....© 2000, Kimit A. Muston
I have counted them and right now there are exactly 457 active hate groups in the United States. There are 130 neo-Nazis groups, a few black separatist organizations and something I never heard of before; Idenity Groups, folks who have decided that white people are the lost tribes of Israel, which somehow doesn't make them Jewish but gives them the right to hate Jews. Go figure.
There are skin heads and square heads (they're all dunder heads to me) and a whole bunch of haters who call themselves Christians - there's an oxymoron. There are anti-Semites, anti-Catholics and 138 different kinds of Klu Klux Klaners: Imperials, Invincibles, Knights, White Knights, Imperial Knights, Invincible Knights and White Imperial Invincible Knights - you get the idea. And, of course, all of these folks hate homosexuals.
My point is there seem to be a lot of people who blame complete strangers for their own problems and if corporate America can salivate over buying products made by Chinese political prisoners I figure they should first start buying from our own domestic loonies. It's the patriotic business decision. Besides, these people are a lot closer than the Chinese and a lot more gullible. They'll buy anything.
They actually believe the Jews control the economy in this country - I guess Ross Perot is an honorary Hebrew. Won't he be thrilled to find out. These haters blame African-Americans for crime, conveniently ignoring their own occasionally extensive criminal records, and they blame immigrants for just about everything, as if John Rocker's great grandmother had been born in Topeka, Kansas in forty million B.C.!
But my favorite hate groups are the rich old bigots who fund "Research Institutions", like the weiners who published "The Bell Curve" back in the 1980's. That book claimed to have scientific proof that white people were smarter than black people. Have you ever notice the folks who work on these studies always seem to discover they are in the superior group? What are the odds of that happening every time? Listen, when a bunch of white males discover that wealthy old white males are dumber than everybody else on the planet, that's the study I'll believe.
Still, I smell a major business opportunity here - I think that's what I smell. And I'm not alone. Paramount smells it too, and what they smell is Dr. Laura. She may not have been smart enough to pass the entrance exam into medical school, but she was smart enough to figure out that calling down God's wrath is just entertainment, as long as you don't actually suggest the victim be tied to a barbed wire fence and beaten to death. I can imagine the relief in the Paramount board room when that opinion came in from the legal department.
I'm telling you, the hate market is going to be the growth market in the "new Millennium", even if nobody is using that phrase anymore. But what do these folks have to sell back to the rest of us? Oh, sure, guns and explosives and bibles, they've got plenty of those. But the only other thing they seem to produce are video tapes of their leaders giving long rabid speeches about the need to kill whoever the particular group dislikes. On the down side, these videos don't have a lot of production values and the plots are pretty predictable. But on the plus side they are protected by the first amendment and can be sold anywhere, even in places where it's illegal to sell videos of people making love.
But where are the market makers? Where are the Chia pets for racists? Where are the pet rocks for would-be rioters? I don't know. But I'm looking. And when I find a hate group with decent market projections, I'm signing up. As long as they don't have any members from France. I hate the French. They're so snooty.
Kimit A.Muston is a writer living in North Hollywood. His work may be also be read in the Los Angeles Daily News