/mlpol/, Or It's A Dangerous Business, Walking Out Your Front Door · 3:14am Jun 4th, 2020
More than one person shared with me the image of a crazed fanatic chasing unarmed protestors with a bladed weapon before being forcibly disarmed. Every single one of these people then followed this up by revealing that the individual in question was a writer of fanfiction for My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic--specifically, he was the man behind the account Jetfire2012, where he posted one of the most beloved of that community’s stories, It’s A Dangerous Business, Going Out Your Door which the astute reader will note is a bit from Tolkien.
You’ll not find much in his writings to suggest that one day, years later, he would try to murder people in broad daylight in the most cartoonish way imaginable, all but frothing at the mouth. It’s a standard adventure yarn about three friends questing beyond the edges of the map to secure a panacea for their friend’s terrible illness. The story borrows heavily from Tolkien and Norse mythology, and its harmless. It’s a bit “old” feeling, but its also the story that inspired me to begin writing again when I had given it up.
And it was written by a wouldbe right-wing assassin.
How does that happen? And why are people not surprised? In mulling it over, I continue to return to a joke that’s floated around for years: Bronies either ended up being trans/gay or they ended up being nazis. I've laughed at this a lot--its pretty funny!--but its less funny now. That's what happens to the poignant gallows humor. Eventually there's a point where you tell the same joke and people just nod, like yeah, yeah that makes sense.
Rather than focus on a fanfiction from 2011 (you won’t find much in there to explain this, and its TVtropes page won’t help you either) it’s perhaps better to recap how the Brony phenomenon happened in the first place, because it happened during a very tumultuous time in the internet’s history.
In 2011, 4chan is a pretty miserable place, but its nazis are still mostly a joke. /pol/ is still considered by many to be something of a zoo for the internet and society’s losers to rant at each other and pretend to know things about the Crusades because they played a Total War game once. On the site’s /co/ board, a place dedicated to discussing and meme-ing about western animation, someone posts regarding a reboot of the My Little Pony franchise for a new generation of television watchers. Of note is the name Lauren Faust as the woman spearheading the project--many knew her from other projects. There was a consensus that she had fallen far if she was stuck hawking toys for Hasbro, and a general levity. A few people promised to watch and report how awful it was when the series debuted.
But they liked it! Or didn’t hate it. Or thought that there was just enough expressiveness in the flash animation to make gifs and stock images out of frames from the show to clog the board with in the coming weeks.
Their fellow channers hated them, and it wasn’t long before ponies of any sort had been expelled from 4chan altogether. But instead of fading into obscurity as yet another forced fad, the mostly insincere channers had accidentally drew some attention to the show, and had convinced a number of young men to watch it.
They liked what they saw. Speculating on why is difficult and I’ll only say here that despite the great performative bemusement at the time, that 19-24 year old men raised to repress their emotions beyond anger and deliberately kept from many healthy forms of emotional intimacy and openness should find a colorful show that earnestly celebrates connectedness and expressing oneself is not that much of a surprise. Normal looked like being obsessed with measuring to a masculine ideal, and not-normal looked like being happy about watching a silly cartoon about magical horses, and young men embraced not normal. For a bit.
As noted in this insightful Twitter thread by one Wootmaster, the early days of the fandom were not exactly politically charged. A high fantasy setting with a mostly female castand soft aesthetic with an episodic structure centering aesops lent itself to some ideological bents: people reacted to that bright optimism one way or another, either leaning into it or questioning it while also generally leaning into it. Women can be self-reliant and don’t need men to fix everything for them. This wasn’t universal but it was wide-spread.
Wootmaster above points to a 4chan mod’s decision to combine the nascent /mlp/ and /pol/ boards for April Fools as being the catalyst for a shift, but there were earlier moments for when far-right infiltration turned an occasionally obnoxious but mostly friendly community into a breeding ground for proto-fascist agitprop. An earlier reactionary wave saw Catholic and Evangelical fans reacting strongly to being the odd ones out in a space which was explicitly but casually queer-friendly, “shipping” female characters together happily and frequently. Having come for the positivity and community, the fear that one might be tied to something gay was intolerable. Things like this and performative anti-”SJW” sentiments were not very compelling. They were weak, their spokespeople were largely inarticulate or pompous, and it was too easy to mock them.
