up the Golden Triangle, had been virtually unheard of. By 1930 there were 6,441 government-regulated opium dens. The Kingdom of Siam, Thailand’s predecessor state, earned 14 percent of its tax revenues through its 972 licensed opium dens. While Chiang Mai had once been a center for pottery, weaving, silver work and woodcarving, it now became the destination point for hundreds of mule caravans hauling the bulk of the Golden Triangle’s annual production of 3,000 tons of opium.
As demand for refined opium products like heroin and morphine has increased in Asia and the West, the economics of the Golden Triangle, which produces 73 percent of the world’s opium, have become ever more intertwined with the poppy plant. A succession of local warlords, some with CIA backing because of their staunch anti-communist stances, have ruled the region and fought for control of its rich harvest. Thai generals, Shan rebels, communist guerrillas and exiled Kuomintang (Nationalist Chinese) commanders have all, at one time, sought and controlled a large piece of the opium action. The business of opium is so immense — heroin generates $2 million a day on the streets of New York alone — that its windfall has financed wars and toppled governments. (In 1990 the United States government indicted Shan rebel leader, opium warlord and Chiang Mai local Khun Sa as an international drug trafficker, labeling him “the self-proclaimed king of opium.”) Alfred W. McCoy wrote in “The Politics of Heroin”: “This illicit traffic allows opium and heroin traders at all levels enormous incomes that they can use to purchase enough protection to survive any attempt at suppression.”

“If you go up there it will become clear,” a junior officer in the Thai military explained to David, my photographer traveling companion, and me, pointing to the verdant mountain ranges that loom above Chiang Mai. “Generals and governments come and go; opium is the real king of these hills.”
So our idea was to go into the hills. Sure, we would ride elephants and gaze at ruins, but what we were looking for was something else. I hate saying it because it sounds so stupid now, but we wanted adventure.
We hired two Karen tribesmen as guides. We bought hiking boots. We took malaria pills. We innovated ways to lighten our packs. We consulted maps. We planned a six-day route up through Mae Hong Sa and down along the Burmese border and then back into civilization.
We should have listened to the sunburned, brain-dead, weed-thin American in the lobby of the Chiang Mai Orchid Hotel who had been in the jungle outside Chiang Mai for six months and had come to town for some air-conditioning. Upon hearing of our plan, he asked, “What kind of idiots would want to do something like that?”

From the godlike perspective of looking down on a topographical map, a 2,000-foot hill looks manageable. The green that indicates higher ground seems invitingly lush after all the white and brown that indicate the lower elevations. In reality, when you are humping up it on a mud trail with no switchbacks, a 2,000-foot hill is a monster of a mountain, slick, unforgiving and treacherous. Many of Thailand’s northern mountains — they are mountains, despite what the guidebooks and locals say — don’t have well-beaten, clearly marked tracks. Instead, you have to claw your way up pig runs or seldom-used paths through thick undergrowth teeming with leaches and ticks. It’s bad jungle, with the climate changing every 30 minutes from pelting rain to blistering sun and the mud making for unsure footing.
Within six hours of being dropped off by a jeep at the end of the loneliest dirt road I’ve ever seen, we were enmeshed in the lush green vegetation, banana stalks, giant bamboo, royal palms and thorny licorice. We hadn’t known it would be like this. We hadn’t considered that with steep mountains and quintuple-canopy jungle in a dozen shades of green and rainbowed crystal waterfalls came exhaustion and thirst and confusion and wishing to hell we had stuck to the original plan. The simple plan. The tourist’s plan. There were nice, organized, enjoyable treks for tourists where one can ride elephants, stay in clean villages, do a little rafting. Who were we to buck the system?
All the estimates we, and our Karen guides Perm and Sarbom, had made back in our Chiang Mai hotel rooms of the time it would take between villages were wrong. For example, we had estimated four hours between Sadaeng and Mae Dat La. It took closer to seven. And that was seven bad hours of going up and down mountains, slogging up waist-deep rivers and tip-toeing to keep our balance along the muddy edges of rice paddies. The Karen tribesmen maybe could have done it in four. Maybe. We had our doubts.
“I thought there was a trail,” David shouted as we waited for Sarbom to hack through thick brush with his machete. “There’s supposed to be a fucking trail.”
“This is a trail,” Perm explained (Sarbom didn’t speak English), “a not-used-much trail.”

