SolarGeneral Proudly Presents...
...by Dr. Robert S. Griffin
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Published in 1989, Hunter was Pierce's second novel after The Turner Diaries. 1 To this point, Hunter is also Pierce's last novel— he has only written non-fiction since. As with The Turner Diaries, Pierce wrote Hunter under the same pen name of Andrew Macdonald, and as with his first novel it was never any secret that Pierce wrote the book.
Pierce published Hunter through his own outlet, National Vanguard Books. Whatever he would have preferred to do, taking what amounts to a self-publishing route with Hunter was realistically his only way of getting this book into print. The content of Hunter, which most would find racist, anti-Semitic, and unacceptably violent, renders it an extremely unlikely prospect for getting picked up by one of the mainstream commercial publishing houses that distribute their books through bookstore chains such as Barnes & Noble and Borders. And since Hunter is written as a popular and not a scholarly treatment of the issues Pierce takes on in the book, academic publishers— New York University Press, Harvard University Press, and so forth— would reject it on that basis alone. The Turner Diaries was published by a commercial publisher for a time, but that was due to a special circumstance: the connection the book had to the Oklahoma City bombing. As for distribution, Delta Press, which specializes in books that appeal to military enthusiasts and survivalists, has been selling Hunter at gun shows and through catalogs and magazine ads in Soldier of Fortune and the like. The development of the Internet in recent years has greatly increased the distribution possibilities for books of the sort Pierce writes. Through listservs and chat lines, individuals inform each other of the existence of books that are not otherwise publicized; and there are the online book-ordering services: both amazon.com and bn.com (Barnes and Noble) make Hunter as well as The Turner Diaries available.
Hunter begins with Oscar Yeager sitting in his tan Ford sedan which is parked in a shopping mall parking lot in Washington, D.C.. Yeager is listening to his favorite Schubert sonata on the car radio. Despite the cold night air, his palms are sweaty and perspiration rolls down his cheeks. We are told he is waiting for something, but what it is we don't know. 2
Oscar Yeager is a tall man of forty years of age. He has golden-blond hair, deep-set gray eyes, craggy features, a high, smooth forehead, and a thin scar running diagonally across his left cheek the result of a skiing accident. 3 He is a consulting engineer by profession and a tinkerer and inventor by inclination. He flew F4 fighters in Vietnam. After leaving the Air Force in 1976, he went back to school at the University of Colorado
(where Pierce himself went) and obtained graduate degrees in electrical engineering and computer science. A series of design contracts with the Pentagon brought him to Washington four years ago. 4
After twenty minutes, a brown van pulls into the parking lot. The driver is a black male. A white female occupies the passenger's seat. They get out of the car and stand near one another, arguing it appears to Yeager. His wait is over. He drives toward the couple until they are about eight feet from his open window. They stop what they are doing and look at him. Their eyes meet his. With a smooth motion, Yeager reaches under the blanket on the seat next to him and brings the rifle to his shoulder. He braces his left elbow against the door and squeezes off two shots. He sees the couple's skulls— first one and then the other— explode into showers of bone fragments, brain tissue, and blood.
Yeager feels calm. He drives away. He stops the car and glances back toward the van. The man's body is sprawled into the roadway. The woman's body is obscured by the van. Yeager expriences the icy calm all the way home. It is only after he parks his car in the garage and enters the house and puts away his coat that the same mixture of euphoria and contentment comes over him as with each of his five other executions of interracial couples over the past three weeks. 5
Why is Yeager doing this? How did it come to this— killing interracial couples in parking lots? It is about race, we are told, Yeager's race, the white race. Yeager's experience in Vietnam had given him a deeper appreciation for his own people. All the fliers in his unit were white and a highly select group, an elite. Yeager had contrasted them with the blacks in the heavily-integrated U.S. ground forces. One of the differences he had noted was the meaning of pride to the two races. For the white pilots he had known, pride essentially meant self-respect based on one's accomplishments, especially the achievement of mastery of oneself. It showed itself as an aura of personal dignity and honor. In contrast, with the blacks he had been around, pride primarily meant affecting a certain style, a certain way of carrying oneself and relating to others. For them, pride manifested itself as a swaggering quality, an insolence, and a determination to get one up on other people, especially “Whitey.” With blacks, pride was primarily a social thing. It had to do with relationships, whereas with whites it was more of a private, inner thing.
