DREAMING THE IRON DREAM

By Harold A. Covington

April 20, 1999

Comrades and Brothers: As the last summer of this most terrible of centuries begins, I find myself thinking of a day in early summertwenty-eight years ago. On that day, having completed my last final exam and thus my last Hill High School, I walked up to my car in the parking lot on a hill beside the school. I stopped at the summit of that hill and turned, looking back at the buildings, remembering all that had occurred there over the past three years. In that moment I made a silent vow to myself that I would devote my life to ensuring that someday, no White boy or girl would ever again have to go through what I had to gothrough in that place. To my frequent amazement, this vow of mine I have kept through almost three decades of chaos and madness. The century draws to a close and it is not inappropriate, I think, for us as a group to pause for the few remaining months of it and assess where we have all been andwhat we have done. Many years ago an author named Norman Spinrad wrote a book called The Iron Dream. The book was not a very memorable one, a kind of literary joke, purporting to be what Adolf Hitler would have written had he emigrated to the United States after the Beer Hall Putsch and become a science fiction writer in New York.

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