Jackanapes and Neo Nazis

[Steelhead]

A couple of years ago, I did a series of stories for the Village Voice on
the Far Right. Readers of this list may remember some of my posts from that
time, titled, I think, Notes from a White Visitation. This was shortly
after the Oklahoma City Bombing.

That summer, James Ridgeway and I heard from several sources who claimed
that a Neo-Nazi cell, hold overs from the Aryan Nation, The Order and the
Posse Comitatus, was ultimately responsible for the planning and execution
of the blast. That, in effect, they were Timothy McVeigh's "control."

In order to track this story down we went, among other places, to northern
Idaho, a bastion for the racist right to interview a man by the name of
Louis Beam. Louis Beam was a Texan, who ran the Texas Knights of the KKK
for many years, before leaving in the 1980s to join Richard Butler in the
Aryan Nation. Louis Beam has almost certainly killed dozens of people.
Beam, in fact, developed an assassination hit list containing the names of
dozens of civil rights activists who he planned to kill. His
self-proclaimed motto was: "Where ballots fail, bullets will prevail."
Beam's goal was to unite all the disperate racist groups under one
political banner, the Aryan Nation, and to align it with the racist
religious sect known as Church of Jesus Christ Christian, aka the Christian
Identity Movement.

Ridgeway had written about the racist right for years, most notably in his
chilling book and film, *Blood in the Face*. Having grown up in southern
Indiana, I knew something about the modern history of the Klan, but I knew
little about the Neo-Nazis. Ridgeway invited me to write the stories with
him, mainly, I think, because I knew the country, its roads,and mountains.

So before we hit the road, I immersed myself in the literature of this
crowd. Beam himself had edited a newsletter for several years called the
Inter-Klan Newsletter and Survival Alert. I had the unfortunate assignment
of reading this man's bizarre prose. It was there I came across the word
Jackanape for the first time in this context. Here are a few choice
out-takes:

"An attempt was made to enslave the people of the South--at the hands of
their former slaves, their Jackanapes...where open combat had failed,
secret struggle was successful. So shall it be in the Fifth Era, for the
Anglo Saxon does not long bow to the heavy hand of tyranny...Our Order
intends to purge this land of every Jackanape, or every nonwhite person,
idea and influence. This continent will be white or it will not be at all."

Or this gem:

"One by one, two by two, or fifteen at a time we want them--all of
them--every last filthy money grubbing politician, lawyer, judge,
lawbreaking government agent, media mongrel, lying preacher, race traitor
and Jackanape. The human scum to be hunted down...Praise God! The day of
the wolf will have arrived. We strike in surrogate for all the children
bussed to black ghettos and brutalized, for all the little girls dragged
from the parks and raped, for all the families murdered while they slept,
for all the young men sent to die in no-win wars in forgotten lands for
unknown causes and for all the unspeakable heinous crimes unleashed upon
civilized society, My tow sack runneth over with the heads of enemies."

One of the things I learned from books like Dick Hebdige's *Subculture: the
Meaning of Style* and Kevin Flynn's the *Silent Brotherhood: Inside
America's Racist Underground* is that most of these guys prattle on in
their own argot, their own coded language for the intiated. Hence the
revival of the word Jackanape.

In its original English usage, Jackanape meant someone who was acting like
an ape, acting subhuman, acting black. (This is how I took Mascaro's gibe,
as a compliment actually, something between Beckett's Estragon and the fool
in Lear, with a little Richard Pryor thrown in.) But in the states the
meaning has been reversed. Now it basically means uppity nigger. Jackanape
has been used as a racial slur in the United States since the early 1800s,
particularly in the Deep South. It largely fell out of use in the 20th
century until the 1970s with the rise of the new racist movements aligned
with the Christian Identity sects, which believe that blacks and Jews are
"apelike mud people," sent to Earth as the scourge of God.

Steely

BtW: Like Mascaro, I believe that race, like civility, is a social
construct. With one false construct you lend an excuse for genocide; with
the other an excuse for cultural cleansing.