BLOOD IN THE FACE
It was a sparsely attended meeting. Before that we made small talk with the handful of other people present–including the couple who owned the trailer and a young man who identified himself as the son of communists and who cheerfully explained that the society had deliberately adopted the structure of the Communist Party, complete with cell meetings like this one and vows of secrecy. He and everyone else in the room seemed friendly, normal everyday folks, until the film projector blew a fuse just as they began to screen a movie.
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I haven’t seen this friend in 20 years, but I’ll bet he’d get an enormous laugh out of Blood in the Face, a documentary about members of the American Nazi Party, the Ku Klux Klan, and the Aryan Nations. I found the film compellingly watchable myself, though probably not for the same reasons he would. The paranoid lunacy captured by filmmakers Anne Bohlen, Kevin Rafferty, and James Ridgeway is light years beyond the idle fancies of the Birchers I met or the dim complacencies of John Wayne. These are people who believe that Jerry Falwell is a Jew (existentially if not racially), that Ronald Reagan is a dupe of the Jewish conspiracy, that not one single Jew was gassed during World War II, and that Russian tanks are currently lined up across the Mexican border waiting to make their move. But the impulse to find these people hilarious, as my onetime friend might, or simply terrifying, as many others might, was not what kept me fascinated.
Laughing at these groups, I think, dismisses them too easily, while recoiling in terror gives them too much credence. (Paranoia, we must remember, is even more contagious than sexually transmitted diseases.) Caught between these extremes, I found myself agape at how much like the rest of us these people are, only more so. What they say may boggle our minds, but it’s clear that what we say boggles their minds–and considering that our statements have a much wider circulation, at least in the mass media, that’s a lot of mind boggling to reckon with. And since they appear to be every bit as confident in their beliefs as we are in ours, the alienation that we automatically feel from them registers at odd moments as the mirror image of the alienation they must feel from us.
“Participants at this gathering listened to talks on the history of the movement, tedious harangues against Jews, blacks, and other ‘mud people,’ and even a report on Satanic ritual murders. Events culminated in a cross burning on the back lot of the farm. Garbed in a Scottish kilt Miles held forth, acting as master of ceremonies and officiating as minister at a Klan marriage conducted by flashlight under the smoldering cross. He was also an indomitable advocate of an out-trek to the Pacific Northwest, where Aryans could set up an all-white homeland. Throughout, Miles did his best to broker competition among different groups, sternly advising everyone not to carry firearms, and warning the gathering to take care that their cars weren’t pockmarked by the fire from the cross burning, and to beware of the press.”
Certain details definitely throw the supposed homogeneity of the groups into question. The film opens with the camera drifting past many people standing casually on a lawn outside a meeting hall, eventually identified by an impromptu sign as Hall of the Giants. (“Giant” is Klanspeak for “head of a province.”) But giants aren’t exactly what we see. We notice two men in Scottish kilts, one in army fatigues, many with Nazi arm bands, some in suits, and some in jeans. We hear the voices of a few kids, but the only woman we see is walking away from the gathering; when we cut to the beginning of the meeting inside, however, a few more women are visible. Next we get snippets from seven separate talks, then the discourse continues in casual statements made over lunch at a picnic table outside, and here the lack of homogeneity is striking: though all of the people seem to be working-class–a fact underlined immediately afterward, first by Miles and then by five uniformed American Nazis, one of them female–it’s equally striking that one speaks with a pronounced European accent and that none, with the possible exception of the uniformed woman, conforms to the Nordic specimens we associate with Hitler’s Nazi rallies. They’re merely unglamorous Americans who feel disenfranchised, just like most of the rest of us.
In a curious way, feelings of this sort are a substantial part of what people in this country hold in common, but because the targets are different, they lead to warring tribes, as well as to coalitions of the sort in this film. Sometimes I wonder which of the two is worse–the coalitions that make wars possible, or the wars that make coalitions necessary. During the confirmation hearings of Clarence Thomas, the whole country seemed to be going through a fresh version of this tor- tured factionalism (or “fractionalism”), which repeatedly splits us apart–whether one believed Thomas or Anita Hill, the anxiety and despair were the same.
