The Accused: Raymond “Chuck” Foster, Imperial Wizard of the KKK

Statement of the Grand Inquisitor: Normally a sad nitwit like Raymond “Chuck” Foster wouldn’t even be worthy of the attention of the eXiled Inquisition Team, but now that he’s managed to put the tattered remnants of the Ku Klux Klan back in the news, we thought we’d give him a look. He’s the fellow who killed Cynthia Lynch, an even sadder nitwit he’d recruited, because she tried to bail on the Klan initiation rites halfway through. The theory is, she felt a sudden wave of homesickness for Tulsa, Oklahoma. If this seems impossible, keep in mind that she was in backwoods Louisiana at the time. When you’re in backwoods Louisiana, Tulsa must seem like the center of civilization, practically the shining city on the hill politicians are always going on about.

Cynthia Lynch, late Klan recruit

So anyway, there they were on Sunday last, going through “the rites of passage, including shaving her head and ‘chanting and running around,’ at a sandbar in the Pearl River, a half mile from a remote boat launch in Sun”, Louisiana, as reported in the local St. Tammany News. Makes us shiver just to think about it. Because this was no Klan rally from the old glory days in the Washington Parish of Louisiana, when the KKK really cut a swath opposing the Civil Rights movement, and hundreds of robed locals would’ve turned out to chant and tromp about in formation. (You may recall the Coen Brothers recreated just such a scene of stately chanting and marching in O Brother Where Art Thou?, using perhaps a little poetic license.) No cheery torch-bearing mobs were there to display power in numbers and impressive choreography. Just eight outcast yokels on a sandbar, making shit up.

And led by Raymond “Chuck” Foster, not an inspiring figure, though he apparently insisted his members refer to him as “His Lordship”. Authorities know this because they found all of Foster’s papers back at his house, describing the organization and its bylaws and naming Klansmen thinly strewn all over these here United States.

This wasn’t a tough murder case to crack. Police got an early clue from two of Foster’s dimwitted minions, one of them Shawn Foster, Chuck’s 20-year-old son, who went into a convenience store and asked the clerk how to get the bloodstains out of their clothes. Probably pretty big bloodstains, because apparently right after shooting Lynch, there was an attempt to remove the bullet with a knife. Were they trying to save ammo? Maybe going squirrel-hunting later? Hard to say. Anyway, the police got full confessions from Chuck and Shawn and the others, eight out of eight. So presumably this local chapter of the KKK, known as the Sons of Dixie, is now closed.

The question is, what to do with so much sad nitwitery? Seems as if we ought to have a stance on that. Millions of abject morons so immersed in error they could never get out if they lived ten lifetimes, all cluttering up the landscape and causing untold damage and depressing everybody no end. It’s absurd to condemn them when they’re all pre-condemned. Their lives are hell. Just imagine that damned sandbar at the absolute fucking end of nowhere, and the eight idiots chanting, and then the argument that erupts when the dreary middle-aged woman who’s never been out of Oklahoma in her godforsaken life wants to go back to Tulsa—on the bus, of course. And imagine Chuck’s fury when he realizes he can’t even keep his downtrodden recruit in line, and the messy shooting, and the panic in his little band of hayseeds, and then trying to dig the bullet out…

Torturing them wouldn’t even cheer us up much.

What do we do?

Statement of the Defense: Go back to ignoring them till forced to look.

Verdict: Yeah.

Read more: Cynthia Lynch, initiaion rites, Ku Klux Klan, murder, Raymond "Chuck" Foster, The eXiled Inquisition Team, The Daily Inquisition

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