A while back, I wrote about a friend who is a KKK grand something. I wanted to interview him, but have not been able to get him to talk about how he became a KKKer. We grew up together, I know his family and he didn’t learn this stuff at home.
Recently, I was talking to a mutual friend who was much closer to the klanner. He believes that he knows the answer to why and how he got involved in such a nut case organization. Seems that after he returned from Vietnam, he was approached by a local group of nut cases who needed “military” training. Old Bud had been a cook and truck driver in the Army, but he had been to Vietnam so he had to be some kind of trained killer. They talked Old Bud into training them in hand-to-hand combat and weapons.
My friend says to remember that the Klan and other such organizations generally have about two fairly intelligent people out of every hundred (the rest being total idiots) and they usually end up in charge. Old Bud is not stupid, but he has always wanted to be seen as a tough guy and the Klan gave him the chance to be in charge of something and seem scary to people.
Funny how you can convince yourself of just about anything if you really want to so over the years Old Bud has come to believe the venom he spouts. Thing is, I don’t think he really does. He and I got to talking about the Civil War and he spouted the Klan’s platitudes about how slavery wasn’t such a bad thing, how the slaves had it pretty good and the slave owners were really good people. I noticed that it was almost like he was reading from a script. Maybe he was, just had it memorized.
When I last spoke to him, he was getting his house ready to sell. Nothing was said about the inter-racial family who had just moved in next door. He said that he had been planning to build a house on the old home place for several years and if he waited much longer, he would be too old to complete it.
Old Bud is in his late fifties and the rest of the local KKK looks even older. Maybe we are about to see it die a natural death.
posted by <"Billy Joe Bob"> at 9:05 AM