Yeager hadn't personally liked all of his fellow white flyers. There were some for whom he had little respect. But nevertheless he felt a kinship with them, a sense of natural community. At a very basic level, he had understood them and they had understood him. Despite their individual differences, they were people with whom he could work and play and feel right about it. Despite the weaknesses, stupidity, and meanness he saw in some of them, his white comrades were "us" to him. They were his people.
Spurred by his observations and experiences in the military, Yeager looked deeper into the phenomenon of race after his discharge and entry into graduate school. He read a great deal on the subject— not in courses but just on his own, trying to understand his growing racial consciousness and to put it into historical perspective. His study and reflection led him to the conclusion that the xenophobia he experienced with regard to blacks was more than simply a response to surface differences in appearance between them and himself or to the differences in their lifestyles. The differences between the races ran deeper than that, Yeager decided. Despite what he knew he ought to believe, the fact of the matter is that there are innate differences between blacks and whites. The vibrations or spirits of the two races are fundamentally different. They have different race souls. Simply, they are rooted differently as beings, and that is revealed in significant physical, mental, and behavioral distinctions.
Yeager began to see history from a racial perspective. History is more than an account of a succession of events and dates and names, he concluded. It is a record of the development and interactions of types of people— of races and ethnic groups. That is what history is in the most fundamental, most meaningful sense. One's understanding of history is enriched if the physical and psychical characteristics of types of people are taken into account, he decided. The significance of the Vietnam era and what has happened since is better understood if a racial perspective is brought to bear on an inquiry into that war and its aftermath.
Looking at things from a racial perspective raised the question for Yeager of what effect the war in Vietnam and the events since then has had on his people, white people. Coming at it from that angle, it became clear to him that what has happened during the last few decades has had a negative, destructive impact on whites. Whites are losing their way. They are becoming more decadent, less admirable, less themselves, less honorable, less conscious of themselves as a people, weaker and less able to survive and advance themselves as a race. And the factors contributing to that circumstance are clear: the hypocrisy, concealed motives, and irresponsibility and immorality of the leadership of the government; the effects of the civil rights and feminist revolutions; the multicultural preachings of the media and the schools; the appearance of more and more interracial couples; and the increased abuse of drugs among white young people. All of these things have undermined white heritage, white integrity and dignity, white racial commitment, and the level of solidarity among whites.
It seemed to Yeager that things are always looked at from the point of view of how they affect one group or another—a certain country, political party, economic class, or minority group, or it might be women. The one group that is never singled out for attention, he now noticed, was the white race. And that was precisely what he was doing, and he was repulsed by what he was seeing.
The question then became what was he going to do about what was happening to his race. He wasn't a politician, or the type to become a pamphleteer. He was a man of few words, a man of action; and the action that he wanted to take, he realized, was very direct, immediate, and much of it was violent. That was what was inside him that wanted to get out. That was the pressure that sought release.
