A Bug Under a Sheet

At the start of Rosh Hashana I went by the Los Angeles Skirball Cultural Center to remind myself of an ancient people’s hard and joyful history.

On Mexican Independence Day I went to Olvera Street to remind myself that a people’s pride is viable even in a culture that sometimes scorns it.

And on the way home I stopped by Cal State Northridge to remind myself that a people’s freedom should never be compromised by silencing those with whom we may violently disagree.

The events and visits somehow went together, threads of a tapestry that tell us who we are at this time and in this place, celebrations of identity in a city where an icon of hatred will soon appear.

I’m talking about David Duke.

I know this guy. He’s a slick, sleazy purveyor of white supremacy, a smiling, glad-handing ex-Ku Klux Klanner who once paraded around in a Nazi uniform to tell us who he is.

He’s gone from handing out hate tracts to running for public office, re-creating himself as a spokesman for poor, dumb white Americans who’ve got to have someone to loathe.

But as a Lousiana newspaper reporter who’s covered him for years told me Monday, “This Klansman has never changed his sheets.”

And the guy with the same old dirty sheets he’s worn since he was a kid is coming here Wednesday.

*

Duke will appear at Cal State Northridge to debate Joe Hicks on affirmative action. Hicks is head of the L.A.-based Multicultural Collaborative.

The timing is perfect: the visit of a hatemonger during the season that Jews and Mexicans are acknowledging their cultures, providing a contrast that even a cotton-brained bigot can’t miss.

I met Duke in New Orleans 17 years ago when I was researching America’s misanthropes. At 28, he headed the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan and was working hard to clean up the Klan’s image as murdering rednecks.

He was the very essence of a young, sweet-natured Southern gentleman most of the time, media-hip and glib, the darling of talk radio, knocking down $1,200 a speech to tell the world that the history of Klan violence was a lie perpetrated by Jews.

Duke blamed Communists, pranksters and the FBI for instances of mayhem attributed to the night riders. At one point he told me with studied indignation that “kids, not Klansmen, burn crosses on lawns.”

As we talked over a long afternoon, flashes of the Duke within emerged through the sweetness: once when he went on in red-faced oratory about “the coming storm”--the war between the white and black races--and a second time when I showed him a photograph I had of him picketing in a Nazi uniform at Louisiana State University.

According to the Anti-Defamation League, Duke was a protege of George Lincoln Rockwell, founder of the American Nazi Party, and was once a member of the party.

He angrily denied both accusations as we sat over lunch not far from a white supremacy bookstore where he kept his office. At first he claimed he had worn the uniform as a joke. Later he remembered that he was trying to show that the person he was picketing was a Communist.

Any other explanation I might hear was another “Jew lie.”

*

Paul Bartels, former political editor for the New Orleans Times Picayune, said in a phone interview that Duke had abandoned efforts to upgrade the Klan’s image.

Duke’s pretty blatantly racist now, Bartels said, but he has toned down his rhetoric.

That there are adherents to Duke’s messages of white supremacy is most recently evident in last week’s Louisiana U.S. Senate primary. Though he ran a distant fourth, he still managed to get 135,000 votes.

How would he do here? Duke suggested once that there are more rednecks in Southern California than there are in Louisiana, and he may be right. But what we also have here is what I mentioned earlier, a celebration of culture that gains strength every year.

I saw this at the Skirball Center in the hushed presence of artifacts that traced the Jews over a period of 4,000 years and at Mexican-American fiestas of a people whose voices are rising with strength and pride across the land.

However Duke promotes his evil doctrine of division and derision, history will roll over him as it has rolled over the night riders and goose-steppers that he attempts to emulate.

I’m glad he’s appearing at CSUN. A university is the place where the likes of him must be defined and studied, like a bug under a microscope. And L.A. is the place to observe that the sheets of the bug are as dirty as ever.

Al Martinez can be reached via the Internet at al.martinez@latimes.com