BITTER HARVEST: Gordon Kahl and the Posse...

BITTER HARVEST: Gordon Kahl and the Posse Comitatus: Murder in the Heartland by James Corcoran (Penguin: $8.95, illustrated). Corcoran’s gripping account of the right-wing tax protester implicated in the murder of two U.S. marshals grabs the reader’s attention like an exceptional crime novel. Although Gordon Kahl appeared to be a decent, hard-working, small-time farmer, he was an outspoken proponent of the bizarre mixture of bigotry, Christian millennialism and pseudo-patriotism preached by the Posse Comitatus and other ultraconservative extremists. Kahl refused to pay any taxes, insisting that income tax was part of an international Jewish-Marxist conspiracy to subvert white, Christian America. His self-righteous adherence to this muddled credo resulted in at least four deaths, including his own. What makes “Bitter Harvest” so profoundly disturbing is the evidence that Kahl was not an isolated crackpot but a representative of a group of increasingly desperate and deluded people. Corcoran concludes: “So, it hadn’t died with Kahl--the hate, the violence, the twisted logic he epitomized. It lived on, and continued to fester in the hearts and minds of people frightened by the disorder, chaos, and displacement they saw around them.”