Yeager thought about several possibilities along these lines. He thought about using his electronic expertise to break into commercial broadcasts with a pirate transmitter and deliver his own message about what was happening to white people. He thought about renting a plane and bombing the Congress when it was in session. But he settled on the killings of interracial couples for three reasons. First, they were symbolic of what was most threatening his race— the tainting of white blood. Second, they had therapeutic value for him personally. They had a cathartic effect. They relieved the pressure he felt. They calmed him and lifted his mood. It felt good to defy those in authority— the politicians, the media bosses, all those who were promoting, or allowing or profiting from, the destruction of his race. And last, the kind of thing he was doing could be easily replicated by others. Anyone could get a gun and shoot down a miscegenating couple on the street. 6
As might be expected after reading Pierce's first novel The Turner Diaries, Oscar is just getting warmed up with these assassinations of interracial couples. There is much death and destruction on the horizon. First there is Washington Post columnist, David Jacobs—Jewish, of course— who writes that the killings of the racially mixed couples was the work of a sexually frustrated white male. White males, said Jacobs, resent the greater sexual prowess of black men and the attraction that white women have for black men. White lynchings of blacks in the South in years gone by were largely motivated by sexual envy, he pointed out to his readers. White racism will continue as a great evil as long as there is a white race, said Jacobs, and the best thing the government could do is hasten this day by encouraging even more racial intermarriage. A tax break for interracial couples would be a good step in that direction, Jacobs wrote.
Jacobs started to get into his car in the unattended underground parking area of his condominium complex. He never knew what hit him. 7
And then there is Congressman Horowitz, who vows to start up a Congressional investigation of the killings. Oscar came up behind Horowitz when he was standing in front of a urinal and looped a garrote over his head and strangled him to death.
At this point, Oscar meets Harry Keller, an ex-college teacher who works for a group called the National League (read National Alliance). Harry tells Oscar about the National League:
Our cause is a secure and progressive future for our race. We want a White world someday— a White world that is conscious of itself and its mission; a world governed by eugenic principles; a world in which the goal of families as well as governments is the upward breeding of our race; a cleaner, greener world, with fewer but better people, living closer to Nature; a world in which quality once again rules over quantity, in which people's lives have purpose, in which beauty and excellence and honor once again have meaning and hope.
Our race is in danger of perishing, partly because we're being outbred by other races in the same ecological niche and partly because we're miscegenating ourselves to death.... Progress comes when all the competitors in the game struggle for survival and the most fit wins. Our race isn't struggling. It's lying down and dying. Our job is to wake it up. When it is trying to survive, it'll whip all the other races with its hands tied behind its back.... We want first to assure the survival of our race by waking it up and igniting its natural fighting spirit, and then we want to reorient its values and its way of looking at things so that it strives to continue bettering itself... 8
Harry tells Oscar that at the moment the National League's efforts were educational rather than political. "We're trying to raise people's consciousness on racial issues," he tells Oscar, "and then motivate and direct those whose consciousness we have some effect on." He tells Oscar about the materials the National League publishes and about the video studio he has constructed. Most of the members of the League are professionals, he informs Oscar.
Harry goes on to tell Oscar that the League's principal adversaries are the Jews:
Some of them may look White, but no racially conscious Jew thinks of himself as White, and the Jews are the most racially conscious people on the face of the earth, by a big margin. They call their enemies— and that includes anyone they can't control— "neo-Nazis” because they've invested a lot of effort into making that a label of opprobrium; they've invested it with a heavy load of emotion, of feeling, so that most people react negatively to the word without having a clear understanding of what it means. 9
Harry's anti-Semitism was making Oscar uncomfortable. His fight is against race-mixing, and he doesn't see what Jews have to do with that. Of course he will learn the error of his thinking as time goes along.
Along with Oscar and Harry during this exchange is Adelaide, who becomes Oscar's love interest. Adelaide is twenty-three, which makes her seventeen years younger than Oscar. Oscar had met her just a few months before in the Pentagon office of an army buddy where she was working as a civilian analyst. 10 Adelaide had grown up in a tiny town in Iowa and has been in Washington for a little over a year. Oscar marveled at her nude form lying asleep in his bed:
She was a beautiful woman, one of the most beautiful he [Oscar] had ever seen, long and lean and lithe, with silky- smooth skin, perfect thighs surmounted by a luxuriant bush of reddish hue, a flat belly, magnificent breasts, a graceful neck of extraordinary length, and a face so lovely, so pure, so childishly peaceful and innocent, that looking at it nestled gently there in the pillow, half obscured in the tangle of her long, golden-red hair, made his heart ache with desire, the way it ached when he watched an unusually spectacular sunset in the desert or came upon an especially glorious vista while hiking in the mountains. 11
Adelaide pairs her physical attractiveness with an equally appealing personal manner: she is "bright, generous, and helpful, and always cheerful." 12 Quite a gal, this Adelaide.