We were really naive, on reflection. A lot of us knew that anime had been thoroughly run through with weird internet nazis, but anime was more inherently “cursed” we joked. That wouldn’t happen to us. The very idea was laughable. What would they do, make nazi ponies? Weren’t the /pol/ mouthbreathers all about fighting degeneracy or something? What could fit their hateful ideas about degenerate effeminate men than liking a show about colorful magic horses?
The April Fool’s stunt where /mlp/ and /pol/ were united in one board for a day was a catalyst, but not a spontaneous one. We know now, in 2020, that /pol/ and other white supremacist/altright infiltrators had been leaking into fandom spaces looking for fresh recruiting grounds for probably years, repeating the tactics that led to neo-nazi skinheads flooding into and then being forcibly expelled from the punk scene in the 80s and 90s. But punk had been politically conscious, and fandom did not have that inoculation.
Worth noting: /mlp/ was the most hated board on 4chan. It had been a concession by moot, the man who founded 4chan as a place to talk about anime, had made very begrudgingly as quarantine all pony content and keep the hated brony menace in a controllable space. It revived the channer aspect of early fandom and brought channer culture back to pony fan spaces in force. The young men posting in /mlp/ and on the copycat “Ponychan” were disaffected, disconnected, frequently miserable. When the boards merged, /pol/ quickly shaped a narrative that was perfect for attracting these sorts of people. It went like this: Everyone else makes fun of you and hates you, but we don’t. We know what its like to be despised by people who think they’re better than you.
It didn’t matter that the actual reason was because almost everyone posting in /pol/ was a racist bad actor at best. It didn’t matter to the anime fans before them, and now we’ve all seen roughly a thousand smug anime girls in MAGA hats.
What matters is the emotion. What matters is not what is but what feels to be. You aren’t immune to propaganda. Not even when you know all the facts are you immune to propaganda. It doesn’t matter that the people telling you that they’re on “your” side against the outsider are themselves outsiders, or that they very openly just want to turn you into a footsoldier for their movement, or that they want to hurt people whom you are friends with. What matters is that you feel like the world is laughing and instead of asking why you decide that you’ll go with whoever pretends they are, even if they’re named something martial and german and have several detailed replicas of Wehrmacht uniforms that they wear daily. And whether we want to admit it, that’s a normal response. Humans in privileged positions of society get mildly stung and turn into ragequakes that consume others’ lives and happiness. We’ve all seen suburbanites yell at teenage workers in Target. This isn’t controversial. It’s just easy to assume that’s different from obnoxious nerds turning into nazi-supporting sword wavers, but it’s not on a deep fundamental level.
Jetfire seemed very normal. His story was very in-line with the positive, colorful, newborn community he inhabited. He sort of vanished a few years ago, his last missive being that he would be dipping his toe into publishing fantasy novels with the big boys. I don’t think many thought he’d make it, but it’s probably safe to say that we all wished him well.
But that’s just it, I think. He was normal. His outside normality wasn’t a lie. It wasn’t an illusion. It was just that normal doesn’t mean what we think it means. When you wake up and find that when you weren’t paying attention the spaces and communities you loved were full of nazis twisting the stories that made you happy into antisemetic memes, know that the people sharing those? They’re normal. There but for the grace of god goes John-fucking-Bradford. It starts with Jetfires, writing normal upbeat stories about how the world is wide and mysterious and it ends with Mr. I Studied the Blade running his fat little legs as fast as they go.
Pony fandom was quietly queer-friendly and full of excitable, relatively normal people who had found a new way to make friends, and that was always true. It’s true even right now, in the same spaces where they also made a literal actual pony named “Aryanne”. Our mistake was that we thought “normal” looked like a well adjusted non-bigot who can relate to their fellow humans in positive ways.
Bronies in 2012 really embraced the not-normal when they started using “love and tolerance” as an admittedly eye-rolling way of communicating a not-normal attitude of embracing their difference. The phrase is pretty empty now and the cringe remains, but it did actually mean something once. There was a weird kind of solidarity, and that solidarity and dialogue produced some genuinely lovely things. A lot of people realized that the Normal that was compulsive heteronormativity could be thrown off as had the shackles of masculine expectations. They had made a very tiny step away from conforming, and found the next ones easier. Some of those young men have new names and gender markers on their driver’s licenses now. Some of the young women who were friends with them aren’t women at all. Sheltered teens in zealously religious upbringings realized that what they had been taught about the gays and the Other wasn’t true, and that it was very possible to be friends with people who weren’t religious in any way or who were even from different faiths. We made that a new normal for a very short time.
