U.S. evolves at differing rates

So what should we think of Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam and the fact that racist imagery – including that of the Ku Klux Klan – turns up in his college yearbook?

The Washington Post made this obscure yearbook page public knowledge. Personally, I'm more offended by Northam's quote than the photo

Personally, I’m not totally shocked.

I REMEMBER back when I was in college (mid-1980s) and looking through the old yearbooks from Illinois Wesleyan University – my alma mater – seeing graphics of Klan nightriders and hooded people being used as illustrations.

Entirely on those pages devoted to the fraternities that existed on campus.

But there is one fact that should be pointed out – these particular yearbooks were from the 1890s. Meaning they already were nearly a century old, and the ideals that may have existed on campus back then had long evolved into something far different from its origins.

I’ve also seen old University of Illinois yearbooks from the early 1900s indicating that the Ku Klux Klan once was regarded as a fully-legitimate fraternity on the Urbana, Ill., campus – although I’ve also seen various accounts indicating the U of I KKK was never an officially-recognized chapter of the Klan.

SO WHAT SHOCKS and appalls me about the Northam situation?

It’s that these Klan-like hooded images were still being considered acceptable as recently as the ‘80s – Northam was a student at Eastern Virginia Medical School, and it was the 1984 yearbook that included the photo of people in blackface and a Klan hood on a page devoted to Northam himself.

As for Northam saying in response that the questionable photograph is not of himself, but that he once remembers dressing up in blackface as part of a Michael Jackson impersonation, I’d think that is something that falls into the category of something stupid he once did that is now embarrassing.

NORTHAM: Same person now as he was in '84?

Largely because it makes many of us question his musical tastes in general. It’s something more silly than offensive. Or offensive in the sense that he could ever have been so ridiculous.

BUT THE REALITY is that this kind of imagery that had long withered away in Illinois was still considered acceptable in Virginia. Just as some people are still willing to fight for Confederate imagery in the form of flags and statues that still linger in parts of the nation.

Personally, I don’t have trouble believing that Northam himself had long forgotten about this imagery attached to his name, and he may well have moved far beyond this type of thought in his own life.

The smart-aleck in me thinks that if Northam still felt such thoughts in his daily existence, he’d be a Republican. Which probably would put him more in line with the bulk of the southern region from which he comes.

He’d probably be doing whatever he could to tie his imagery to that of President Donald Trump and going around wearing one of those red “Make America Great Again” caps – which some openly say is the 21^st Century’s version of wearing a white hood.

SO WHEN REPUBLICAN ideologues go about claiming that Northam is evidence of hypocrisy amongst those of the Democratic Party when it comes to racial issues, I see it more as evidence of trying to distract attention from their own racial hang-ups.

My point is that I’m not quickly jumping on board with those people who are demanding Northam’s resignation on grounds that he’s an embarrassment to his home state. Although I’m also wondering if the pressure is going to rise to such levels that he’ll have no choice BUT to resign!

Are the same people calling for Northam's resignation the same individuals who defend the continued existence of Confederate memorials?

I almost feel like the only people who’d win by denouncing Northam as an unreformed bigot are the unreformed bigots themselves – as though they’d try to claim this as justification for their own ignorant ways of thought.

While also expressing some thoughts indicating that they think we’d be better off going back to the past – such as an era where no one would give a second thought to anything being strange and hostile about the imagery stirred up by Northam’s college yearbook.

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Can we misconstrue the Klan? Or is racism on the rise amongst our teens?

I’ll be curious to see how the courts wind up addressing a case out of a high school in suburban Barrington, where some people are insisting on discipline for several students they believe were supportive of the Ku Klux Klan.

The ultimate arbiter?

For this incident reminds me of something potentially equally stupid back when I was in high school more than three decades ago – one Halloween when a student managed to concoct an overly elaborate costume for himself that wound up offending certain students of an African-American persuasion.

