The Lies They Tell

by Tuvia Tenenbom

  That’s freedom. That’s liberty.

  Why is it, I ask Chris once I’m done with the fish, that big American planes fly to foreign countries, such as Libya, Iraq, Afghanistan, etcetera and etcetera, and bomb them out of existence?

  “You have to understand America. We built this country on an idea, the idea of freedom, and if there are countries in the world which are not treating their citizens well, it is our obligation to go there and fix the problem.”

  Who gave you this right?

  “I didn’t say ‘right,’ I said ‘obligation.’”

  Who gave you the moral superiority to justify flying to another country, another culture, and killing its people just because they do not follow the same rules that your culture does?

  Chris is getting very upset at me. More than just upset. He is mad. He calls the waitress, asks for the bill and gives her his credit card.

  In an instant she is back with the bill, and the card.

  “I pay for the table, it’s over $300, for one reason,” he says while signing the check, “so that I can tell you what I think of you.” He puts the card back in his pocket, lays his hands on the bill and says to me: “You are full of shit, and you’ll do yourself a favor if you leave Alaska as soon as possible.”

  At this, he ceremoniously leaves the table. This Chris, in case you were wondering, is also a “loonie,” a conservative loonie.

  Another person at the table now says to me: “I hope you understand what you just did. If you plan to stay in Alaska, don’t be surprised if you get into some serious problems. Chris knows everybody here. He is a very powerful man and he can hurt you.”

  I learn a new meaning to the words freedom and liberty.

  I look at Chris’s retreating figure and a thought comes to me: What Chris has just done is no different than what the Western world has been doing in the Middle East in recent years. Flush with cash and muscles, they tell the people of the East that they are full of shit, that they should leave the area at once, and then they bomb them.

  Climate change. Is it really happening? If I am to trust the weather specialists of our day, it is happening and it is endangering the entire planet. The weather specialists also say that tomorrow morning it will be rainy in Anchorage. Will this come to pass?

  Let’s wait for tomorrow and see.

  • • •

  Tomorrow has come. Is it raining? No. Is it cloudy? It’s mostly sunny. Is it possible that those specialists, who can’t predict the weather for the next day, are capable of predicting the weather in fifty years? It is. Everything is possible in America.

  This reminds me: A few days ago the stock market took a nosedive, shedding gains made over many previous months, and some Evangelical pastors “prophesized” that the stock market would promptly crash. It did not. The stock market is actually doing pretty well, thank you.

  Personally, I wish I could take a stand on climate change. Everybody does, and I look like the biggest fool in the United States these days because I don’t take a stand. On the other hand, less than a century ago if you didn’t kill a Jew you looked bad, because almost everybody did. Before that, in this very country, if you didn’t have a black slave you also looked bad. And not that long ago, almost everybody was sure that gays were psychos.

  • • •

  Climate change or not, I’d like to see the glaciers. I’m in Alaska, after all! I drive to Whittier, which is about sixty miles from Anchorage, to join a boat excursion to see the glaciers. I need to check the glaciers’ conditions: Are they icy? Are they melting? Is anything cooking?

  I embark on a tour boat, also known as a “cruise ship,” and am ready for my encounter with the glaciers.

  On this ship, they serve lunch at predetermined tables. At my table there are four Mormons from Utah; over at the neighboring table are two intellectuals from New Mexico. Anything the Mormons believe in, the intellectuals believe in its very opposite, which is really refreshing to witness. The Mormons believe that Americans are great and wonderful, and the intellectuals believe that Americans are selfish creatures motivated by money and acute narcissism. Forget the glaciers. These people are a delight!

  Most of the other people on this trip are Asian tourists, and they are effusively anticipating the prospect of seeing glaciers soon. It is only when these Asians raise their voices in a language that is incomprehensible to me, shouting excited consonants and the loudest of vowels, that I realize we’ve reached the glaciers.

  I walk out to the deck and look at the glaciers. A glacier, defined by Merriam-Webster’s dictionary as “a large body of ice moving slowly down a slope or valley or spreading outward on a land surface,” is indeed what my eyes see: an icy white mass on top of brown mountains. The ice is thick, really thick, and at times huge chunks of it drop into the water below. Is this what they call climate change? What do I know? I don’t.