But no good rising out of the Broad Normal just endures. If there’s anything to learn about the Swordman stepping outside his front door to fuck around and find out, its that the Normal will sweep away the things you value unless you resist it, not once but again and again whenever it threatens to snap you back into place. And even if you know that, even if somewhere in your heart you know that the world is going to creep in, the worst thing you can do is be convinced by bad actors that the way to prevent it is by buying into ideologies built on pathological hatred and a fear of their precious status quo being disrupted. The “normies” aren’t the SJWs you think are coming for your show and your fan art and your memes. The normies are the LARPers with Wehrmacht profile pics in your threads. Because normal was a facade over the ugly truth that was /pol/. There was nothing more normal than racist dudes telling tired jokes to each other in between genocide memes.
As meme-worthy as Jetfire is, I can’t help but see in him the visage of all fascist movements. They start with uncouth chuckling over a pint, they continue in like-minded back rooms, they progress to slogans and signage, they take power by whispering in the ears of those who feel left behind and ignored, they lead them up the streets in Bavaria and come back to burn the Reichstag only after a hundred separate little instances where something as small as a genuine pushback might have toppled them altogether. If the churches in Rome had turned up their noses at Mussolini he would have been forgotten in a month, probably. If the Weimar Social Democrats, the blue checkmarks of their day, had done more than make very clever jokes, perhaps they would have made those get togethers full of Nazis less cozy and empowering, and torn their beloved symbols down. And maybe, if we had started paying attention when the weird catholic bronies got mad and then when the weird WWII obsessed ones got more numerous and more Wehrmachty, just maybe we could have avoided this fucking picture. Or this one?
Normal is a lie. Normal is a word that starts as farce and ends in tragedy, and unless you want to wake up to your own Jetfire McStudiesTheBlade, you’ll keep the /pol/lacks of the world out of your spaces and your communities, or the status quo built on repression and supression will track you down, and it blots out the sun.
I'm guessing that he made the weapon to defend himself from the rioters, then lost his temper when someone threw poop on his car without provocation.
In his place, I probably would have used the car as my weapon.
I hope he suffers no legal consequences from his actions.
Inter armes silent leges, and No Peace No Justice.
Thus far, I’ve manged to avoid both categories.
I am, as Silver Glow would say, untranslatable.
(Edited for clarity: quote added)
5275436
Jet fire specifically went out with a blade to intentionally kill unarmed protestors because he is a larping fascist and we know this because he openly admitted it before deleting his twitter
I have managed to avoid all as well. I am just one of those folks that look at everything going on. I am like ugh can we just calm down for a moment and just talk it out? But for me, all I do is observe and never judge but watch and learn to stay out of the middle.
Unfortunately, knowing what I do about certain branches of the fantasy community... I suspect that his going to join the "big boys" was probably a step deeper into the echo chamber.
There are shocking amounts of self-delusion amongst the disciples of certain authors. Howard's readers are among some of the worst, taking from his writings to construct support for a movement that he expressly and repeatedly denounced as asinine, stupid, and ultimately evil in its banality. But when you let yourself hang out with those peop!e, u less you keep pushing back, it's so easy to buy into their pseudointellectualism.
Until somebody who wrote a fond little love letter to Tolkien finds himself on Sauron's side of the war.
Ugh.
The only thing I disagree with you on is that the /pol/ mentality isn't normal. Not the new one, not the old one.
But it desperately wants to be.
Normal is ugly, toxic, and sick, the abcess that desperately needs to be lanced.
But it can be lanced and drained and made healthy again.
We just need to stop lancing it and ignoring the fact that we're leaving behind the infection at its core - clean out the crap once and for all, and maybe things can heal if we keep it clean.
Ugh. Again. Times like this, I wish I could drink.
Ponychan wasn't like /mlp/. At least, not that I remember. Maybe it changed, after a while, after the mergers. But all the toxic bull that /mlp/ embraced, all the ironic appreciation, that had no place at ponychan. The fanbase splintered off from /co/ even before /mlp/ existed, and so the... Infiltration? Corruption? ...let's just go with change. The change that slowly overtook /mlp/, ponychan was - at least a little - inoculated from, and its userbase had a reputation as being much "softer" than 4chan.