HIS COSTUME, AS I remember it, was essentially a white sheet – albeit one that had been decorated with elaborate, ghoulish-looking drawings. As I recall, the costume was intended to be symbolic of the rock band Black Sabbath (remember Ozzy Osbourne back when he really bit the heads off of bats and before he became a reality television star?).

But the black students who saw this white sheet walking down the hall presumed that someone had the nerve to wear a crude-looking Klan robe to school, and I remember seeing them chasing this student down the hall.

Teachers ultimately intervened, and the incident didn’t become anything lasting – although I wonder if somewhere out there is a one-time school mate (one whom I haven’t seen or heard from since those days) of mine who’s convinced he saw the Klan, and wishes he could have kicked its derriere.

Or, if some heavy metal rock fan realizes how close he came to getting a beat down because of his absurd choice of a Halloween costume?

IT SEEMS THERE is an incident at Barrington High School that has elevated to higher intensity levels – one that the courts ultimately will have to resolve.

It seems the Internet, amongst its many stupid and trivial images and tidbits, includes a photograph of white girls at a party, wearing white t-shirts and holding their arms over their heads in a gesture that some are choosing to be the equivalent of Klan hoods.

One of the girls, whose party the photo was supposedly taken at, is identified by initials. Which happen to be a string of “K’s.” How unfortunate for her.

For it means the photograph has been spread around the Internet to people who are insisting that the high school district take some sort of disciplinary action against these budding white racist princesses who likely view their purpose in life as the propagation of the white race by creating multiple white supremacist babies. A statement as over-the-top, ridiculous and absurd as this case has the potential to be.

THE FACT THAT this activity was not part of any school activity and took place on property not connected to the school doesn’t seem to sway any of these activist-types. They want action!

And when Barrington Community School District 220 didn’t provide it, they went to court, where assorted documents have been filed in recent months, and a hearing on the issue is scheduled for Monday.

Now I don’t know any of the people involved in any side of this particular case. So I don’t know if any of these girls involved at what was a “white out” party (everybody, including the black people who were invited, wore white clothes) has racist tendencies in their personalities.

Or if the activist types are just looking for a fight that some of my black classmates were willing to carry out many years ago.

BUT YET I don’t want to automatically dismiss the chance of racist perceptions being seen in our society. For they are there. They are real. We do have people with irrational hang-ups amongst us who largely count on the fact that they can couch them in such vague ways so as to make them unnoticeable to the masses.

Who would just as soon believe that such things, if they ever really existed, are a part of our societal past.

Ultimately, it’s going to be the courts that will have to decide what constitutes improper and racist behavior, and whether this incident rises to that level.

Although there’s a part of me that suspects the only real crime here is the parents of a certain teenage girl who gave their daughter a name resulting in multiple K’s for initials.

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What kind of twisted twerp thinks white supremacy is the “American” way?

There is one positive aspect I can think of related to the white supremacist rally in Virginia that resulted in fatalities – maybe now we’ll stop thinking of such events as a laughable spectacle.

Popular spot to express Trump contempt

Because that is what happens all too often whenever these people with their racial hang-ups insist on exercising their right to free expression (their ‘right to be wrong’) – the end result is usually something so laughable.

WE GET OUR chuckle at the thought anybody could be deluded enough to think such thoughts. We comment about third-rate brown shirts who likely would have been rejected by the real Nazi Party had they tried to join back in 1930s-era Germany.

Or maybe we joke about wondering just how those Klansmen get their sheets so white.

We laugh them off because the spectacle usually is ludicrous.

Like the time I once covered a Klan rally held outside the Illinois Statehouse in Springfield – the Klan chaplain (I forget the goofy K-laden title they gave him) led the protesters in a “prayer” that God strike Planet Earth with a plague that would wipe out all the undesirable life forms and leaving the globe free and clear for white people.

ROCKWELL: Brought Nazis to United States

OR ANOTHER RALLY I once covered outside the Bloomington, Ill., hospital where American Nazi Party founder George Lincoln Rockwell was born. They laid a wreath to pay tribute to their founder, and the followers who came uniformed in swastika armbands and helmets took a public pledge that bore some resemblance to the one that the “Illinois Nazis” took in the film “The Blues Brothers.”