In the book, Adelaide basically is support for Oscar. The men in the book deal with the big questions and make things happen. Oscar says that there are both physical and psychic difference between men and women which grow out of the evolutionary condition, and that the feminists and their supporters don't take these realities into account. Back in Vietnam, Oscar recalls, there was the idea that the only reason women weren't flying military aircraft in combat was because of the repressive effects of society's ideas and practices. But he was convinced that no matter how fast her reflexes, or fine her coordination, or keen her vision, a woman wouldn't be as good a combat pilot as a man. What she lacked was the instinct to fight. Fighting wasn't her natural role. The fighting hormones are missing, Oscar decided, the innate fighting micro-skills finely tuned over the millions of years of the evolution of the species during which men were the hunters and fighters and the women were the nurturers. 13
Oscar concluded that while Adelaide was bright and witty and well read and her intelligence made her an especially good companion, her mind simply didn't work the same way his did. For one thing, her mental world was smaller, her horizon closer. What was real to her was the here- and-now. The past and the future, like distant landscapes, were of much less interest to her. Adelaide was a good, practical worker on limited projects, but mapping world-historical vistas and making plans to transform them would seem unreal to her.
And one other thing: Adelaide was not a generalizer. Her focus was on the trees, not the forest. She saw people as individuals. Oscar did too, of course— but he also saw people as members of larger categories. He saw them as representatives of their races, their social classes, their religions, their interest groups. To understand a man, Yeager believed, one had to consider where his roots were and with whom he identified and not just take into account his individual indiosyncracies. 14
Oscar says Adelaide 's way of approaching things as a woman explains why when an interracial couple is murdered she sees two people murdered and not a blow against miscegenation. Her reaction is natural to her, it is feminine. Oscar decided that Adelaide could be brought around to an acceptance of his ideological beliefs, and even approval of what he is doing, but that her fundamental nature is to be private and adaptive and peaceful while his is to be public and transformative and violent, and that had to be taken into account when dealing with her.
Oscar tells Adelaide that he wants to fight what is wrong with the country: "the growth in racial mixing, the flood of non-White immigrants pouring into the cities, the increasingly obvious crookedness and lack of responsibility of the politicians, the destructive bias of the news and entertainment media, the breakdown of the country's morale, the decay of discipline and standards everywhere, and the loss of any sense of racial or cultural identity on the part of the dwindling White majority." 15 She responds: "There's a lot of dirt out there, and we can't change that. But we can keep our own lives clean and make clean lives for our children. That's all we can do." 16 Oscar understands what she said and why she feels as she does, but he knows her way of dealing with the situation isn't his way, isn't a man's way if he is truly a man.
For her part, Adelaide is sympathetic to Oscar's attitude even if she is not as disposed to get into all the investigations, analyses, and pondering as he is. She had been put off by all the randy Blacks who had come on to her in college, and how the campus environment was more interested in helping her overcome her purported racist tendencies than equipping her to live the life she wanted to live, which was with people of her own choosing. She says that the feminists on campus weren't of much help. Most of them, she thinks, whether they knew it or not, were angry that they were women and not men. They campaigned against rape— much of it black males forcing themselves on white women— date rape, they usually call it— but what they were really protesting, she suspects, is that they were on the bottom and not on top. "And since I've always been happy to be on the bottom as long as there was a good man on top, I couldn't really empathize with them," says Adelaide. 17
Oscar's (and Pierce's) ambivalence toward women comes through in Oscar's perception of what he is getting out of his relationship with Adelaide. On the one hand, he concludes, living with Adelaide has definitely mellowed out the jumpiness and uneasiness he had felt before. He has a more positive outlook now as a result of experiencing her laughter and grace at every meal. And it is comforting to feel her warm body snuggled next to him when he goes to bed. But on the other hand, he worries that she is taking away his edge, pulling him away from what he needs to do, dampening his sense of purpose and urgency, making what he has been doing seem less important, distracting him from what really matters in his life. Was he becoming more cautious, softer, more passive, more tolerant of the intolerable? 18 Reading this passage in the book reminded me of the section in Shaw's play, Man and Superman, the play that had such a powerful impact on Pierce in his younger years, when Ana says to Don Juan that she wants to go to Heaven with him and his reply that he would find his own way there and that he wouldn't be taking her route.
