I remember once, growing up in Mississippi, a rumor started floating around my high school that there was going to be Klan meeting somewhere in (or around) town, and how completely ridiculous the notion seemed. Someone might as well have started a rumor about a horseless carriage or the Yankees electing Lincoln. The Klan was a relic of the past, occasionally dredged up by Hollywood (or, later, a Dave Chappelle skit), not a real entity in any meaningful way.

It's never ceased to disappoint and slightly embarrass me, then, when some haphazard collection of lonely, misguided finks calling itself the KKK pops its head up -- as it apparently has this week at Ole Miss, where LSU's student paper reports a Klan group plans to rally in full garb before and after the Rebels' game with LSU Saturday to protest the university's ban of "Dixie" because students wouldn't stop shouting "The South Will Rise Again" at the end:

Shane Tate, the North Mississippi great titan for the Mississippi White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, confirmed via e-mail the KKK will rally on Ole Miss’ campus in protest of the Ole Miss Chancellor Dan Jones’ decision to remove “From Dixie with Love” from the Ole Miss band’s song selection.
[...]
"We aren’t coming there to cause problems or cause trouble," Tate said. "Trouble has already been caused by a handful at Ole Miss, including the black student body president, who wants to shape Ole Miss into yet another liberal sodomite college."

"We're not coming here to cause trouble, we're just showing up in regalia commemorating a century of lawless hatred, violence and intimidation to spit out ridiculous slurs. We don't want no trouble." With any luck (this being an open college campus in the 21st Century), most passersby will laugh at the clowns without slowing down on their way to the stadium, since they don't deserve to be taken seriously enough to argue with, jeer at or otherwise engage in any way at all. With even better luck, they won't even show. But when it comes to this sort of business, I'm always unpleasantly surprised.

It's a shame, too, since this was the one week the proposed replacement for "The South Will Rise Again" -- "To Hell With LSU!" which was formally approved by Ole Miss' student government -- would have worked splendidly if the students hadn't insisted on trumpeting their completely fabricated "tradition." Ah, the shortsighted insolence of youth