Remember? They pledged allegiance to Adolf Hitler, only to see the one-time Mount Prospect police car driven by noted scofflaw Elwood Blues come roaring at them – forcing them to all dive into a nearby river.

The rally held recently in Charlottesville, Va., had no such laughable moments.

TRUMP: Election emboldened modern-day Nazis?

What wound up happening was that a white supremacist backer drove his car into the group of counter-demonstrators who wanted to make their opposition known.

WE NOW HAVE fatalities caused by these people whose insecurities about life cause them to want to think the accident of Caucasian conception makes them a superior form of life.

One-time Klan leader and Louisiana politico David Duke described the events as being one of, “We are determined to take our country back.” President Donald Trump has taken some abuse because his initial statements about the matter came so many hours after it occurred, and were lukewarm as though he were trying to shift blame to the counter-protesters – who are the ones who suffered a casualty in all this.

When Trump tried making a harsher statement that acknowledged the absurdity of the white supremacists, Duke retorted by telling the president, “I would recommend you take a good look in the mirror and remember it was white Americans who put you in the presidency, not radical leftists.”

These are the racist ideologues who were the bulk of the 46 percent of the electorate that was able to give Trump an Electoral College victory making it clear they won’t be ignored.

IT’S GOING TO be hard for Trump to continue to deny he’s president because of the bigots amongst us who saw his repeated ridiculous rhetoric as backing of their own racist ideals. Particularly since the gaudy tower that contains the hotel he operates in Chicago is now a popular gathering place for the protesters.

Friday's incident not comical like this Blues Brothers scene

That may be the significance of the counter-protests held Saturday and Sunday in Chicago, amongst other cities, in which people were able to peacefully express their outrage over the racist radicals who think this Age of Trump is their age of empowerment!

Many of us who would have dismissed Friday’s event for the Wal-mart-purchased Tiki torches carried by the white supremacist protesters or the ridiculous attempts at being clad in paramilitary gear are going to have to take a more serious look at this segment of our society.

Which may be a minority going about chanting “You will not replace us.” But it is one with an un-American ideal in that they’d want to use their freedom of expression to overpower everyone not like themselves into a position of submission.

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It’s the ones who don’t wear the sheets whom we ought to be fearful of

It doesn’t surprise me to learn that many political people being “outed,” so to speak, as members of Ku Klux Klan-like white supremacist groups are quick to deny such involvement.

Back in the 1920s when the klan was (almost) politically respectable

The reality is that the klan of old is no more. There are many knuckleheads who go about donning the white robes and hoods and using the imagery of the klan – including the lit crosses that technically are a symbol of Christianity – while expressing their racial hang-ups about anybody who isn’t exactly like themselves. Modern-day public klan spectacles (such as a prayer for God to hit the Earth with a plague to wipe out all non-white people) are too buffoonish to take seriously.

SO TO LEARN that a group calling itself Anonymous is using the Internet to anonymously identify political people who are affiliated with the klan is something we ought to be fearful of.

Largely because I’d question the validity of any information they actually have.

In theory, I get the idea that we ought to know which government officials (the people whom we the voters were stupid enough to elect) are tied to white supremacist groups.

I just don’t trust the ability of those anonymous types to accurately be able to say who has ties to such groups, or even to identify which groups deserve to be thought of as klan – and which ones are just a batch of drunken meatheads.

WE PROBABLY WILL wind up getting at least a few people wrongly identified as being “klan,” which has the potential to be a devastating label to tag onto someone.

More fearful, there probably will be people with political ties who are white supremacist at heart who will get overlooked by this list.

Will they then think they have been cleared, or absolved, of any hang-ups they may have that do influence the way they go about dictating public policy? That would be the real shame.

They would probably think the fact that they’re not on the list means that everything is hunky-dory about their ignorance, and that the rest of us have to put up with it.

NOW I KNOW my history enough to accept that there have been political people who were part of that terrorist organization whose purpose was to ensure that black people remained in a position of subservience within our society.

