The Lies They Tell

by Tuvia Tenenbom

  I want to scream: Is this America? Am I in America? I am in Obamaland.

  Often, too often actually, I get “personal” emails from President Obama. Here’s one of them:

  Tuvia –

  When I was just getting my start as an organizer on the south side of Chicago, things weren’t easy. Sometimes I called a meeting, and nobody showed up.

  But with patience and persistence, folks who lived in the community started to come around. Soon we were spending hours together, talking about the problems they saw and going over the best ways to tackle them.

  The more active and engaged they became, the easier it was to affect the change that we sought. I believe that same concept applies today. Organizing is the building block of everything great we’ve accomplished.

  Who is he bullshitting?

  In a corner street I see a Spanish man sitting on a stoop while holding on to a cane. What’s the name of this neighborhood? I ask him.

  “I live here many years and I never asked this question,” he responds.

  But what’s the name of it?

  “I don’t know.”

  A gray van stops by. The windows roll down to reveal two men wearing bulletproof vests, both armed with guns and all sorts of communications gear. “What are you doing here? Where are you from? Where do you live?”

  I live at the Allegro Hotel downtown.

  “How did you get from there to here?”

  Train and bus.

  “You know where you are?”

  Not exactly, but I’m trying to find President Obama’s district.

  “Not here. Go to Hyde Park.”

  I was told it’s here.

  “This is a dangerous place, a shooting range.”

  Who are you, by the way?

  “Police.”

  Driving a civilian car?

  “Unmarked car. We know this area. Please leave.”

  I’m a journalist. You have your job to do, and I have mine.

  Where should I go from here to –

  The cop cuts me off. “Home!”

  What?

  “You should go home.”

  Why?

  “Believe me, you don’t want to be here.”

  Is this not Obama’s district?

  “No, this is not Obama’s district. It’s way deeper the other way.”

  Is this not the Thirteenth District?

  “No.”

  I take out my iPad to show him the information that I have. “Why are you taking your iPad out? You want to be robbed?”

  The other cop, in the passenger’s seat, says, “He doesn’t know where he is.”

  The cop at the steering wheel: “Listen, you don’t belong here.”

  I stop paying attention to his warnings and just go on with my business, showing him the info on my iPad.

  In 1996, if I’m not mistaken, the Thirteenth District was drawn differently, I say to him.

  The cop changes his attitude. “Correct,” he says. “You are now in the district that Obama represented at that time. That’s correct.”

  Were you a cop here at that time as well?

  “Yes.”

  Has anything changed here since then?

  “Here, changed? Nothing changes here. If anything, it’s gotten worse.”

  Well, let me talk to some more people and see if you’re right.

  “It’s a free country. Be well and be safe. But, please, get out of here as fast as you can.”

  The cops drive off, and I’m left to my own devices. Abandoned businesses, some with iron gates all around them as if to protect the decaying emptiness inside from spilling out, continue to be the common sight. I walk, walk, walk and walk and store after store, business after business is abandoned.

  Only a few stores still function: a Salvation Army station, a gas station, a check-cashing business, liquor and lottery stores, and then a couple of restaurants.

  I enter the restaurants and in each of them I am welcomed by poor lighting, broken toilets, dirty floors, broken chairs and dirty walls. And they are empty of diners, save for one of them that has two people.

  The houses in the area, surprisingly, actually look nice. Many are private homes, which gives the impression that this is a nice area.

  But it’s not.

  How do the people, who are dirt poor, get to live in these houses?

  Part of the neighborhood, which some tell me is called Englewood, is black and another part has Spanish people as well. Alex, a sixteen-year-old Spanish boy, tells me that he likes his neighborhood but that life is not easy. “All gangs are here,” he says.

  How many gangs are there?

  “A lot. A lot of different gangs are here.”

  And they kill each other?

  “Yes, they do.”

  How often is there violence here?

  “Every summer everybody gets killed around here.”

  How many and how often?

  “Once a week somebody gets killed here.” Pointing ahead of him, he adds: “They just killed somebody right there, in the gas station.”

  For what?

  “Gang member. Shot in the head.”

  Is he dead?

  “Yes.”

  When was the last time you heard gun shots?

  “Two days ago.”

  As far as you remember, did anything change here in the last ten years?

  Two older men, both Spanish, are listening to Alex. He looks at them, not knowing what to say, but then says: “It did.”

  For better or for worse?

  He looks at the elders and says: “For the better.”

  What’s better?

  He does not reply, as if afraid to say anything.

  Be honest, Alex.

  “To be honest? No.”

  What “no”?

  “No. Nothing changed.”

  Are you scared?

  “I’m not scared.”

  Do you go out at night, like you’re doing now?

  “At night? No.”

  What’s the difference between the gangs?

  “On this street there are two gangs. One gang, they walk with baggy pants and blue shirts. The other gang, they walk with baggy pants and red shirts. That’s how they know who is who and they kill each other.”

  How is it between the Spanish and the blacks, do they kill each other?

  “Yes, sometimes.”

  Two Spanish youths pass by; one is a teenager and one a ten-year-old. Did anything change, I ask the older, since Obama became president?