It’s the downhills that kill. Uphill was horrible, but downhill in the mud and mossy rocks was deadly. And by the second day, I felt like my knees were running out of cartilage, that nothing was cushioning the impact of bone against bone and each downhill step was somehow degenerative or permanently debilitating. I was being punished for the aplomb of walking into the jungle and just assuming everything would be all right. And while we were fatigued, our native guides were still going strong and carrying all our luggage. (We would hire, over the course of the trek, four porters, a pony, elephants and a Lisu opium trader named Sook.)
It was midway through the third day when, as David was verging on heat stroke and my right knee simply stopped working and poisonous blue snakes made their first appearance on the trail (they liked the rain) and it was getting dark fast and we were still hours away from the nearest village and even Perm, our guide who had taken on a sort of Daniel Boone-meets-Bruce Lee heroic quality in our eyes, said that finding the way in the dark would be impossible, that it dawned on us that maybe we were in serious trouble, that maybe we had made a terrible mistake, the kind of mistake people die from. And if something were to happen to us, who would ever know? A few Hmong tribesmen on their way out to hunt? A couple of Lisu merchants? A Chinese opium buyer making his rounds? There were no roads. No planes in the sky to spot us. We would simply vanish. Fallen off a cliff. Bit by a snake. Shot by a drunk tribesman. There were so many ways.
“This is bad,” we were mumbling as we descended another killer downhill. “This is so, so bad.”
And we were out of water.

We made Nao Lao Dum, a Lisu village somewhere along the Burmese border, as the sun shot orange and blue streaks through nimbus clouds in a dramatic last stand before surrendering behind a craggy mountain. Sai Pu Dong, the village headman, was between 25 and 60. It was impossible to narrow his age any more based on looks alone. His face was mottled and scarred, but his arms and legs remained sinewy and tight-skinned. When he smiled, he flashed teeth bright red from betel nut chewing.
Naked children stared at us as we staggered in after climbing the terraced rice paddy, they mobbed us as we wended up the trail into the village, and as the headman greeted us the crowd of children and women swelled to about 50, all just drop-jawed staring at the spectacle that had wandered into their village.
There were no roads to Nao Lao Dum, only footpaths so narrow that if you didn’t know they were there you would miss them. Where there are no roads there are no police and no schools and no bureaucracy and no missionaries. No law. And certainly no toilets. Call me a wuss, but it’s hard taking a crap when 30 kids are giggling watching you squat. And it’s not that you’re crapping that’s so funny, it’s you, just being foreign and wearing sunglasses or a red shirt. Utterly shocking. It wouldn’t matter to them if you were taking a crap or assembling Stinger missiles, it’s you they’re fascinated by.
Headman’s elephant grass hut wobbled precariously on stilts. Wide gaps had been intentionally left between floorboards so any grain of rice that didn’t end up in your mouth fell through the floor to the ground below for the pigs, chickens and cows who made an awful racket down there jockeying for scraps.
A crowd of men were gathered around a cooking fire in Headman’s hut. The women and children skulked at the periphery of the orange glow, their shadowy features catching the flickering light for a moment and then vanishing as the flames shifted in the draft. The place was better in the dark. You couldn’t see all the cow turds and pig shit and fleas and garbage. You couldn’t see what was floating around in your water, even after it was boiled.
“When was the last time you had foreigners here?” I asked.
“Two opium harvests ago.” Headman answered as one of his wives spooned something into a bowl for me. “Eat.”
It would have been rude to refuse. “What is it?”
“Pork,” I was told.
The Lisu men were digging in.
“It’s cooked?” I asked.
Headman nodded.
I took a bite, chewed and swallowed. It was fatty and cold.
“After we cook it,” Headman explained to me through Perm, “we soak the meat in the raw blood and guts for flavor.”

Opium was the opiate of the masses. Opium served the same purpose for the hill tribes as the cocktail after work does for Manhattan’s work force. No matter how poor the village, no matter how destitute the inhabitants, every male over the age of 18 owned a well-crafted glass-bowled opium pipe, a gas or oil lamp for heating opium, crushed aspirin for mixing with opium to eliminate headaches, several thin steel sticks and pokers for heating the opium and reaming the pipes, a small pillow or smooth bench for laying his head upon and, probably, some opium. Even if the kids were naked and they ate rice mixed with barley for dinner, dad had an opium pipe. Even if they couldn’t afford a candle to light their hut, dad had an oil lamp for heating his opium.
After the cooking, eating and cleaning, the men broke out their pipes and went to work with their oil lamps heating the opium and mixing it with aspirin powder. (Aspirin powder was the only Western medicine they had and it never occurred to them to use it for anything besides cutting opium.) Once the paste was heated and mixed it was rolled between the palms into cylinders and then broken off piece by piece to smoke. The reason one must lie down to smoke — and hence the evolution of the opium den — is that it takes one hand to hold the opium, and one to direct the foot-long pipe so that the opium is close to the flame but not directly burned by it. Unless your head is down near the ground, you can’t see how close the flame is to the pipe.
It takes five pipes to get high. Seven to begin to drift away. And between 10 and 20 and you don’t feel any more of your pain. Your knees feel strong. Your stomach cramps are suddenly gone. And you’re not hungry anymore. The hill tribes smoke it because it is the best thing they have in otherwise tough, hardscrabble lives. Take opium away and replace it with what? Corn? That’s what the Thai government tried to do. Once you’re up in these hills you see why that will never work. Corn, as useful as it is for making whiskey, doesn’t get one away from it all for a few hours.
The dozens of children gazing at us, the mangy dog next to me scratching violently, the fleas biting me, the leach stings, the raw pork, the dirty water, suddenly it was all tolerable and didn’t seem so horrible. But then nothing seems horrible when you’re on the pipe and that’s why opium will always be king of these hills.