They probably did wear the robes and hoods while partaking in the cross-lighting rituals that the group thinks adds a credence to their hateful rhetoric.

So I’m not interested in hearing of lists of decades old politicos who had their klan ties.

I’m interested in the here and now. And quite frankly, I don’t care about anyone who is interested in being anonymous – in part because I’m a writer who always puts my name on any copy I create.

ANONYMITY IS THE ruse of those people interested in merely stirring up trouble without wanting to put in the work to back up their rants. I consider this particular group’s efforts to be as credible as the anonymous railings of the conservative ideologues who spout out trash talk that isn’t all that far removed from official klan-speak.

Besides, I have no doubt that many of those people who try to pass themselves off as respectable people in our society don’t go about wearing the klan robes and hoods – even if their attitudes border on being equally despicable.

There are even people who go about in fairly expensive suits whose hang-ups ought to qualify them for the klan robe that perhaps their grandparents might have considered wearing.

Those people are the ones who really scare me because of the fact that they think the passage of time has somehow made their views respectable.

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Republicans as the Klan and “evil?” It makes about as much sense as most of the Obama socialist rants we hear

It seems that Slim Coleman, the outspoken activist who now calls himself a pastor, is going about trying to stir up support for Gov. Pat Quinn by bringing up talk of the Ku Klux Klan and forces of evil within the Republican Party.

What would Harold think of one-time ally?

To listen to Slim (whose mother named him “Walter”), the reason people shouldn’t vote for Bruce Rauner is because having a Republican Party person as governor would add strength to those forces out there who use the GOP to promote ideas that do, at times, border on racist and hateful.

THE CAPITOL FAX newsletter out of Springfield seemed to find it odd that most of the reporter-types who covered the Quinn stunt that had him being endorsed by many clergymembers (including Coleman) didn’t highlight this element.

I wasn’t at the event; I heard audio off of WBEZ-FM. But I’d wonder if it is because those of us who have been around this city for any length of time know that Coleman is capable of spewing just about anything.

The activist who was allied with Harold Washington when he was mayor and was a co-hort of former Alderman Helen Shiller when the Lady from Uptown was one of the few people who would speak out against Mayor Richard M. Daley has such a record of trash talk that this moment isn’t even in the Top 10, so to speak.

It is the kind of nonsense comment best ignored by sensible people. As for the fact that Republican Party officials are now trying to claim they’re being victimized, they come across as crybabies.

PERHAPS I’D TAKE these party officials a little more seriously if they tried to do anything about all the nonsense rhetoric we’ve been subjected to throughout the years about President Barack Obama’s socialist attitudes.

OBAMA: Socialist talk just as silly?

Or all the times any dink who wants to rant about Democrats resorts to talking about Lenin, Marx and Communism. Usually, their diatribes devolve to the point where it’s obvious most of them don’t have a clue what communism or socialism really are.

So when Coleman came out this week and talked about how the Ku Klux Klan of the early 1960s evolved into militia movements and how some of them get politically active with the Tea Party types that are now taking over Republican Party organizations all across the country?

That’s kind of a long-winded attack by Coleman, and one that is way too easily deflected.

IF THERE’S ANYTHING about this that truly surprised me, it is that Coleman is now an ordained minister. And that he has ties to the Methodist church that offered sanctuary to Elvira Arellano – the Mexican woman who hid in the church for just over a year to try to avoid deportation.

RAUNER: Do some backers have nasty motives?

The point being that to try to think of Coleman as merely a pastor who spends his time reading the Bible and trying to decipher its greater truths would be misleading.

He’s an activist who throughout the years has always shown a willingness to play political hard-ball, largely because he wants the attention. Ignoring his rants would truly be the best way for Republicans to respond to him.

Because I’m sure that Coleman is enjoying the thought that he has provoked newly-named Cook County Republican Chairman Timothy Schneider to a response. Although maybe he's less impressed by the fact that Rep. Luis Gutierrez, D-Ill., for whom he does some work, feels the need to dish out an unnamed punishment, according to the Chicago Sun-Times.

