"Way back about 1920 there was a Klan, but it was a political organization more than anything. Besides, they couldn't find anyone to scare."
-- Atticus Finch, explaining the world to Jem and Scout in Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird
I'm writing this a few days before the Ku Klux Klan event that was scheduled to be held near Monticello last night; I'm hoping that you didn't hear much if anything about it and that nothing newsworthy occurred. That's usually how these things go these days, a few disgruntled white men (there are generally fewer women) get together and proclaim their godliness and their opposition to any and all social progress, nobody much pays attention, and the world continues to spin.
I've been to a few Klan rallies, and none of them impressed me as gatherings of authentically dangerous or even particularly effective people. Mostly they seem like thwarted, silly men who enjoy the ritual of dressing up as much as the cathartic whining about white genocide or whatever they are getting on about. As individuals, none of them appear particularly fearsome, and the overall impression left by the spectacle is one of impotent sadness. Ralph Forbes and Thom Robb are not particularly charismatic guys, and David Duke has always had about him the whiff of artificiality that attaches to the second-rate motivational speaker.
It's easy to dismiss anyone who aligns with the KKK as ridiculous and pathetic, a low-information loser looking to buck himself up by up by asserting his dubious superiority. We want to laugh at the Ku Klux Klan.
And we do--one of the videos I saw posted on Facebook timelines last week was of a Columbia, S.C., man trolling a KKK march with a Sousaphone (essentially a tuba designed to be carried by a member of a marching band). As a motley gang of Confederate battle flag-bearers, presumably klansmen in mufti, shuffled down the street, an American hero named Matt Buck puffed and blatted out some purposefully awkward circus music, at one point seguing into a version of Wagner's "Ride of the Valkyries" as performed by a flatulent elephant.
While I'm compelled to take off some points because Buck's cellphone-carrying accomplice shot the whole thing in portrait as opposed to landscape mode (when will they ever learn?), Buck's stunt was a wonderfully subversive piece of performance art. It's not hard to imagine that some of the marchers thought the poor kid was supportive of their efforts, that he was doing his best to lend some dignity to the proceedings. Some of them might even have welcomed him.
While ridicule is sometimes the most effective way to deal with noxious ideas, it's a mistake to dismiss the KKK and its ilk as a bunch of clowns. Even crazy talk has the potential to impress those who want to hear it. During Reconstruction, the original Ku Klux Klan was a genuine force--it carried out perhaps the largest and most successful terrorist movement in American history, effectively thwarting the efforts of former slaves to assume full citizenship with a calculated program of assassination, random murder and intimidation.
The 20th Century saw a succession of ultra-right domestic terror groups, including any number of revived Klan groups, William Dudley Pelley's Silver Shirts, the Minutemen and the neo-Nazi militia groups who began to appear at the onset of the '80s. In the 1920s, Henry Ford did much to circulate the myth of a world Jewish conspiracy by helping to promulgate the infamous forgery Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a hoax that set forth a supposed Jewish plan for world domination. In the late 1930s, radio priest Father Charles E. Coughlin founded the Christian Front, which plotted the overthrow of the U.S. government. In 1995 Timothy McVeigh blew up the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City.
It's easy to call them clowns, to make fun of their haircuts and their grammar. We can all pretend those poor blighted boys in the bedsheets don't scare us.
But they do. They scare me. Not because their hate is unfathomable, but because I can understand it.
I can remember the first time I became aware of a group that called itself the Ku Klux Klan. I was in the back seat of the family sedan, traveling on I-95 from our home in North Carolina to my grandparents' house in Georgia. It was in South Carolina, not far from where you'd turn off for Columbia, when I saw the billboard with the white-robed man on a rearing stallion and the words "This is Klan Country."
I remember a sense of creeping awe, as I uncomprehendingly apprehended the image. I remember asking my father what the sign meant.
I do not recall his exact words, but I remember his revulsion and his insistence on the shamefulness of the image. He told me the KKK were thugs and murderers. They bombed churches, they killed little girls. They were cowards.
I had other relatives who wouldn't have agreed with my father; they used words I was instructed never to use and they lived in ways that, to be honest, we looked down on. They were kin and so we tolerated them, even to the point where we'd sit around the supper table with them. But they had bad ideas. They were "ignorant."
None of us are responsible for the actions of our ancestors; we bear no guilt for their crimes and we can assume no credit for their virtues. Still, we ought to acknowledge how their actions shaped our world, how certain advantages may have accrued to us, and how certain others might have been disadvantaged. We ought to at least have the decency to acknowledge that none of us are genuinely self-made, and that deeds ripple consequentially through time. Some fortunes are rooted in robbery; some children are born profoundly disadvantaged.
That may well be an incurable condition, just the way our sorry old world works, but it should be kept in mind. There is no real correlation between net worth and moral fitness. As someone who grew up in the America South, it is not hard for me to imagine how I might have fallen under the spell of someone who told me I was persecuted, that my way of life was under attack, that "my people," who were special unto God, were being genocided by agents of darkness, and that therefore none of my failures or troubles were my own fault. I can see how I might have wanted to believe those sorts of things--had I not been taught better.
Had I not been lucky.
pmartin@arkansasonline.com
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Editorial on 07/26/2015