Opinion

I Have Covered This March Before. It Loses Every Time.

Wally Okonkwo went to the morgue files, pulled the folder, and found Saturday's march already inside it.

In August of 1925, tens of thousands of Klansmen marched down Pennsylvania Avenue in robes and hoods, and some newspapers of the day wrote that they represented an unstoppable political future. I was not there. I am old, not geological. But I have read the clippings, because reading the clippings is the job.

The unstoppable political future stopped. It stopped the way it always stops: the membership rolls leaked, the neighbors recognized shoes and gaits, the organization collapsed into lawsuits over merchandise revenue, and the men who were going to inherit the nation went back to selling insurance under the names they had been so careful to hide.

"Every masked march believes it is the first draft of the future. Every one of them is filed in the same drawer, and the drawer is labeled by decade, not by destiny." Walter Okonkwo

I have covered eight presidents. Under every one of them, some group of men has assembled in matching outfits to announce that history had chosen them. History, in my experience, does not attend these events. History is at the library, keeping the files.

What The Files Say

The files say the following, in every decade, without exception. The marches inflate their attendance. The leaders end in prison, in litigation, or in radio. The members are unmasked by time, which has subpoena power no reporter can match. And the country they marched to claim keeps being claimed instead by the people who build it in public, with their names on the mailbox.

Saturday's men wore masks because some part of each of them already knows this. You do not hide a face you expect history to celebrate. The mask is not security. The mask is a forecast.

I typed this on the same machine I have used since the Carter administration. It has no working delete key. I have never needed one for this subject. The sentence has not changed since 1925: they marched, they were counted, the count was wrong, and the drawer closed.

Filed by typewriter. The copy desk has adapted.