THE ONE THING people shouldn't want to do is to lower themselves to a hostile level. Because there are people of a certain age who remember how then-Alderman Edward R. Vrdolyak once went on the attack against Coleman so as to reign political blows on Washington.

VRDOLYAK: Dishing it out to Slim

Remember that Vrdolyak said Coleman was “the funeral director for the Nazis?" Because he permitted the wake of a neo-Nazi who was trying to get out of that movement to be held at the headquarters of the activist group he was heading up back some 30 years ago.

The sad part of our political people is that they all too often devolve to trash talk, and that neither political party has a monopoly on stupidity.

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A suburban Christmas w/ the Klan?

White supremacist stuff is almost laughable. On the face of it, the materials they peddle come across as pathetic.

If not for canes, this Klan would be forgetable

One really has to have a depraved sensibility to find anything appealing about it.

WHICH IS WHY I have a hard time taking seriously the incident that occurred earlier this week in suburban Tinley Park, where the local police are investigating the distribution of a few fliers touting a group calling itself the Traditionalist American Knights.

As in a group that uses the imagery of the white robes and hoods of the Ku Klux Klan and tries to appeal to people who have their own irrational hang-ups about our society based on race.

It seems that five people living on a block in the southwestern Cook municipality reported having found fliers placed on their driveways in plastic bags – along with a candy cane.

How sweet. These racist nitwits who want to stir up fear kept in mind that it was the Week of Christmas. They gave a gift.

ON THE SURFACE, these people weren’t making a threat to the individuals who found the flier and candy. It seemed more to reassure people who live in the predominantly white (but also very ethnic) community that someone would sympathize if they’re the types who believe that all these Muslims who are moving into the southwest suburbs are somehow a threat.

The police may well be handling this incident properly. The candy canes have been collected as evidence, in the event that some sort of serious racial supremacist activity does develop in the suburb.

For now, it’s someone with a depraved sensibility leaving a candy cane. In and of itself, it’s not a crime.

Would these people have used candy canes?

But it’s the kind of thing that ought to have authorities concerned that criminal activity can develop. Although it seems that in Tinley Park, officials are less concerned with the Klan than the “16 and Pregnant” program of M-TV setting foot in town.

BECAUSE I’LL BE the first to admit the Klan, or the groups that use its imagery, aren’t anywhere near as organized as they’d like us to believe. The Klan of old that was fully-worthy of the label of “terrorist organization” is dead.

Instead, we have half-wits who try to reinforce their hang-ups by using the old imagery – as though they think everyone will cower in fear at their hooded presence. Instead of merely causing us to snicker at how pathetic they truly are.

I doubt this group, whatever its membership actually consists of, even bothers to wear the hoods and robes of old. They’re probably like a group of people I once encountered at a hot dog stand on the Northwest Side who were talking amongst each other about how to properly erect a cross so as to try to intimidate someone.

As far as I know, that cross was never erected in the neighborhood. It likely was a few meatheads blowing off some verbal steam.

NOW THAT WE have a candy cane chapter of the Klan (how else can we think of this latest group), it seems even more lame and laughable.

There always will be a few people who turn to the image of the hood or the swastika to try to reinforce their thoughts that it’s everybody else’s fault that they’re at the bottom of our society.

And that if things were just, someone else would rank below them. Which never will occur.

If anything, I have always sided with those civil rights activists who say that in the modern era, the bigots we ought to be concerned about are those who don’t wear sheets.

AS IN THOSE people who actually work their way into legitimate positions of power and authority – then use them to reinforce their racist thoughts.

I fear a government official or police officer with a racial attitude more than I ever will fear some clown in a hood who wants to idealize the nitwits who resorted to terrorist tactics to try to keep black people “in their place.”

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Dragging the Klan into the mix is nothing but foolish for Cardinal

Cardinal Francis George is correct in saying that the Ku Klux Klan has a history of being just as anti-Catholic as it has been anti-black.

Does anyone seriously believe ... 



