"When Ugly Hatred Puts On A Pretty Face, Beware".

When ugly hatred puts on a pretty face, beware

When we're kids, we think nasty creatures look, well, nasty. Our storybooks and movies show them with warts on their chins, or bolts coming out of their necks, or sparks shooting from their clawed fingers, or eyes that blaze a sick yellow with hatred (get thee behind us, Maleficent). By the time we are older, we find ourselves wishing that the bad people had those flashing neon warning signs about them. Unfortunately for us, they've become better at passing, which means we have to get better at figuring out what's really beneath their smooth surfaces.

I thought about this a month or so ago, when I was doing research for an editorial about a hate group whose national headquarters is in Dawson Springs, Ky. The Imperial Klans of America, affiliated with the Ku Klux Klan, last year lost a huge civil suit to a Meade County teen-ager who suffered injuries after Klansmen beat him at the county fair; since then, the number of IKA chapters throughout the country has fallen off and that's a good thing. Now I don't think anyone would call these white supremacists smooth, on the surface or otherwise, but in my reading about them I ran across something that stopped me in my tracks. In writing about their 2008 "Nordic Fest," they boasted of a cross and swastika lighting and their children's playground. ("This is a family event for one and all. How else are we going to teach our children?")

I swear that's true.

I swear this is true, too: Years ago, my paper did a story on a new NAAWP chapter in our community. Yes, that's the David Duke-affiliated National Association for the Advancement of White People. We did an interview with the guy who founded the chapter and asked him to supply a photograph to go with the story. He sent in one of those soft-focus, gauzy-lensed glamour pictures that usually sport a subject with cleavage or a feather boa or both. This man's features may have been fuzzed by the paid-for kindness of the camera, but his snazzy, black jacket practically threw off sparks. Guess he thought if he looked pretty people might think what he was doing was pretty.

The local NAAWP guy could afford a flattering photograph, but probably couldn't bankroll the full nip and tuck like that of his leader — racist, gambler, deadbeat, player, sex manual author, forever candidate (presidential, gubernatorial, congressional), tax dodger, Russian expatriate, liar, hypocrite and narcissist, Mr. David Duke. Duke's extreme makeover included dropping the obvious regalia and redoing his face, complete with surgery and peels, and dyeing his hair. The Southern Poverty Law Center dubbed Duke a "Nazi with a nose job," and likened the work to "a metaphor for the ideological face-lift" in which he recast himself as a populist who could hide behind "the slippery vocabulary that mainstream conservatives employed to attack affirmative action, welfare, immigration and other hot-button issues." He was re-branding before re-branding was cool.

That kind of passing fools a lot of smart people (look at the jaw dropping number and nature of U.S. groups and individuals that feted El Salvador's Roberto D'Aubuisson, sharp-dressed man and death squad leader known as The Blowtorch, during the Reagan years). And it still does, especially as those aforementioned issues have not gone away; if anything, they have multiplied and voices have been added to the chorus and the volume has been turned up.

History has coughed up a couple more examples at prettification in recent days: A cache of rare color photos of Adolf Hitler was found and published (the brown shirts were brown, the swastika armbands were red, as were his cheeks and many of the flowers in the chancellery), and Iranian President (and Holocaust denier and anti-Semite) Mahmoud Ahmadenijad looked as if he was celebrating his ripped-off victory in a Members Only jacket.

It's an old, old game, this trying to make the unacceptable seem acceptable by dressing it up, but surely we know that a swing set can't make a Klan rally a family event, and that Vaseline on the lens (or a chin implant) can't make a racist attractive, and that pleasing flower arrangements and a nice coat can't make rabid anti-Semitism any more palatable.

No flashing neon warning signs will alert us to these nasty creatures as they did in our childhood stories — indeed, many of them will come with adulation and great following — so it's up to us to be wise to the fairy tales these bad people peddle. We can't let them pass anymore.

Pam Platt is an editorial writer and columnist whose columns appear on Tuesday. Call her at (502) 582-4578; e-mail her at pplatt@courier-journal.com.