The race-baiting, anti-Semitic leaflets that have afflicted the East End this past month are the work of an unlikely 23-year-old who operates under the name Brother Hardy -- a professed neo-Nazi whose last job was at a bagel shop.
He joined the racist World Church of the Creator earlier this year and, in the past month, delighted the church's "Pontifex Maximus," Matthew Hale, by scoring television and newspaper attention with late-night postings of papers denouncing race-mixing and attacking Jews.
"Whenever we don't get the literature out to him right away, he gets back to us to make sure it wasn't lost in the mail," Hale said.
For the past month, Brother Hardy and I have corresponded by e-mail, as I puzzled over whether to write about him as an emerging racist or ignore him as another flywheel in the great machine of lunacy. It does not escape any of us who cover fringe characters that publicity is their oxygen. It is just as true that mold cannot grow in direct light. The trick is finding the balance in a world in which imbalance is the norm.
What complicates the equation almost beyond comprehension is the fact that Brother Hardy, whose racist antics have had the city's media agog, is autistic.
"It's inexplicable," said his father when I called yesterday. The young man who writes with ferocious, if ungrammatical, anger at the "other" in this world would, himself, have been sent to the crematorium by the regime he celebrates.
"We can't count the number of times he would have been killed by the Nazis," his father told me.
Hardy's type of autism is called Asperger's syndrome. It disrupts the social and emotional development of children, but rarely diminishes intellectual development. They become, in essence, socially retarded people with unimpaired intellects.
To understand how this could be, consider that this year's valedictorian at a Washington D.C., high school has a mild form of autism.
Similarly, Brother Hardy has managed to work his way through high school and is able to communicate with a fair amount of eloquence. Still, there are moments the message doesn't reach.
When Brother Hardy decided to register to vote in 1997, he asked to be listed as a National-Socialist. He wound up being registered with the Socialist Workers Party. In an e-mail he blamed the snafu on the race of the registration clerk.
Since television and newspaper coverage of the leafleting began, Brother Hardy, according to his parents, has been in a sort of nirvana.
His parents have spent several seasons in hell.
His father is a medical professional. His mother stayed at home to raise the children. They have tried reason, warnings and prayer and at one point put their son in the hands of a black coach to guide him away from his fixations on race. After his son's most recent foray through Shadyside, plastering racist stickers and leaflets around the neighborhood, his father scrambled out of the house and began tearing them down.
"This boy does not have a following," the father said. "He is the self-proclaimed master of this religion."
Brother Hardy's parents consider him incapable of violence. But Hardy's leafleting, coming in the wake of the Baumhammers and Taylor shootings, has unnerved the East End neighborhoods that awoke to fliers calling on them to boycott kosher products and denouncing racial intermarriages. That both Baumhammers and Taylor have been diagnosed as mentally ill raises still another issue here.
Can it be that, at its core, extreme racism is simply a manifestation of some biological or mental deficiency? Is it not possible that some basic, universally applicable morality is, in fact, the foundation of what we define as wholeness and sanity?
Brother Hardy's parents, gentle people who deeply love their son, don't have answers to this, nor do I. They went home yesterday to tear out the computer in hopes they can slacken the pace at which their boy is slaloming to disaster.
"To him, we're race-traitors," his father said. "We can't reason with him."
So far, Brother Hardy's handiwork has made it onto two television news broadcasts and, as of this column, two newspaper reports. And this, God willing, will be the last.
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