We were five now — David the photographer, Perm, Sarbom, Sook the opium merchant and me, plus a pony we had bought for 8,000 baht ($160) from a Lisu tribeswoman. But the gray pony, once we loaded our gear in baskets and slung the baskets on his back, proved to be slower than we had thought. Still, it was good not carrying anything — not that David and I were carrying anything, anyway; we had long ago given our packs to Perm, Sarbom and Sook. Sook was 4-foot-10, weighed about 115 pounds and had small, cruel features and an expression that conveyed total indifference, to you, to his own well-being, to the world. He was a certified opium addict who broke the rule of drug dealers the world over: He got high off his own supply. It took Sook 35 pipes to catch a buzz. He smoked three times day, including first thing in the morning. And after he smoked he could carry a 50-pound backpack through 10 miles of bad jungle and not feel a thing. He was ageless, his growth stunted from opium and his expression childlike in its emptiness. But he had a never-ending supply of opium, so wherever we brought him we were warmly welcomed by the locals; he was a good guy to have around.
We marched knee-deep up a rocky stream, Sarbom behind us keeping the pony walking by shooting rocks at its ass with a slingshot. (Slingshots are immensely popular in these mountains. It is the child’s first toy.) Perm led us out of the stream and up another muddy trail that offered about as much traction as a hill of frozen yogurt. As we climbed, the familiar noises of Sarbom’s snapping slingshot, the flustering of the pony, the bird calls and the gibbon shrieks were suddenly interrupted by a sharp cracking sound and then a rapid succession of breaks and whizzes in nearby bushes.
The smell of smoke.
Perm, Sarbom and Sook dropped to the ground. David and I stood and stared at each other for a moment before realizing what was happening. We were being shot at. We hit the mud. I hurriedly unbuttoned my pants and pissed while lying in the mud.
Perm shouted something in Karen.
A child’s voice answered. We were being shot at by children.
There followed a long exchange during which we assured the children firing at us at that we were not interested in stealing their prized bulls or confiscating their opium. And nor were we Nationalist Chinese (KMT) troops looking to extort opium. The KMT had been through here recently and had forced the villagers to give up the bulk of their opium and a few ponies. These KMT units were relics of Chiang Kai Shek’s defeated 3rd and 5th Nationalist Armies, which had crossed in 1949 from China’s Yunan province into Burma and then kept moving south to northern Thailand, where, with the tacit cooperation of the Thai government and weapons from Taiwan and the United States, they had established fully militarized bases. The KMT these days was nothing like the efficient heroin-exporting machine it had been in the 1960s, when thousand-mule caravans guarded by hundreds of armed troops plied these mountains, but they were still a considerable, well-armed and dangerous presence. With their American-made M-14s and AR-16s — compared to the local tribes’ cheap Chinese imitations of 19th century British muskets — the KMT were still among the top opium buyers and refiners.
“We are tourists,” we assured them. If only that were true, if only we had done some sedate nature walk with a pack of healthy Germans and Swedes, a few hours of hiking, some food, plenty of water, clean villages and real trails. That would be the life. There are hundreds of companies offering that kind of safe, touristy trip, and if you’re ever in Chiang Mai and get the urge to head into the hills, do it the easy way. Don’t be stupid and get shot at.
Our attackers turned out to be one 8-year-old child with a Chinese-made musket taller than he was. He emerged from behind a thorny licorice plant onto the trail about 20 feet ahead of us, smiling widely. He wore a blue wool cap and a T-shirt on which was a tattered silk-screen of Paul Molitor, a baseball player now with the Minnesota Twins but pictured in the silk-screen with his original team, the Milwaukee Brewers.
“What the fuck is this?” I demanded of Perm as I buttoned up my pants. “Who the fuck would shoot at us?”
And then focusing my anger on Perm because he was the only guide who spoke English, “And who would take us to a place like this?”
Wide-eyed, dirty-faced Paul Molitor spoke quickly.
Perm translated: “He wasn’t trying to hit us.”
Paul Molitor spoke again.
“And he says he will take us into town and introduce us to his headman.”
“What’s the big deal about a headman?” I asked. “We’ve met plenty of headmen.”
“Special headman,” Perm assured me. “Powerful headman. Headman of all headmen.”

