a different sort of march madness

Someone at my apartment complex drives a truck whose tailgate is decorated with what is unmistakably a Confederate flag. It’s not even worth checking to see if other vehicles are similarly emblazoned – being that I live in Texas, it’s an absolute certainty.

And but it’s uncertain just what these symbols are supposed to mean, exactly – different things to different people. Some folks probably believe the bit about reclaiming some part of their cultural heritage; you know, it’s about “Southern pride,” divorced of its meaning with regards to slavery and racial turmoil. Some people just like to provoke others (a habit I can get behind, most of the time). Some were probably just too lazy to scrape it off after winding up with the vehicle secondhand. And some probably still believe all that racist bullshit, and fuck you buddy but it’s my ra-ight.

It’s this last group that concerns me, and that should concern you.

See, there’s still a Ku Klux Klan. Crazy, right? Now, for the most part the KKK seems to have dropped the bed sheet and pointed hood gimmick. They’ve kept the silly titles – the group is chockfull of grand dragons and wizards and so forth, to the point where they remind me of nothing more than a bunch of D&D nerds, shaking their 12-sided die between bouts of acne-cream application.

No, now they wear suits, or at least the higher-ups do. I know this because the Klan came to the sleepy little town I’ve been working in for the past year. I didn’t go to the rally – I suppose I could’ve gone to help cover it for the newspaper which employs me, but I had bigger things to attend to – namely Texas A&M’s second-round NCAA tournament game versus Louisville, which was an absolute nail biter from start to finish. The two events were coincidental, and as sports editor it was easy for me to opt out of checking out the sideshow at the county courthouse.

The Klan’s impending arrival was a big story for a couple of weeks before this last weekend (speaking of which, what do they have against St. Patrick’s Day?), and the primary thrust of that story, to these already-jaundiced eyes, was the city’s utter inability to handle a shitstorm of this magnitude. Driving down the city’s main street the morning of the event, side streets downtown were already taped off, and a chain-link fence encircled the central courthouse square (which was where the Klan would be; gawkers were on the other side, and there were lots of them, and not just locals) giving the normally quiet area the look of a steel cage match. A comparison that is perhaps not wholly inadequate. (The crowd’s general mien was one of amped-up tension paired with a thirst for blood/spectacle, a phenomenon recognizable to the Hulkster and his ilk)

And there were fights – tensions were high, and the crowd got what it wanted (as did the Klan, as did the anti-Klan group that follows them all around the state), if only for a few moments. Undercover police numbered in the hundreds; one of the anti-Klan dudes evidently provoked an area man who probably wouldn’t mind being id’d as a white supremacist. A few punches were thrown; three jerks landed in jail.

That was the story to me, a person who didn’t go to the blasted thing: they’re all pretty much jerks, the whole lot of them. They chose this place as a staging ground for their petty grandstanding – both the Klan and their antagonists, both locked in an eternal parasitic struggle.

One of the grand dragons made a comment, quoted (somewhat) approvingly in our coverage to the effect that ‘the only hate I sense is coming from the other side of the fence.’ Some of the Klan members wore shirts that made the following bold statement: “Hate sucks.” And what a classic move – jockeying for the role of the aggrieved and disenfranchised, angling to be put upon simply for their cherished, long-held beliefs of “white pride and brotherhood” & etc.

But here’s the thing: nothing’s more disingenuous than a bully dressed up in the language/clothes of victimhood. It’s flat-out dishonest, and anyone who falls for their routine is even dumber than the Klan members themselves.

Much later that night, after sending off the paper around midnight, I parked in that same courthouse lot that hours before had been cordoned off for the sake of a couple dozen wolves in sheep’s clothing. See, there’s a bar across the street – I walked in, waited for something like 15 minutes for one of the overwhelmed bartenders to give me a couple of Shiners before last call, to no avail, and walked out.

But the worst part? The aforementioned Klan sympathizer, a big dude with head/face/neck tattoos, and a swastika inked onto his belly (a fact revealed by a photo taken following the fight, during which he apparently lost his shirt), was there with a little baby girl (her name: Eternity, which interestingly enough equals the amount of time she'll regret said name. It's unclear if she was named after the fragrance or the concept), who he had no qualms with holding up high for all to see, right near the chain-link fence. Daddy and baby even posed for a picture for the paper - with pops proudly holding out his little girl's baby arm extended from her chest: "Sieg Hiel."

Our reporter in the field said the profane chants of the crowd would linger in the city's collective memory, but I disagree. The lasting image was published on our front page, an innocent, harmless human soon to be perverted against her fellow humans by the ignorance of her forebears. Teach your children well.