....that...well this is certainly not what I expected to see when I opened this website. Dangerous Business and its sequel are among the first stories I have ever read on this site and of fan fiction in general. They remain among the earliest in my favorites list and I had Dangerous Business featured on my profile page for some time. I don't interact with the MLP fandom outside of this website these days. Long gone are the major brony analysis YouTube presence, and I was never on 4chan or Reddit or even Twitter. This...comes as a great surprise to me, honestly.
It's a damn shame, if he was out there, trying to defend people, great, but all evidence points toward him doing the opposite, going to attack people who he viewed as evil. And yeah many of the rioters are evil, but we don't truly know which ones, it's not our jobs as Christians and humans to be judges, juries, and executioners.
Thank you for speaking out about this Cyne, it's great to see some people on this site using their platform for good.
5275458
That was definitely true at one point but it decidedly changed. Last time I went to ponychan it was a nightmare
Huh.
That's who it was? Well, fuck that guy.
A friend of mine on the facebooks mentioned some headline along the lines of "Sword wielding man also author of World's Most Popular My Little Pony Fanfiction." I couldn't really find any details beyond that, which had me wondering if, like kkat was a secret nazi or something. (Which, well, I'm gonna hope he isn't).
If there's any sort of a 'happy ending' to this story, is that this kind of shit is going to be absolute poison for his writing career. The big genre imprints like Tor or Orbit make it a point to be very socially aware (political activism in sci-fi? SAY IT AIN'T SO), which means they ain't gonna touch this idiot with a ten foot pole. Which, well, I guess he could write under a pseudonym, or maybe wriggle his way into Baen, but still.
I reiterate my point: fuck that guy, and fuck the cesspool that is 4chan.
Man, it'd be nice to find a fandom without any assholes in it.
Fantastic job with this blog post, Cyne! And yes, now more than ever, we need people on this site and on Derpibooru spreading good.
5275480
Well, I am not sure if this is still true or not. I think Trekkies are not that well crap I haven't heard of anything bad about them. If there is. It's been kind of silent about it.
The only fandom I am part of is Star Trek Browncoat [AKA Firefly.] and that's it really. But I am not a brony I am just friends with a bunch of them. I also wanted to write since I felt it was fun and something to do with my free time.
Well, that's just depressing. I knew there was a far-right presence wriggling around the fandom -- the OC I'm not going to name is proof enough of that -- but it's never fun to look at a fandom you love and see rot going this deeply into its roots.
5275441
Were any screencaps of these tweets made before he took down his account?
5275482
The word you're looking for is Browncoat.
Now really isn't a good time to use terms like "brownshirt" to describe yourself.
Or, well, there's never a good time, but you get the idea.
As for Trekkies, it's a mixed bag-- there's a good chunk of 'em who definitely embrace the show's principles, but apparently there's also a chunk that does ... not. Mostly made up of folks bitching about black and/or gay characters on Discovery and whatnot.
5275484
pbs.twimg.com/media/EZXEK4zWAAE9wIW.jpg
5275486
Ah mostly my issues with Discovery has nothing to do with that more on how the Klingons are portrayed.
I never read Dangerous Business, but its spinoff A Day for Spike and Twilight was one of the first four or five MLP fanfics I ever read. While other, arguably superior stories quickly overtook its place in my heart, the case can be made that it was the story that initially instilled my persistent fascination with Twilight and Spike's enigmatic relationship.
It's... disheartening, to say the least, that something that once so greatly inspired me now has such a dark shadow hanging over it. I don't think I can ever bring myself to hate it, but I know I'll regret not doing so if I ever give it another look, out of morbid curiosity or otherwise.
I dunno, maybe I'm just rambling. Any thoughts?
5275486
Brown coat aged slightly poorly huh?
Trekkies are a mixed bag you’re right—and people smarter than me have kinda traced that back to how a lot of the early basically anybody who wasn’t super white and super insecure about their masculinity were run out and when they left those remaining bickered. It went back and forth. It always does, you know?
5275480
The problem is to do that you'll need to find a fandom without any humans in it.
Time to move to Equestria?
5275490
It was a bleak discovery. I don’t think you have to hate it either. Honestly for your sake I hope you can one day return and not feel any stain.
5275491
Heh, kind of why I am one of those folks always looking in like... Uh.... what is the point of this argument ain't we talking about a show here?
I think she's pretty cute tbh.