“Billy Bong will see you now,” a thin Karen warrior dressed in a thickly woven V-neck tunic told us. From his mouth dangled an unlit teak tobacco pipe.
We took off our shoes and climbed the ladder to the tin-roofed hut that stood a whole story higher than any other hut in the village. The hut had wooden windows. The hut had doors. The hut had separate rooms. There was an outhouse in back. This Billy Bong lived in a palace.
All the windows of the innermost chamber were shuttered and the only light in the room emanated from two candles stuck to empty condensed milk cans. Billy Bong was little more than skin and bones beneath an orange, flowing, V-neck tunic and trousers. He lay with his eyes closed and his head resting on a shiny black stone slab. His opium pipe lay on a small, gray and black carpet before him. He opened his eyes as we entered. His high cheek bones, drawn skin and strong jaw gave him a dissipated look. He did not look cruel but rather exhausted. He smiled. He said something to Paul Molitor, who had entered ahead of them, and Paul Molitor spoke rapidly back.
“Why don’t you go home?” Billy Bong said, looking at our eyes.
“We want to,” I said. “As soon as possible, as soon as we can get out, to a road or something, somewhere where we can be picked up.”
“There is a village one day from here, through the village runs a river, down the river there is a road. There are jeeps there.”
“Then that’s where we want to go.”
He began heating opium on the oil lamp. “The village is five mountains away.”
We sighed.
“But I can get you there in five hours. No walking.”
“How?”
Then we heard an animal call like a distorted, amplified amateur trumpet blast and turned and beheld through the doorway an armed Karen warrior seated atop the immense, dinosaurlike head of a five-ton cow elephant. Behind her were five more elephants, standing in a broken line along a trail up the hill from Billy Bong’s hut.
“My elephants will take you,” said Billy Bong as he lit his pipe.
Billy Bong, Headman among Headmen of the Black Karen, was the supreme tribal leader in these parts. Billy Bong (his real name was Ba Pu Long, but he insisted Westerners call him Billy Bong) had five wives and 22 children whose names ranged from Ee Pa (literal translation: First Girl) to Ee Pa Pa (twenty-second girl). As Supreme Headman he was in charge of the local opium production, and of keeping KMT and Shan hands off of that opium, and Billy Bong wanted to expand.
“No more Khun Sa,” Billy Bong said of the indicted warlord. “No more KMT. The Karen people must take charge of their own opium. Karen people will rule these hills. Tell them that where you are from.”

We climbed onto Billy Bong’s elephants from the deck of his hut, stepping between the elephant’s eyes and then sitting cautiously on the wooden benches strapped to the elephant’s backs. Billy Bong had informed us he always traveled by elephant, and it is a magnificent way to travel. Elephants are sure-footed, steady if a bit stubborn, and capable of climbing steeper hills than ponies. (We gave Billy Bong our pony in gratitude.) The only things to watch out for are branches and the occasional showers of dirt elephants throw over their shoulders. Their guides keep them moving with slingshots and monosyllabic commands. (Elephants will only listen to one master at a time. When an elephant is sold — in these mountains the price is between 200,000 and 400,000 baht, or $8,000 to $16,000 — the new master must spend a month together with the former master handling the elephant before the elephant will listen to the new owner’s commands.) They are smart, temperamental animals who spend 20 hours a day eating. And they were our saviors.
We got out. On the back of the elephants who took us over the mountains, the ride a relief for sore legs and battered egos. Riding on their backs above the jungle, so that our heads scraped the bottom of the canopy, made the drenching rains and blistering sun seem not so bad. As they climbed up the mud tracks, their immense flat feet finding traction where there would appear to be none and their trunks rooting out bamboo from the side of the trail, as we rose higher and higher to the top of a mountain, they were taking us to heaven. This was ecstasy, to ride and not walk, to be carried and not to carry, to be above the jungle and not in it, to be safe and not threatened.
After the elephants, rafting down the Nam Mae Yuam river was easy — no walking, just poling along the bottom during slow parts and keeping balanced during rapids, but nothing as tough as those mountains. All the bad part of what we had been through began to seem not so bad as it became clearer we would make it out with only partially torn ligaments and severe dysentery and eye infections and leach scars and maybe a stomach amoeba or two, but we would make it.
Yes, it became obvious we would be OK, and that realization makes you happy when you’ve been through a rough spot. For just a moment, you are relieved. And then, instantly, your worldly concerns return. All those cares that seemed trivial as you were dehydrating in the jungle or dousing leaches with Deat or worrying about being shot, all those cares return suddenly and you think about money and cars and girlfriends and all the civilization you left behind and how you will be fine, you will go home and you will take all that up again. And you think that maybe what matters more than everything that happened out there in the jungle is keeping up on your credit card bills and changing the oil every 3,000 miles.
I don’t know. My knees are still fucked up.

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.”