  The teenager says that there’s no difference, and the ten-year-old tells me that there is. How a ten-year-old can answer this question, given that Obama became president about seven years ago, is a mystery to me. Still, I ask him: What’s the difference?

  “More food stamps!”

  “Food stamps” is a government program that helps the poor buy food. The government used to give out stamps. Now it gives out debit cards.

  Walking about here and there, I see a lady across the street. She’s old enough to remember Barack Obama who, in his first campaign to an elected office in 1996, said he was running because he wanted to “empower the disenfranchised citizens.” I should talk with her.

  Her name, she tells me, is Cynthia. She’s a Spanish lady, seems older than I initially thought, and she leans on a dirty wall.

  Her right hand is encased in an orthopedic cast; she is quietly smoking a cigarette, fear emanating from her eyes.

  No point in talking to her about twenty years ago. What happened to your hand? I ask her.

  “I was coming out of a grocery store. I had my groceries and someone came up and pushed me, I fell on the ground and they robbed me.”

  Did your robbers get caught?

  “No. They escaped in a car. They also stole $300 from me.”

  Who were the robbers? Spanish, black?

  “Black.”

  I wish you well, my lady.

  “Thank you.”

  She pauses for a minute or
two and then says: “At least I have my life.”

  I talk to more people, and the stories repeat themselves. I’m ready to leave the neighborhood, despondent and despairing.

  None of the people I talked to, excluding the ten-year-old kid with his food stamps, could point to even a single improvement in their lives since Barack Obama first started representing them years ago, and no one cares about Obama one way or the other. For them he’s just one black man, a “nigga brother,” who made it to the top. It has nothing to do with them.

  As for President Obama, if one is to judge by deeds rather than words, he cynically used these people’s hardships to get ahead of the other contenders, but he doesn’t care a bit about the people who put him in power. Lucky him; he doesn’t live here.

  I go to a nearby bus stop and wait for the next bus out. At the station I read that a “march to end rape culture” will take place tomorrow. In moments, long moments, the bus arrives. I mount the bus that will take me, I hope, to a better place.

  A number of stops later a lovely, friendly and gorgeous teenage black girl asks me if I need any help. She’s not used to seeing white men on this bus and wonders from what planet I have dropped. I tell her that I’m here because I wanted to check out a few things about President Obama.

  “You went to the president’s house?” she asks.

  President’s house? What’s that?

  “You don’t know?”

  No.

  “What are you doing here?”

  I just spent a few hours in Englewood.

  “You??”

  Yes. What’s the problem?

  “You were in Englewood??”

  I wanted to see people.

  “In Englewood??”

  Yes.

  “I’m from Englewood! I hate Englewood! It’s a dangerous ’hood. You didn’t go to the president’s house?”

  What’s the president’s house? Where is it?

  “You want to go? Take bus number 15.”

  Well, it takes me some time but slowly I get it: President Obama has a house in Chicago, where he lived before he moved to DC. The house is in the historic Hyde Park-Kenwood neighborhood of Chicago, which is somewhere around somewhere, and bus number 15 goes there.

  I take that bus.

  I get off where the driver tells me to get off, and I walk toward President Obama’s Chicago abode. He is not there, but some Secret Service agents are. Their mission is to protect the house, and they have blocked off the street where the house is. The only way to see the house, actually just a fraction of it due to the many trees surrounding it, is by looking at it from the other side of East Hyde Park Boulevard, which is perpendicular to the blocked-off street.

  This is a rich neighborhood with stately townhouses. This is not Englewood, and nobody will rob you here.

  Whatever the difference, I want to see more of the house and I contemplate ways to outsmart the Secret Service. I try schmoozing with one of the agents, but this leads me nowhere. What I do find, however, is that there’s a tremendous structure right across from the president’s home, and I ponder ways to enter that place. As I approach it I see Hebrew words at the entrance. What is this place? Well, it’s a synagogue by the name of KAM Isaiah Israel.

  Hallelujah! All I need to do is to take part in some services and I’ll get to see the president’s home from inside the temple.

  The temple’s entrance is locked. I check for their schedule of services and find that their last event for today took place at 10:00 in the morning, quite a few hours earlier.

  The title of today’s last event, if you care to know, is Yoga. What’s yoga got to do with a temple?

  I leave the area of Obama and yoga and think of what to do next. Perhaps, a thought drops into my brain, I should find myself a temple that teaches Pilates and pole dancing. Would be nice to watch a kosher Jewish woman pole dancing in front of congregants pigging out on gefilte fish. I do a little research and fall upon an interesting discovery: Rahm Emanuel’s temple.

  Yeah.

  Barack’s got a temple and Rahm has one too. Only Rahm actually attends services. I mean, I suppose.

  I must check the place out. Yoga.

  Do the Jews in Chicago have nothing better to do in their temples than practice yoga next to the holy arks?

  • • •

  The name of Rahm’s temple, or synagogue, is Anshe Sholom B’nai Israel, and it is located in the Lake View neighborhood. I get there around evening time. Outside the synagogue a man in black civilian clothes, whose name is Neil, minds the entrance door. Are you the guard? I ask him.