  I look up close at the glaciers. Bluish colors emanate from the face of the ice. Some of the glaciers in the path of our cruise are so gorgeous that for a moment I mistake them for giant diamonds. Then the ship turns around, heading back to land.

  The good thing is this: I’m enjoying the company here, and we still have some time to spend together. The Mormons tell me that Jesus Christ came to the United States, or whatever it was called then, immediately after he was resurrected. That’s two thousand years ago.

  The intellectuals at the other table totally reject the Mormons’ story. They are offended by it. The intellectuals, a man and a woman who are in a relationship since about Jesus’ time, are not married and think that marriage is just a stupid paper, but they strongly advocate for gay marriage.

  Which reminds me: the gay marriage issue played big in the recent mayoral election in Anchorage. In the heat of the mayoral battle one of the contenders said: “I support the idea of adults being able to choose who they have a relationship with. Father and son should be allowed to marry, if they’re both consenting adults.”

  Despite the stupidity of such a sentence, this guy eventually won the mayoral race. His name is Ethan Berkowitz. I think I should meet him once this trip is over. And, indeed, when I’m back on dry land I go to see him.

  • • •

  Like Rahm Emanuel, Ethan Berkowitz is Jewish. Unlike Rahm, Ethan has no armed policeman seated in the reception area, just a smiling secretary and some other employees. Mayor Ethan Berkowitz is very busy these days. The GLACIER conference is opening shortly, and many His Highnesses and Her Excellencies are showing up. They include: His Highness Barack Obama, the Honorable John F. Kerry, His Excellency Tang Guoqiang of China, His Excellency Kristian Jensen of Denmark, His Excellency Gunnar Bragi Sveinsson of Iceland, Her Excellency Kazuko Shiraishi of Japan, the Honorable Henryka Moscicka-Dendys of Poland, Her Excellency Margot Wallström of Sweden and many others. They are Ethan’s guests, yet he has found the time to sit down with me and schmooze about such abstract topics as being Jewish in Alaska. I am grateful.

  Ethan was born in San Francisco and has lived in Alaska for the past twenty-five years. What brought you to Alaska? I ask him.

  “I worked down at the Antarctic; I shoveled snow; I drove people around; I unloaded planes and ships. I live up in the Arctic now. I can tell my mother I made my way up in the world! That’s what I tell her!”

  What made you come here?

  “I worked for a judge, down at the Antarctic, and I wanted to have another good adventure before I settled down and grew up. Not having grown up, I haven’t gone back home yet…”

  Are you still a baby?

  “There is a twelve-year-old in all of us.”

  Tell me some of your Alaska adventures.

  “You get to see a country that you wouldn’t see anywhere else.There’s nothing quite like seeing the Northern Lights or hearing the sound of extremely dry snow as you walk across it. Those are profound. Or sharing meals with people who grew up in Native cultures.”

  You can do that in Michigan.

  “You can’t have mu
ktuk [an Eskimo delicacy made of whale skin] in Michigan.”

  You can have paktak (a word I just made up) in Michigan!

  “Maybe!”

  Do you think that people relate to you differently because you are Jewish?

  He pauses here. He starts to say a word or two, stops, starts again, stops, starts and stops. Then, finally, he says: “I don’t think most people think about that.” But then, a few moments later, he says: “I think that anti-Semitism exists.”

  At times, he tells me, he hears people say about him that “he is not like us.”

  Are these words coming from people on the right side of politics?

  “Yes. It’s a code, code words. I hear it.”

  How often have you heard these code words?

  “In every campaign I have been part of.”

  What’s the story of anti-Semitism in Alaska?

  “We have a lot of the militants here, the right-wing militants.”

  Percentage-wise, how many are they?

  “I don’t know.”

  Guess.

  “There are pockets of it. Not here in Anchorage, but in other parts of the state.”

  Big pockets?

  “Significant.”

