Long Time Leaving (55 page)

In Pulaski, the speeches were considerably less loathsome and, in fact, evoked sympathy for the marginal white worker. But I wasn't feeling infiltrated.

It seems to me that any organization in this day and age that speaks out for free enterprise but can't relate to the Japanese is not what you would call upscale. The Klan's rank and file like to talk about being better than “minorities” because they don't feel better than anybody else, and the leaders like being around the rank and file because they wouldn't appear to have much leadership potential compared to anybody else. Wilkinson is smart, but that is to say smart for a Klansman. He is not very smart compared with, say, Vernon Jordan, or Morris Dees, the Alabama lawyer whose Southern Poverty Law Center has organized a Klan “Watch that is building cases against Klansmen involved in violence.

Wilkinson doesn't hate anybody, he says, and he may have too complicated a mind for that. He reads
Black Enterprise
magazine on airplanes to keep up with the other camp. “Of course I'm not saying you won't find some Klansmen who hate Negroes’
guts,”
he says with a you-know-how-folks-are chuckle. I would say that Wilkinson almost, but not quite, knows how folks are.

He's willing to share his thinking, though. The Klan today frightens me less than the secret Klan of the sixties, which was lodged deeper in the infrastructure. Wilkinson says his empire is emulating the civil rights movement—parading, clashing with the publicity-seeking Communist Workers Party, getting on TV. “The squeaky wheel gets the grease. White Americans have got to learn to squeak.”

Wilkinson feels that his wheel is gathering momentum as the nation bears right. But I can't see that the Klan has the pervasive potential of the blander Moral Majority, or even of
Diff'rent Strokes.
If you want to be racist and complain about people on welfare, as Slick pointed out, “There are many other things you can join.”

True, those robes and crosses remain a marketable, revivable quantity, like the word
jaws
when it comes to movies. But for all its modification of image, the Klan's distinction—and its usefulness—is still that it reflects
raw
racism and reminds us how real and nasty that is. The Klan is also counterrevolutionary, as always, because it helps divide the American proletariat into white and nonwhite. The Communist Workers Party does the same thing by taking the Klan as a target.

Cheap Klan labor.

There are, however, all those guns, which squawk louder than words. A majority of all American households now are armed, and the Klan is out there in public, brandishing the most lethal legal weapons and urging all white people to stockpile ammunition. Recently Tennessee Grand Titan Stan King was creased by two bullets fired at him point-blank through his screen door by a disgruntled banished Klansman.

Along with King, the “Wairs, Tex Moore, Mary Stickle, and several other Klanspeople we got to know, Slick and I went on a support-your-local-police march in Clarksville, Tennessee. The marchers were armed only with sticks, but there were raunchy-looking security men driving along behind with heavy firepower in their trunks. Supposedly, the local media had been advised that members of the Communist Workers Party were going to be on hand, ready to clash.

As it turned out, the CWP didn't show. And only minimal curiosity was aroused in Clarksville as we paraded through the streets past Mack's Cafe (“Bean Soup. Vegetable Soup. Special Breakfast”) toward the courthouse. But we were all scanning the horizon for Reds, and our buddy Tex Moore said to me, “I don't know. You might be a minority sympathizer. And we'd shoot you quicker than anybody. Because it's the sympathizers that have caused the trouble.”

Caught up in the drama of covert minority sympathy and imminent exposure to crossfire, I was hanging in there next to Tex, and I was
up.
I was thinking, “This must be what combat is like. Sort of.” Maybe Slick and I would get shot together and get an award. I was even thinking that if I got wounded in the line of duty, I wouldn't have to worry about certain pressing personal matters for a while. I was aware that these were stupid thoughts, but I had them anyway.

That was the other time the Klan got into me.

W
ags are calling Bill Clinton and Al Gore the “Double-Bubba” ticket. Clever. Will the first all-Jewish ticket be Double Bubbeleh? The first all-black one (assuming both parties will be male), Co-Bro's? And what are Bush and Quayle, just white? The Blank Slate?

As a matter of fact, I was sometimes called Bubba, by family, when I was younger. A familiar form of Brother. Maybe people of my ethno-genderal category are seen, by the culture at large, as jes’ naturally brotherly. Okay, I'm grasping at straws. But who isn't?

A
USA Today
cartoon depicts Clinton declaring from a podium,
“Ich bin ein
Bubba!” The implication would seem to be that he's a slick, Kennedyesquish or gentleman bubba, a bubba wannabe with a heart of wonk. Isn't that a bit much, to give somebody an ethnic-stereotype nickname and then suggest that it's a pretense on
his
part? In time, no doubt, he'll be denounced for being no bubba after all.

It's all about core, really. Voters today are seen to crave core, and commentators are probing for it. Margaret Carlson in
Time:
“Clinton has shown that there is some iron in that core.” Peggy Noonan in
Newsweek:
“One wonders: at the core, where it counts, what is there?”

Let us not forget that Richard Nixon had core, and was rotten to it. John Kennedy had core, and couldn't keep it in his pants. Jimmy Carter's (pious) and Lyndon Johnson's (ass-kicking) cores were their downfalls. Harry Truman had core in retrospect, but that is partly because historians are looking for core at this juncture.

Will perceived core do, as long as it's sustained? I picture the perceived bubba as an old boy who, whatever else he may have going for him, at least doesn't have his head in the clouds. (“These are not goofy liberals,” says Clinton-Gore campaign manager David Wilhelm. “These are the guys who are in touch.”) Whatever else a bubba is deficient in, he has core. Or anyway, cob. But can any core be genuine, yet marketable-core worn on the sleeve—to a plurality of the voters?

I think it was during the Reagan administration that commentators started worrying about politicians’ cores. And I think it had something to do with the growing suspicion that anybody who looked as calmly resolute as Reagan on TV must have at his core a rock-solid sense of which camera to look into. Then, because they were awkward on TV, we could be quick to disdain Bush and Quayle as hollow. Now, because Clinton seems unnaturally outgoing on camera and Gore unnaturally stiff, they must both be hiding something. If it's core, why would they hide it? They must be just mannikins (or as Republican senator Jake Garn has put it, “pretty boys”) who tell us what we want to hear. So what? We don't want to hear what we want to hear anymore?

What lies at either a voter's or a politician's core of cores, after all, but self-interest? If you think you're voting for somebody who's going to help somebody else, you silly liberal, you're just doing it to feel better about yourself, seems to be the working assumption these days. It's hard to see how any president can manage not to be cored by the current electorate's core values, which set in deep during the Reagan years and which may be stated as follows:

We are entitled to everything, and taxes are bad.

A quote in
The New York Times:

The speaker is some congressman who was present when Robert M. Gates, director of the Central Intelligence Agency, gave Bill Clinton a national security briefing six months before the presidential election.

That's why you want to be president, right? So the CIA has to tell you what the real bottom line is. But then when you find out, do you wish you hadn't? And if you're still only
running
for president, and the guy who's slipping you the skinny is serving at the pleasure of your opponent—who himself used to be the CIA head…

I figure it went like this:

Or, else, it went like this:

An Inaugural Ode