EDIT: It's come to my attention that people think I'm a fascist because I find this pony cute. This was quite startling to me, as generally speaking I find all ponies cute. It's why I'm here. I think Veronika (a Soviet pony) is quite cute, and if you dress a pony up in American or Commonwealth or Italian or Egyptian or French or Japanese or Chinese uniforms, I would also find her cute. By this thread's metric, I must then be simultaneously every ideology involved in WW2, because I just like the history around that era.
But I suppose there's some miscommunication there, and for that I apologize. I am not, in fact, a fascist. Indeed anyone on my Discord could tell you I'm lib left, and I've spent way too many hours in the last couple days arguing with conservatives about the protests going on recently.
As I write this, I can't help but wonder if everything I've done before to indicate my character—including my writing that I often worry is too transparently liberal—will be tossed aside in favor of a single comment about me finding a pony cute. For the record, I still think she's cute. We should all try to be more considerate of each other and not jump to conclusions about one another's beliefs, because it's that polarization that's brought us to the crazy times we're in today.
One more time, in case it wasn't clear: I'm not fascist, and I think Nazis are wrong. Apologies for the misunderstanding.
5275489
I keep on hearing good things about Discovery, I'm just not inclined to get another streaming service just to watch it. Well, it, and Picard, I guess.
On a tangent, I've also heard that the K-Pop fandom has been doing stuff like spamming white supremacy hashtags and getting riot-snitching apps shut down, so maybe I should start listening to ... shoot, I don't even know any K-pop groups. But still, good on those kids.
Thanks for the insight into the quiet fascist infiltration of our fandom. It's sobering to see it laid out like this.
I'm reminded of a few tweets I wish I could go back and show all the people who disagreed with me:
—https://twitter.com/remygryph/status/1192490245922676736
—https://twitter.com/BookiePone/status/1192762692580380672
5275496
Eh, I don't see the points of streaming services. I don't want to watch on a service that would just take it away anytime.
5275495
Go to hell.
5275497
Yeah I remember half the steps to here and god I wish we had taken it more seriously. Maybe if when they constantly infiltrated the LGBT groups if the mods hadn’t been do-nothing. Maybe when the Fundamentalist bronies got all butthurt there had been someone there to back up the other people in those groups trying to pushback. Maybe if we hadn’t written fucking stories about Aryanne. It’ll drive you mad
Good write-up. While I agree with the sentiment, I disagree that it was an explicit infiltration of /pol/ into /mlp/. /pol/ itself was more of a general politics containment board in it's early days if I'm not mistaken, without a clear centralized ideology.
Rather, I think it has more to do with the overt welcoming nature of the fandom itself. This fandom was and is very hesitant to call out abhorrent behavior due to an inability to sort between what is and isn't acceptable, especially in it's early years. There was a very strong message that everyone is welcome in the community back then, regardless of race or gender or sex or ideology. When 2015 came around and the alt-right started to materialize everywhere, across numerous groups and mediums, this fandom simply tried to laugh it off and "love and tolerate" all parts of its community, including these guys.
Things have improved in recent years, but there are still things like a very real pedophilia problem that this fandom by and large would rather sweep under the rug. It's up to these communities to self-regulate, but sites like derpibooru and fimfiction remain all-inclusive and so these kinds of behaviors are allowed to remain.
Btw If you write foalcon go rot in Hell.
5275495
Go back to /mlp/ god knows they jerk you off enough over there.
5275503
I think you should delete that person's post. No one needs to see it.
I got this wake-up call quite some time ago. After attending a get-together with my old gang to raise a glass to two dead friends, I posted about it here, and made a joke about punching Nazis. (Who had forced us to change our meeting place because they had a scheduled march... which they never showed up to.)
Imagine my surprise when several people I had thought to be just regular folk, went completely off their rockers. Yep... defending actual Nazis from my unwarranted aggression. "Antifa is just as bad!" they screeched. And other such bullshit. Some people who had never commented on any of my blogs before, came from far and wide to put their swastika-stamped oars in. Some of those folks are still fairly loud noises in this fandom.
So a "regular guy" (who had been ranting about blood-dripping machetes on Twitter) turned out to be a bug-fuck crazy racist who went on a bigotry-fueled rampage? Doesn't surprise me at all. Wouldn't be surprised if we get more.
So... anybody know if Moomin fandom has a lot of Nazis in it? (Asking for a friend.)
5275513
Honestly? It's not just a brony thing. I found it described best in the Five Geek Social Fallacies. It's the same thing that can ruin D&D groups or LARP troupes when you have assholes joining up, and then running roughshod over everyone else.
