Time Mag: Government Distrust and a Dead Census Taker

The death of a U.S. Census Bureau worker in Clay County, Kentucky, found hanging from a tree, reportedly with the word "fed" scrawled on his chest, rippled through the national consciousness more than other crimes from rural, tucked-away corners might have. The discovery of the body of Bill Sparkman, 51, a substitute teacher and field worker for the bureau, comes at a time when talk media, tea parties and white-hot town hall meetings have fanned anti-government sentiment. Speculation has run rampant that the Sparkman case may be related to the vitriol. Kentucky, like many southern states, voted overwhelmingly for Sen. John McCain during the 2008 presidential election.

Sparkman's body was found on Sept. 12 near a small family cemetery in a remote patch of the Daniel Boone National Forest in Clay County, about 18 miles south of the county seat of Manchester. According to published reports, Sparkman died of asphyxiation. Kentucky State Police, who are in charge of the investigation with FBI assistance, have not determined whether the death was from homicide, suicide or an accident, but an assistant director at the Census department's southern bureau says the police have told them it is an apparent homicide.

If so, was it part of the recent rage at what right-wing commentators decry as the big spending, socialistic government of the first African American president? Al Cross, a former reporter for the Louisville Courier-Journal who covered the area for 30 years, believes that the conditions underlying the murder go back much farther and much deeper — and are more local — than the spate of recent ire.

Now the director of the Institute for Rural Journalism and Community at the University of Kentucky, Cross told TIME that "the idea that hatred for Barack Obama played any role in this is rank speculation and completely unwarranted at this juncture." Explains Cross: "resistance to federal authority in the area dates back more than a century, to the era of major moonshine stills." And, for nearly the last three decades, he says, "federal and state authorities have targeted pot growers in Clay and adjoining counties." Currently, it is marijuana harvesting season and probably a particularly bad time to randomly knock on doors in Clay County.

Cross points out that the economically-distressed area's drug activity — from marijuana grown in the national forest to methamphetamine and prescription drugs — is often intermingled with political corruption and that "in the last several years, the Justice Department has won indictments and convictions of officials and other local residents for vote fraud, other corruption and other crimes." The area is within the jurisdiction of the Appalachian High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area task force, which eventually created another task force to take on political corruption.

http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1926180,00.html


Hoskins Cemetery in Manchester, Ky., near where census worker Bill Sparkman was found dead.