In fact, if one goes back to the late 1910s and early 1920s when Klan chapters expanded beyond the Deep South and it almost became respectable to be a member, there were some people who joined because of their religious bigotry more than any hostilities felt toward black people.

THE REALITY WAS that some parts of the country had very few black people. The Catholics, however, were a foreign conspiracy that was taking over the world. Or so the nitwits of that era wanted to believe.

But the Cardinal made himself look like the nitwit earlier this week, and he had to go ahead and do it on television. People across the Chicago metropolitan area who happened to watch WFLD-TV’s evening newscast on Wednesday got to see and hear George when he compared the gay rights activists upset about a Catholic parish’s objections to the route for the 2012 gay pride parade to the Klan of old.

As George put it, the “Gay Liberation Movement” has the potential to “morph into something like the Ku Klux Klan” for daring to suggest that Catholic officials might be mistaken.

This makes the Cardinal sound as ridiculous as Rep. Allen West, R-Fla., who got himself international attention for his wisecrack about how low approval ratings for Congress reflect badly upon its Republican members, saying, “if Josef Goebbels was around, he’d be very proud of the Democrat(ic) Party because they have an incredible propaganda machine.”

NAZI PROPAGANDA IMAGES for speaking the truth about Republican partisan political tactics? Just like thinking ill of the Catholic church. It all sounds like people who are way too touchy; perhaps because on a certain level they realize their side is wrong on a certain issue – but don’t want to admit it.

Of course, just as the Republican-controlled House of Representatives shot down an attempt to censure West for his over-the-top rhetoric, I suspect a lot of Catholics are going to be quick to jump on the bandwagon of support for the Cardinal.

... these people are comparable?



Which is a shame, because this is a case where everybody would be better off if this issue withered away – instead of being prolonged by defensive talk. Which all winds up being a defense of a ridiculous position.

Now the fact that the Catholic Diocese for Chicago is concerned about the gay pride parade next year isn’t new. Parade officials altered the route through north lakefront neighborhoods, and also wanted to start the event earlier.

THE END RESULT was the potential for the parade to pass by a Lakeview neighborhood Catholic church right as Sunday morning mass was starting. There may have been some parishioners who would get offended, but there also was the potential for an area traffic jam as a large-scale parade passes the Our Lady of Mount Carmel parish (although church officials had hinted that many passengers might just skip church that morning in protest of the parade).

Which is why parade officials have agreed to alter the starting time. Now, it should pass the church a couple of hours after the Sunday morning mass is over. Which, to my mindset, makes it sound like the parade organizers are trying to be reasonable.

But the rhetoric we got from the Cardinal makes it seem that being reasonable isn’t good enough. They’re upset anybody challenged their opposition at all. And now, they want to resort to Klan analogies – hoping desperately that they will capture the support of the “middle” of our society.

Which I’m skeptical would happen, because the imagery of gay rights activists being aligned with the Klan is just too absurd to take literally. It’s even more ridiculous than the concept of a “World Series champion Chicago Cubs” team.

BESIDES, IT REMINDS me of the occasions when, as a reporter-type person, I have covered rallies involving the Klan. I have seen the robes and the hoods up-close, and I also have read their literature that attempts to make them out to be an organization promoting “American values.”

One thing I noticed is that the modern Klan, in stating who it does not want, has altered its rhetoric slightly. Catholics are no longer forbidden. Catholicism has become so mainstream in our society that many of its members now qualify as ordinary white people – in the Klan’s eyes.

Although I’m going to stop short of stating that George may well have given verbal comfort to real-life Klan members by making statements that indicate opposition to gay rights activists. I’m sure real Klan members don’t object to what he said.

But I do, and I’m sure there are many other people (both Catholic and non) who do object – particularly in these days leading up to the holiest of all holy days. The concept of bringing up the Klan at Christmas-time seems particularly venal.

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What should we think of Byrd in Klan?

It has been a staple of the conservative ideologue attack rhetoric – whenever somebody of the GOP says something incredibly stupid, we get reminded that “Robert Byrd was once in the Ku Klux Klan!”