  Did you become more Jewish or less Jewish in Alaska?

  “This is really an interesting question.” After a pause he says that being in Alaska “has strengthened my Jewish identity. Here, we Jews are the Frozen Chosen.”

  • • •

  Many an Alaskan tells me that they are in Alaska because of its pristine natural beauty. You have to take a flight above the glaciers, they say. They’re local; they should know.

  I hook up with a local company called Rust’s Flying Service and I join them for the next flight out. The plane I board is a small, amphibious craft known as a floatplane. This plane cruises on water and flies in the air.

  The pilot, Bruce, is a pilots’ pilot. His papa was a pilot, his children are pilots and his wife is too. I sit on the seat next to him, where copilots sit in planes that use them, and he takes off. “Copilot controls have been removed,” the sign in front of me says. Thank goodness; I wouldn’t know what to do if something went wrong.

  The plane starts cruising on the waters, like a boat, which is kind of cool. And then, when Bruce gets clearance, we fly. “One in five Alaskans is a pilot,” he says as we reach an altitude of thirteen hundred feet. This is not the normal altitude on commercial airplanes. Cruising at thirteen hundred feet will get nobody anywhere on a passenger flight.

  Personally, I prefer this height; at least I can see something. Bruce points to the left, where there’s a white structure that looks from this distance like a Russian Orthodox church or a mosque. Must be a church, I think. Russia sold Alaska to the Americans many, many years ago, and it stands to reason that they were praying here before they left.

  “It’s a mosque,” Bruce corrects me. How did a mosque get here? Did we fly so fast that we’ve reached Saudi Arabia? Nope. Did Muslims from the hot Middle East come by to cool off? Not exactly. Nobody prays at that mosque, Bruce says.

  I ask him if we could drop by for a quick prayer, so that the mosque won’t feel lonely, but he says no. The area where the mosque is, he informs me, is a US military installation. It’s an army base where American soldiers practice warfare in Islamic countries.

  Could somebody please replace the copilot controls? If they were active I’d direct the plane to the mosque, but Bruce won’t hear of it. He’s a one-dimension man: glaciers. “All the glaciers in Alaska are shrinking,” he says, and soon enough we approach our first glacier.

  Bruce lowers the altitude. We are now about six hundred feet above the ground, and the visibility of what’s below us is excellent. We are flying above the Knik Glacier, which Bruce says is “like an ice river.”

  The ice exhibit under my feet, below this plane, is a mesmerizing sight. I can’t take my eyes off this glacier. It is a master work of art in ice. It’s a sculpture, a painting, a being that has no equal. It’s one huge exhibit, with no beginning and no end, of infinite beauty. It’s wavy, it’s straight, it shines in angelic white, and it has a heavenly soul. Think of being surrounded by glowing white ice of every conceivable shape. It is so amazingly grandiose in its beauty, having myriad layers in it and above it, that no camera can capture it. Believe me, I tried.

  Bruce keeps on flying; at times he pilots the plane rightwards, then leftwards, back and forth, just because he loves it. He missed his profession; he should have been a dancer. And then he dances his way to another glacier. I wish I could live here, among the glaciers.

  For some reason the glaciers take me back to my childhood, when I studied the Bible and the story of how the world came to be. I’m not religious anymore, but for a moment there I can see the Wind of God flying next to me, above these whitest and bluest of glaciers.

  So unreal!

  Bruce points to a particular glacier, of whatever name, and says that it receded quite a number of yards just in the last few weeks. Is that due to climate change? Bruce, a devout Alaskan pilot, is not a man in love with sound bites, of either the left or of the right. “Some say it’s due to climate change, some say it’s a natural cycle,” he replies. He doesn’t know who is right.

  “We don’t have enough records to answer this.”

  I’m not the only dumb-dumb in the world. What a relief!

  • • •

  When I get up the next morning I make it my duty to read the news. Tomorrow, according to the Washington Post, President Obama “will announce the renaming of Mount McKinley, honoring the 25th president, to Mount Denali, an Athabascan name used by generations of Alaska Natives that means ‘the great one.’” Americans love their Indians. Especially the dead ones.