  “Kind of. I’m a police detective, specialized in drugs and gangs.”

  Jewish?

  “Me? No. I’m of German descent.”

  Neil explains his presence: “Years ago a Jewish doctor saved my life. I came into his office and he gave me my life back. What I do here is my personal thanks to him.”

  Are you armed?

  “Always.”

  Tell me, gang specialist, how many were shot dead in Chicago lately?

  “This month, just in the Fourth of July weekend, eleven people were murdered and sixty-three were shot. Maybe there were more shootings, but we know of sixty-three.”

  I guess you are familiar with the Englewood neighborhood.

  “Oh, yes! Englewood is a very, very dangerous place.”

  They have nice houses there, at least some of them, but at the same time everything there smells of poverty. How can the people afford such houses?

  “The government is paying for them. The residents don’t pay for them. The original owners were whites, but they left the area. ‘White flight.’”

  Here too, I see. I wonder how many more neighborhoods of “white flights” exist in this country.

  I walk into the synagogue. It’s a big place, but very few people have bothered to show up; most of them are about God’s age. The event, I read on a piece of paper everybody here gets, is a speech about the Iran deal.

  The speaker, who happens to be quite boring, strongly opposes the Iran deal. Couldn’t this synagogue bring a more exciting speaker, maybe Rahm Emanuel?

  Once the event is over I talk to a Jewish lady, a member of the congregation, and she tells me that, yes, “This synagogue is Rahm Emanuel’s shul [synagogue]. He comes here every year for the High Holidays service. He doesn’t pay his dues. Everybody else who attends the High Holidays pays, except for Rahm.”

  Why doesn’t he pay?

  “He feels that he’s above the rest of us. He used to stand during services because he didn’t pay for a seat, but now one of our members is paying for him, from his own pocket. He pays for Rahm and for Rahm’s family.”

  A man standing near us intervenes: “You know why he doesn’t pay? Because he’s stingy, he’s a miser. Rahm doesn’t spend money, not his own money. That’s Rahm.”

  Time for yoga, I think.

  • • •

  The American media is very busy these days with Donald Trump. Known as the Donald, he tears to pieces every American pundit’s predictions that he will soon disappear from the map. Instead, he just shot to the top of the list of Republican candidates. The Donald has diarrhea of the mouth; he doesn’t stop talking dirty, and the people love it. American journalists can’t figure this out and so they write long articles about him, hoping that by the time they are finished writing their articles they will have figured something out.

  The Obama administration, on the other hand, is not busy with the Donald. It is busy, very much so, with the Iran deal.

  Tomorrow morning, for example, its people will try to convince Jewish leaders in Chicago that the Iran deal is not really bad.

  I think I should attend.

  • • •

  The Jewish Community Relations Council of the Jewish United Fund/Jewish Federation of Metropolitan Chicago is holding a special meeting today to discuss the Chicago Jewish community’s response to the Iran deal. The Jewish Federation is the most important Jewish orga
nization in Chicago, and the meeting today will be attended by members of many Jewish organizations, including the famous AIPAC (American Israel Public Affairs Committee).

  Security is tight, with guards, x-ray screenings, and even electronically secured double doors for those going to or coming from the toilet.

  Bottom line: only active members of Chicago Jewish organizations, preregistered, are to attend this meeting. I’m not a member of any Jewish organization and, naturally, no guard can find my name on the registered list.

  Problem. To solve this problem, I present to the gatekeepers of this ultra-secured building my driver’s license.

  They let me in. I love it.

  I feel so secure!

  This is a Jewish meeting, by the way, which means that there’s some food around. And actually it’s not bad.

  Note: when I don’t write about food it means that there is nothing to write about it – which, sadly, is what I experience almost every day in the Home of the Brave.

  But here, the Jews have performed a miracle: Excellent salmon, warm and fresh, is available to be consumed by the participants. Tuna salad as well, pineapple, avocado, chopped onion, watermelon, coffee (which I don’t try) and Diet Coke (which I’m addicted to). No bagels – which reminds me that I’m not at a New York Jewish event, where the lack of bagels is a major crime. No cheesecake either, or any cake.

  What’s going on with these Jews? For all I know, it’s a crime against Judaism not to have sweets at an event like this. But I don’t complain. I don’t say a word. I don’t need any Jew here to ask me which organization I represent. If push comes to shove, I’ll say that I represent the State of New York, the issuer of my driver’s license. That’s an official entity, and as far as I know, Jews love officials.

  One official, actually, is speaking to them now as they swallow the salmon. His name is Jon Wolfsthal, senior director for nonproliferation, National Security Council, and he speaks via video from the White House.

  “Can you hear me?” he asks. “I wish you could feed me, too.” Must be a Jew.

  “This deal is an extremely good deal,” he says, moving on to talk business. The Iran nuclear deal is an excellent deal, he argues, and it has no flaws. In addition, the United States and its allies will be able to immediately see any Iranian violation of the deal and will act on it at once. Period.