THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT 
              Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: Sunday, April 14, 1996                 TAG: 9604120706
SECTION: COMMENTARY               PAGE: J1   EDITION: FINAL 
SOURCE: By TONY WHARTON, STAFF WRITER 
                                             LENGTH: Medium:   56 lines

ISOLATED. EXTREMIST. ANGRY THE ISSUE: WE OFTEN THINK OF THE UNABOMBER SUSPECT, THE FREEMEN AND OTHERS AS ANGRY OUTSIDERS. HOW MUCH DO THEY REFLECT FEELINGS OF DISCONNECTION AND DISPAIR IN AMERICAN SOCIETY

The West gave us the image of the loner in American culture - the frontier scout, the settler, the prospector, the gunslinger. Part reality, part myth, they stand firmly astride our imaginations.

A century later, there is a new, even more violent image of the Western loner: the Unabomber, the Oklahoma City bombers, the Freemen, David Koresh. Suddenly, the vast spaces of the West seem populated with angry men trying to drop out of society or destroy it.

Westerners are indignant, nervous and comic about these developments - ``At least our cows are sane'' reads a T-shirt in Montana. Still, there is serious meaning, too.

The mythic Westerner of old could be dangerous if you angered him, but his anger was personal. These new loners rage at American society in general, the government in particular.

And they aren't confined to the West.

Witness John Salvi, advocating separate currency for Catholics while shooting abortion clinics and shattering lives in Brookline, Mass., and Norfolk.

Dark threads trace a connection between the fiery rhetoric of these outsiders and the more recognizable fears and disturbances of the mainstream.

The Unabomber is angered by technology and its effects; thousands of workers have lost jobs because their plants were automated.

The Freemen claim the government has no power over them because it is not legitimate; politicians from Ross Perot and Pat Buchanan to Newt Gingrich maintain the Washington bureaucracy is completely out of touch with Americans.

David Koresh and the Freemen sought to physically separate themselves from society; think of the new subdivisions with walls, gates and security guards.

Perhaps, then, the West isn't the only place where these themes resonate. The impulse that drove some, not all, to the lonely parts of Montana or Texas is disconnection. And plenty of Americans understand that feeling.

The point is not that the men getting the headlines are physically isolated, but that they are socially disenfranchised. They don't enter into the bonds of mutual regard and reliance that are the glue of society.

To the millions of Americans who don't vote and don't know their neighbors, that may not be such an alien feeling after all. MEMO: Three articles are reprinted: Montana's hard times, by William

Kittredge, Newsweek

Terror in America, by Philip Jenkins, American Heritage

Politics of the Freemen, by Jim Nesbitt, Newhouse News Service< by CNB