  According to the weather forecast, the temperature in Anchorage will soon reach thirty-nine degrees. In New York, where I started this journey, the temperature will rise to ninety-one today. I’m so happy I’m in Alaska.

  • • •

  Good morning. The GLACIER conference, hosted by the US Department of State, is opening in a few minutes at Anchorage’s Dena’ina Civic and Convention Center. Dignitaries, domestic and foreign, are about to convene in order to solve the world’s problems. On today’s schedule are speeches by United States President Barack Obama and US Secretary of State John F. Kerry. The opening statement at this prestigious conference will, naturally, be delivered by the most important person in attendance: Mr. Lee Stephan, the “President and First Chief” of the Traditional Tribal Council of Eklutna, Native Village.

  Next to speak will be the Honorable Ethan Berkowitz, followed by some other distinguished speakers; last to speak at the early morning session will be the Honorable John F. Kerry. The conference will close at end of the day with “remarks by the President of the United States.”

  At 9:15 a.m. attendees are motioned to be quiet. They comply. At 9:19, Kerry and the dignitaries enter. The audience members rise.

  The First Chief speaks. “In your honor I have, eh, try to speak my language. I never learned it, but I’m going give it a shot,” he says, and proceeds to say a few words in the Native language, which are probably all the words he knows. The First Chief quickly moves to speak in English again, and he thanks President Obama for the honor of opening this distinguished conference.

  Will the second speaker, the Honorable Ethan, speak in Hebrew? No. Instead he talks about the diversity of Alaska’s people and remarks that “we live the climate change every day.” Once upon a time, he says, “sell air conditioners to Alaskans” was the punchline of a joke, but today it’s reality. Before concluding, he utters a word in a Native language, proudly transforming himself from a Jew into a Native.

  I need a break. I get up from my seat, take three steps, and a lady approaches me, asking what I need. Toilet, I say.

  Follow me, she says. She takes me around the conference hall, from one end to the other, and then out all the way to the restroom. She shows me to the door of the me
n’s room and waits there. Once I’m done she escorts me back to my seat.

  Two seats next to me is an Alaskan journalist, a red-haired beauty who identifies herself as a “married gay,” and she wants to get out. She gets off her seat and walks toward the exit door, only to be stopped by security. They tell her that she cannot leave the conference hall. Period.

  Yes, nobody is allowed to leave this place during sessions. We are trapped inside. We have no choice but to listen to the speakers, who, one after the other, prophesy the end of world as we know it unless we take deliberate actions to stop climate change. If we don’t take action, we are warned, wildfires will increase, glaciers will melt, villages and towns will disappear, temperatures will rise to African levels, and all white folks will become black. Something like that.

  And then John F. Kerry speaks.

  He lets us know that everywhere he travels “leaders and average folks talk to me about the impacts of climate change,” and that he is “so grateful for such a display of interest by so many countries coming here today to be part of this discussion.” How often does Kerry talk to “average folks”? I’m not sure, but I know what will happen to them when they want to pee while he talks to others.

  For all Kerry’s big talk, this conference is not well attended; many seats here are empty. Still, Kerry seems to enjoy the stage. “Villages in Alaska are already being battered by the storms and some have had to move, or will.… Houses and other buildings are literally collapsing into rubble. Already this is happening,” he says.

  Following his speech, sessions break out in different rooms. I go to one of them. Escorted, of course.

  Slowly but surely I start to get used to being escorted. Most escorts are young Alaskan women or American military men in civilian clothes. They share with me their big love for Alaska and some other intimate stories, but all stop mid-story at the exact moment we arrive at my next destination, be it a toilet or another session.

  My newest destination for the moment is a session about the dangers our world is facing, with emphasis on Alaskan Natives whose villages are either being eroded at this very moment or are about to erode. Pictures of all kinds of villages with Native-sounding names are projected on the walls. And they are effective. By showing real people, and not just strange-consonant scientific terms, the message comes across much clearer. It’s a climate change message about people, people who will be drowned or otherwise disappear if we don’t stop the glacier erosion.