It is supposed to imply that nobody should assume all the nitwits are of the conservative faction that has become all dominant in the Republican Party. After all, the senator from West Virginia was a southern boy who resisted the trend of his many regional colleagues to shift allegiances to the GOP.

BUT NOW, BYRD is gone, with funeral services held Friday at the Statehouse in Charleston, W. Va. In line with his stature as the longest-serving senator, he got an incumbent president and the previous Democrat to hold that office. Both Barack Obama, the first biracial president whose existence in that post would have been anathema to Byrd when he began his political career, and Bill Clinton even eulogized the man.

Both are getting hit with charges that they’re being hypocritical because of the way they addressed Byrd’s long-ago membership in the Klan.

Obama described Byrd as a man with “a capacity to change, a capacity to learn, a capacity to listen. A capacity to be made more perfect.” Clinton, the boy from Hope, Ark., said that a Klan tie was something that can be found in people who were “country boy(s).”

As Clinton put it, “Maybe he did something he shouldn’t have done. And he spend the rest of his life making it up. And that is what a good person does. There are no perfect people. There certainly are no perfect politicians.”

AN APOLOGIST FOR anyone willing to keep a “D” after his name? Or just a realistic view of what life in our society is about?

Now as I have written, it is not a new disclosure that Byrd was in the Klan back in the days before he became an elected official. Based on his rhetoric and writings from the times, it seems that Byrd was delusional enough to believe the line of thought that the Klan still tries to peddle about itself, but that people today have enough sense to disregard.

That “thought” is that the Klan represented American ideals, because naturally real Americans were white people of a Scottish-Irish ethnic background. Some people still try to peddle that line of thought, although they don’t speak quite so bluntly as what was once considered to be appropriate.

There has never been evidence that Byrd kept Klan ties once he became a federal government official in the 1950s, other than the fact that he was a Southern White Male.

IN A 2005 autobiography, entitled “Robert C. Byrd, child of the Appalachian cornfields,” the senator explained his one-time Klan membership as having occurred because, “I was sorely afflicated with tunnel vision – a jejune and immature outlook – seeing only what I wanted to see because I thought the Klan could provide an outlet for my talents and ambitions.”

I’m not necessarily trying to defend Byrd for his Klan membership of six decades ago. I do find it reprehensible that he could ever have thought that the white supremacist ideology of the Klan represented what this country ought to strive for.

But I do realize that such attitudes were prevalent, in that there once was a time when anyone who pushed for the idea that anyone not White Anglo-Saxon Protestant could have a legitimate place in our society was somehow regarded as being “communist.”

Then again, maybe we haven’t changed as much as we’d like to think we have. How often do we hear rhetoric these days claiming that Obama is a “socialist” because of his stance on health care reform, immigration or, well actually, just because of his existence?

CHANCES ARE THE people who like to spew this rhetoric are the biological descendants of at least a couple of individuals who once put on a robe and hood and claimed their rants against miscegenation were meant to preserve “American” ideals. They’re definitely the ideological descendants of those people.

Which is why it always struck me that anyone who tried to lambast liberal causes in recent years by exclaiming that “Robert Byrd was once in the Klan!” was doing nothing more than trying to misdirect attention away from their own stupid rants.

On this issue, I’m willing to consider the likelihood that Byrd was a Southerner in character (although not all bigots are from the South), but that his attitudes adapted throughout the years. I base that thought largely on the fact that he managed to get himself re-elected every six years since the 1958 elections.

I am enough of a political realist to know that anyone who mentally was still stuck in 1959 would have at-best become a fringe member of the Senate, and would not have risen to the ranks of majority leader.

WHICH MAKES ME wonder if Obama hit this issue right on the head when he said the Byrd story is one that reflects the ability of people to change.

If anything, the fact that some conservative ideologues will try to characterize Obama’s remarks at the Byrd funeral as “a socialist giving praise to a Klansman” ought to be evidence enough of the nonsensical nature of much of the rhetoric that emanates from the far right.

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