Hate, Hatred, Haters

Say them out loud. Get ‘em out of your system. You know what I mean. All those vile hate words that debase, denigrate and defile the human race. Write ‘em out a thousand times. Scream ‘em down the toilet.

Feel better?

Some of you do. I get your letters. I see the results of your hatreds. I read the statistics of your efforts.

Six hundred and seventy-two hate crimes in L.A. County last year, an increase of 27% over the previous year. Four hundred and thirty-two of them in the city proper, more than double 1990.

Proud of yourselves?

I mean, you went after gays, blacks, Jews, Latinos, Asians, Anglos, Arabs, lesbians, Iranians, Catholics, Muslims, women, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Mormons, Protestants and a few mixed bloods.

You hit them all, man.

By hit, I mean just that. There was more assault than graffiti this time around. Especially against gay men.

You band together and wait. Or you hide alone with a weapon and wait. Or you clench your fists and wait. Then you jump.

What do you talk about later? I mean, after you’ve left someone bleeding on the ground?

I know what you talk about. I know what you say.

Spic, kike, fag, gook, nigger.

If there is redemption in hatred, it lies in repetition. If there is atonement in repetition, it lies in candor.

So I don’t want the hate names whispered anymore. I want them shouted, then I want them gone. I don’t want my city to be a hate capital. Call us kooks, America. Call us nuts. But don’t call us haters.

I figure if we say the words enough, the hate words, they’ll lose their meaning. Or we’ll get so damned tired of them we just won’t want to say them anymore.

And what we don’t say, maybe we won’t think. And what we don’t think, we might not do. No more beatings, no more swastikas, no more satanic symbols, no more anonymous telephone calls, no more unsigned letters.

“Hatred,” the poet Byron once wrote, “is by far the longest pleasure.”

The pleasure’s been running 20 years in the City of Angels that I know of.

I’ve been here that long and I’ve been getting hate mail ever since my byline began appearing. The tempo increased when I got a column.

A shadow in El Monte writes me regularly. I call him a shadow because he never signs his name. His first letter began, “Hey, Mexican.”

It was meant, of course, as an epithet. Hey, Dane, doesn’t make it. Danes aren’t hated. At least not currently and not by us. But Hey, Mexican-- there’s something to bite into.

But the guy has been writing me for so long, he’s run out of insults. So now he shares other hatreds with me.

Repeat the words. They’re the same.

Hatred is a human tradition. In America, depending on the situation, we’ve hated the Irish, the Chinese, the Germans, the Japanese and the Arabs.

Jews, Mexicans and Catholics we always hate, so they don’t count.

During earlier wars, we were told to hate all Germans. Then all Germans and Japanese. But we got better after the Second World War. We regretted putting our own Japanese into camps. Those things happen. Nothing personal.

When the Korean War came along, we were instructed to hate only those Koreans who were from the north and only those Chinese who were actually fighting us.

Be selective, we were told. Don’t hate our own Koreans and our own Chinese, only The Others. Same with the Vietnamese. You, but not you.

Same during that quick, heady, wonderful adventure called Desert Storm. Don’t hate all the Arabs, only the Iraquis, and only those in uniform and never those in the Good Old U.S.A.

Well, yes, a lot of people not in uniform were blasted in Baghdad, but, hey, we didn’t start it and we gave them plenty of warning and war is war. Sorry about that, women and babies. Nothing personal, old men and cripples.

I saw graffiti once that said, “What a wonderful day for an auto-da-fe.” The irony is explicit. The auto-da-fe was judgment day in the Spanish Inquisition. Sentence them to heaven. Purify them in fire.

Hitler understood purity. And so have all the stabbers and choppers and torturers and shooters and bombers who foul the halls of history.

The tradition continues here as the city grows, and the music of many languages fills our lives. There is a glory to the music and one day it may mute the discordant tones of invective. But not now. Not today.

And not until us spics, kikes, fags, gooks, white Protestants and niggers get together and build a tomorrow in which words won’t hurt us anymore.