I'm just lucky in that I've stumbled into some nerdy spaces that aren't afraid to tell those kind of people to get fucked.
Ah well. Not much to be done about it now. And, uh, "silver lining" is that with the show over, the fandom'll get smaller, which ... either means less nazi fuckwads, or MORE nazi fuckwads staying around out of proportion. Just depends on how optimistic you're feeling, I guess?
5275493
Maybe someday—for better or for worse, I have a habit of trying to separate the artist from the art whenever possible, so it could happen. That doesn’t change what he did and how sh*tty it was, but at the very least, he won't be getting any money from me either way, that's for sure.
5275513
i don't think the actual issue got better but we just got better of segregating ourselves into my insular communities that made ignoring it easier.
5275515
I respectfully disagree. I say, leave it up and let it be a badge of shame.
5275517
5275519
We are absolutely becoming more self-aware of these problems, which is good. But as communities we ourselves have a history of not doing anything about it and continuing to give these kinds of people a platform to feel like they belong in.
5275521
Looks at Ponyfest Online like it's the office.
5275517
What it actually depends on is moderation. Fimfiction has never banned nazis. Individual nazis have been banned for harassment, but nazi stories and holding nazi-looking opinions are not banned here. Anywhere that doesn't ban nazis is doomed to be eventually overrun with them, unfortunately. The fact that they're willing to ban the outright harassment and hate speech is the only reason it hasn't already happened, imho.
5275515
You may be right, but Goldenwing was given a chance to show everyone what he’s like and I feel like letting people see him mask off is worth keeping it for a while
Dangerous Business is one of those long-ass classics that's been languishing on my Read Later list for years and years. Just now, I downloaded it (and its sequels) in the event that JetFire's old profile is kicked off, and perhaps that his works go away.
5275441
Damn, did anyone screencap that? It's not that I don't trust you Cyne, it's just that I make sure to find evidence with my own eyes.5275484
Thank you asking my question already.
5275488
Wow, even without the context of what I just read here, this dude comes off as totally mental.
5275525
I may just be some random nobody but I can't help but feel calling a cute OC cute might not indicate someone is a terrible person. Food for thought.
5275530
She literally has a swastika on her ass and is often depicted in Nazi uniform. Woe is the show that essentially capitalized cuteness into every aspect of its nature.
5275526
To quote 5275524:
Fimfiction doesn't give a shit about Nazis. Or if they do decide to give a shit, it's only after repeated prodding and poking and noise-making. And then you're the asshole for hassling them about it.
Anyway, Dangerous Business is overrated and stops being worth reading long before it reaches its final act, so you're not missing much.
I guess gold’s in a trolling mood tonight.
Anyways, I was fortunate enough to be introduced to fimfic by someone I knew irl, skipped right over all those forums.
5275530
There are thousands of cute OCs. That character is the most boring ass boring OC ever, even outside of it being a Nazi. The only reason to like that design is if you like the Nazi part.
BTW, I hear /mlp/ is reading this now. For our guests, I recommend reading Kareem Abdul-Jabbar's recent op-ed explaining the protests.
5275530 5275495
You can have a white-coated pony with a blond mane (see, Bulk Biceps). You don't need said pony to have a fucking swastica called "Aryanne"
5275517
On the contrary, considering the nazis clearly don't get the show's message in the first place outside of cute ponies to lewd, the lack of fresh content may push people to stop trying to stay in the cesspool, leaving, well, wolves behind, as in Swan's comment above.
5275530
lmao she's called fucking Aryanne, the whole point of saying she is cute is to dogwhistle. There's some food for thought, and I strongly encourage yourself to think about who you defend and if perhaps you shouldn't do that.
Other than that, I agree with every word.
I'm reminded of this one Twilight Zone episode that always stuck with me, ever since I was a little kid. It haunts me, when I think about it. And that's because it was so true.
"Where will he go next, this phantom from another time, this resurrected ghost of a previous nightmare – Chicago? Los Angeles? Miami, Florida? Vincennes, Indiana? Syracuse, New York? Anyplace, everyplace, where there's hate, where there's prejudice, where there's bigotry. He's alive. He's alive so long as these evils exist. Remember that when he comes to your town. Remember it when you hear his voice speaking out through others. Remember it when you hear a name called, a minority attacked, any blind, unreasoning assault on a people or any human being. He's alive because through these things we keep him alive."