As it turns out, Adelaide doesn't take away Oscar's edge, because he was able to pull off what came to be called the “hate crime of the century”: Oscar bombed a church that was hosting a meeting of the People's Committee Against Hate. Among those on the platform that night killed by the blast were two governors, three congressman, a senator, a cardinal, two bishops, a prominent rabbi, a TV talk show host, two leading Hollywood actors, an acclaimed feminist writer, the head of a homosexual rights organization, the president of the NAACP, and the leader of the Jewish organization B'nai B'rith. Forty-one members of the audience and the media also perished in the bombing. Speaking of therapeutic relief, as I was reading Pierce's account of this slaughter, I was imagining the smile on his face and gleam in his eyes as he wrote these pages. As in The Turner Diaries, the components of the bomb and the method of constructing it were presented in detail in the book. 19
"Freeze, Yeager! FBI!" 20
Uh, oh. Oscar is caught. It's all over for him, or so it appears. The agent holding the Smith and Wesson Airweight.38 Special on him is William Ryan. Ryan is in his mid-fifties, sturdy-looking, about four inches shorter than Yeager, and is gray-haired and has steely-blue eyes. But surprise— Ryan is sympathetic to what Oscar has been up to and isn't going to arrest him. Instead, he wants Oscar to be his hitman as he, Ryan, maneuvers to become the head of a new agency called the Committee for Public Safety, a kind of American KGB, and then, from that base, proceed to clean up the problems confronting America. Ryan needs Oscar to do his dirtywork for him because with Ryan's position and visibility inside the system and his personal situation (he has a wife and children), he is not in a position to do it himself. This arrangement between Oscar and Ryan sets up the narrative strand for the remainder of the book: Oscar knocks off people and blows things up at Ryan's behest, while at the same time Ryan cracks some heads and worse in his official capacity as the head of an FBI anti-terrorist unit.
Amid all the fireworks, Ryan still has the time to fill Oscar in on what is going on with the Jews. He informs Oscar that while the Jews in Europe exercised their control through money and banking, here they do it by manipulating public opinion through their control of the media— television, Hollywood, the music and publishing industries, and news dissemination outlets. By these means, Ryan tells Oscar, Jews further their own interests and "promote racial mixing and other forms of degeneracy" among whites. 21
Ryan stays busy eliminating rivals and taking care of people who are causing trouble. On a couple of occasions in particular, I thought the way Ryan and his unit handled black rioters seemed to be good examples of Pierce playing out his fantasies and getting the satisfaction and cathartic relief that comes from that. In the first instance, six hundred men of Ryan's agency equipped with helmets, flak jackets, and M16s and under his direct supervision sweep through the riot area blasting locks off doors and shooting anyone who did not respond instantly to their orders. They arrest four hundred blacks, kill one hundred three and wound another two hundred, and quell the disorder post-haste. In the second instance, in response to black looting and arson, Ryan and his men go in with helicopters. There is live television coverage of Ryan's assault. Pierce describes the scene: "One moment the television showed hundreds of Blacks in the street below, shaking their fists defiantly at the helicopter above and shouting obscenities. Then there were a hundred practically instantaneous flashes scattered among the crowd and a deafening, staccato explosion. All that could be seen after that were horizontal Black bodies strewn grotesquely on the pavement." 22
One other episode that may have been Pierce playing out his fantasies, although this one doesn't involve either Oscar or Ryan: when a group of AIDS protesters throw AIDS-infected blood on a secretary as she leaves her office, her husband blows them away with a twelve-gauge shotgun while the cops look the other way. When a homosexual spokesman protests the failure of the police to respond, his office is firebombed. And then when a group of homosexuals appear at City Hall with placards to protest the firebombing, street workers beat them senseless. 23
