When people get together to complain about the governments, the maladies they bring up take predictable forms. Taxes are too high. The government is too bureaucratic. And as George Orwell so powerfully showed us in Animal Farm power corrupts. The idea that government officials are corrupt is particularly troubling a democracy when the government is nothing more nor less than we ourselves, which is why there is something of a cottage industry in exposing government corruption. Such exposes have long been one of the main courses of American journalism, but book-length discussions of corruption also abound.
These books have a number of different purposes, although nearly all of them seek to make people angry about a wrong that the writer perceives. Some writers are openly partisan hoping not only to convince the reader that a particular wrong has taken place but also that the particular course of action advocated by the writer is the only possible recourse. Other writers are more temperate in their approaches, assuming that once a wrong has been made public then the public will know how to act to right that injustice. Of the two books examined in this paper, one pursues the former strategy while the other takes the second. Both examine elements of the federal government and particularly of the federal intelligence system. However, despite these similarities, the politics, style and philosophies of the different authors produce dramatically different books.
Alan Bock's Ambush at Ruby Ridge : How Government Agents Set Randy Weaver Up and Took His Family Down (Dickens Press, 1995) examines what was before Waco the cause celebre for those people who feel that the U.S. government is far worse than the criminals that it pursues. Weaver was a white separatist (not a white supremacist) living with his family on Ruby Ridge in remote northern Idaho. According to Bock, after a government stooge baited Weaver into an ill...