Shadows in the dark, voices in the jungle.

The letter was signed only “Frank” and was carefully printed on lined notebook paper. It said that Jews were taking over the American presidency, blacks were controlling American music and Mexicans had a stranglehold on the gross national product.

It said that Jews, blacks and “people like you” were mongrelizing the Christian white race, but that the time was coming when Jews, blacks and people like me would be adequately dealt with by, one presumes, people like him.

I think I know the man. He lives in Pacoima (which was the postmark on the envelope) and writes to me whenever there is a stirring of racism in the land.

Our one-way correspondence began a few years ago after articles exploring the size and scope of hate groups in America appeared on the front page of The Times. I wrote them.

I had spent months seeking out the sick, sad misanthropes, both Nazis and Klansmen, who marched to mad drummers in a twilight army. Frank Collin in Chicago, Matthew Koehl in Arlington, David Duke in New Orleans, Tom Metzger in San Diego. Others in New York, Portland, Stockton, San Francisco, Canoga Park.

It was before Collin led the Nazi demonstrations in Chicago. Before Metzger ran for Congress in San Diego. Before exponents of a “new Klan” hit the television talk shows.

I was moved to investigate their activities by isolated instances of cross burnings and the unsettling reappearance of swastikas. Something inside said “watch them!” so I did. I’m hearing that voice again. “Watch them.”

It isn’t just the letter from the nut in Pacoima that makes me uneasy. Nor a couple of telephone calls I have received, both of them also anonymous. It’s the cross burning in Kagel Canyon in 1983, the anti-Semitic literature distributed at Parkman Junior High last January, the murder of a talk show host in Denver.

It’s my gut talking to me. “Something’s out there”.

I asked Dave Lehrer how he felt. Lehrer is Western states counsel for the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith and a good source on what’s happening in the hate world.

“I think it’s only the hard core that’s stirring,” he said. “They want to show that the flag is still up. Their flag.”

Widespread coverage of their activities flushes them out. The same coverage, one hopes, will ultimately flush them down, but meanwhile they survive.

“In the past few months, everyone has focused on the neo-Nazis because of incidents of violence,” Lehrer said. “Oddly, a side effect of the publicity is that they grow. But it isn’t a systematic growth. The numbers remain small.”

They’re cut from the same cloth, these people, regardless of the name they go by. The American Nazi Party, the National Socialist White People’s Party, the Ku Klux Klan, the Order, the Aryan Brotherhood, Posse Comitatus.

They wear hoods and Hitler brown shirts and drift from one organization to another. They distribute pamphlets, make phone calls, meet in basements, collect guns and prepare for a racial Armageddon they are certain will come.

The controversy attending Ronald Reagan’s muddled indecision on whom to honor during his upcoming trip to West Germany has got them barking and scratching again. The guy in Pacoima, stirred to fighting fury, sat right down and wrote that letter. Two others sat right down and called me.

Shadows in the dark, voices in the jungle.

This morning, as I began writing about the Nazis and the Klansmen, my intent was to mock them. God created such people especially for the satirist’s table. They are buffoons, ridiculous and inadequate, seething with redirected self-hatred, evil caricatures of dark history.

I remember Frank Collin particularly, living with guards and dogs in a boarded up storefront in southwest Chicago, hiding in a room behind a bright red door. I remember him coming down the stairs toward me, a paunchy, dull-eyed man in rumpled uniform trousers and unpressed olive drab shirt. He was yawning and seemed confused.

I remember thinking, this is the new American Hitler? This mean, tongue-tied clown who can barely articulate his own hatreds? This disheveled fool with a half-zippered fly who mumbles and scratches and proclaims himself the new messiah of a super race?

I damn near strangled to keep from laughing.

Collin, by the way, went to prison for sexually abusing young boys. He’s still on parole.

But to have dismissed his potential would have been to deny my own instincts. To treat any of them as a joke would be to ignore the admonition that history repeats itself. Madmen do come to power. Arms are easily obtained and triggers just as easily pulled.

So I share with you instead the knowledge that the Nazis and the Klansmen exist in the Valley, and the unsettling notion that there is a stirring among them.

I say it without mockery because even that requires hard laughter, and I can’t find them very funny anymore.

They’re out there somewhere, possessed by a special lunacy, hearing a distant drummer.

Watch them.