All the while this is going on, three other things are happening: the National League's Harry Keller keeps up his lessons to Oscar on the Jewish menace and continues to augment Oscar's already-existing views on race; Oscar does some speechifying on the book's designated topics; and a new character comes on the scene, Saul Rogers, a former high school teacher and current member of the League. By this time Oscar has joined the League, and he and Harry build up Saul into a powerful television preacher of the League's doctrine under the guise of a Christian evangelist ministry along the lines of a Jerry Falwell or Billy Graham. Saul, as might be expected, gets in a few speeches of his own when the occasion arises. "You young people, think about what your parents and grandparents are like. Think about the way they look and act, and then pick yourself a mate that looks and acts that way too." "Who would have thought that we'd have [people] actually beginning to feel proud that they're White and developing a real interest in their racial roots in Europe. 24 "
Indeed, this is a "teaching and speeching" cast of characters. Or at least the men are— Adelaide and Colleen, Harry's wife, offer an observation here and there, but they aren't given to mounting the podium as the men are.
Among Harry's "lessons":
As for modernism, what is it but the repudiation of our culture, the culture we have shared with all other White people throughout our history? What the Greeks wrote and what the Greeks sculpted 2,500 years ago appeals to us today for the same reasons it appealed to the Greeks then. We respond to beauty and order the same way. The feelings expressed by Homer and Sophocles are our feelings. What Dostoevsky wrote spoke to Englishman and Germans as well as to the Russians, just as Dickens spoke to Russians and Germans, and Goethe spoke to Germans and Englishmen. A painting by Rembrandt or Turner or Friedrich said the same thing to all Europeans, just as did a symphony by Beethoven.... Our culture tied us together, made us aware of our common heritage. And the Jew, the eternal outsider trying to work his way in, could not tolerate that. He had to break us up, destroy our solidarity, make us believe that we had no more in common with one another than with the Negro or the Chinaman— or the Jew. Modernism is the essential strategy of the parasite." 28
We perceive the threat to everything which is beautiful and good in the world. Some of us might state it a little differently, perhaps a little more personally, and say that we perceive in the mindless push toward an ever more inclusive egalitarianism, an ever more debased democracy, and all the consequences those things entail— more and more ugliness, more and more disorder, more and more racial degradation— a threat to the meaning of our existence. We're not threatened personally and physically, but the thing we identify with, the thing that gives meaning to our lives, is threatened. We identify with our race, with an idealization of our race— more than that, with the process of which our race is the principal agent, the process of higher organization, the process which is the active principle of God." 29
Consciousness is knowledge plus awareness plus motivation....To become racially conscious one must elevate one's racial knowledge to such a degree that it actually governs one's thoughts and behavior; one must have a constant awareness of it; one must feel it. One can gain knowledge from reading books or listening to sermons, but achieving and maintaining consciousness generally involves changing the way one lives. 30
The climax of the book involves a showdown between Oscar and Ryan. Ryan wants Oscar to "pop"— that is to say, kill— Saul. He tells Oscar that Saul's television programs are stirring people up and that he worries that there could be a tax revolt, and that this would get in the way of what he, Ryan, is trying to do. Oscar balks at the idea of killing Saul, his fellow League member, and that leads to a debate between Oscar and Ryan on the best means for accomplishing the ends they both want to achieve.
Ryan explains his thinking: what we need most of all now, and for the next couple of decades at least, is order and stability. It isn't the time for disruption and revolt; whites aren't ready for it. "The White people are too far gone," he explains to Oscar. "They don't understand discipline, sacrifice, pulling together for a common goal. They're too weak, too timid, too spoiled, too selfish, too undisciplined." 31 Ryan wants to work within the current system to accomplish his purposes, within its democratic processes, and to ally with others, including Jews. He sees himself as realistically aligning with the forces of history instead of ignoring them or idealistically trying to combat them as he perceives Oscar and the League to be doing:
If you [Oscar] had made a serious study of history like I have you might have recognized certain general facts of historical development. History has inertia. Any historical development such as the one we've been going through in this country as it has changed in this century from an essentially homogeneous, White, Christian nation quite conscious of its European heritage to a heterogeneous, multi-racial, polyglot, heterodox rabble ruled by Jews and crooked lawyer-politicians in league with the Jews, has an enormous inertia. It moves tectonically, like a crustal plate in the earth. It has built up its motion over a long period of time. That motion is driven by historical forces. There is simply no turning such a development around. The most one can hope to do is understand its dynamics and learn how best to adapt to it. That's what I intend to do. You, on the other hand, want to ignore the laws of history and charge head-on into all the forces that are carrying America in the direction she's going. In particular, you want to tackle the Jews head-on. You can't win that way. 32
Oscar counters Ryan's argument with what amounts to the program of Harry Keller and the National League, which is to raise the racial consciousness of whites, and then in an as yet unspecified way, "send the Jews to hell." In Oscar's eyes, the argument comes down to whether it is better to promote stasis as Ryan wants or flux as he and the League favor.
No doubt there is much truth in what you [Ryan] say. No doubt we would be facing a desperate and risky struggle. But we must chance it, Ryan. We must interrupt the current trends. We must at least give our people a chance to save themselves and make a fresh start. We can't permit ourselves to be locked into a new stasis, with the Jews continuing to control the media. That would be inevitably lethal. Order and stability are good things, when the situation is progressive, when a people is imbued with a constructive spirit and is building a better future for its progeny. But when the situation is regressive, then order and stability become the enemies of life, the enemies of true progress. 33
To punch up his point, Oscar sends a spray of tear gas into Ryan's face by squeezing on the pocket clip of a pen he had been toying with as the two men have been talking. He then closes off the debate— and, for all practical purposes, the book— by firing two quick rounds from a pistol into Ryan's midsection and then one more to the back of Ryan's head.
After reading the book, I came to the conclusion that Harry Keller was Pierce and that— it seemed obvious— the National League was the National Alliance. I chuckled to myself about Pierce's choice of the National League, the name of one of the major leagues in professional baseball, as the name for the fictional counterpart to his own organization, because I know how much he disdains mass, commercialized spectator sports. He thinks people ought to engage in physical activity themselves and not watch others play games. He also thinks that the spectator sports are a way the system distracts people from the important things they ought to be attending to and doing. Lastly, as with practically everything in his life he assesses sports in light of race— namely, the fact that blacks are very prominent in the major spectator sports of baseball, football, and basketball. He thinks that makes those enterprises about them and not us, and wonders why so many whites get caught up in them.
I remember one weekend day— I don't recall whether it was a Saturday or a Sunday— I went to watch the evening news with Pierce on the second floor of the headquarters building. But he wasn't there and the set was dark. I went looking for him and found him sitting kind of shrunken at his desk in his office, looking as despondent as I have ever seen him. I said I had just come from the television area and had expected to see him there. He muttered dejectedly, "They pre-empted the news for the ballgames, goddammit."
Back to Hunter, reading the book I came to the conclusion that Oscar Yeager represents the kind of recruit that Pierce would like to attract to his organization, the National Alliance— bright, action-oriented, receptive to what he, Pierce, could teach him. As for the ending of the book, where Oscar dispatches Ryan, I saw that as the triumph of Pierce's and the Alliance 's way of doing business over a more conservative approach. And then there was a lot of cathartic fantasizing and speechifying that Pierce was doing in the book. Put all that together and that was what the book was about, I thought. My conversation with Pierce about Hunter, which is coming up next, prompted me to rethink my conclusions.Previous Chapter | Index | Next Chapter
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