The Lies They Tell

by Tuvia Tenenbom

  That’s too much for her, to be labeled a Flaming Republican. She promptly tells me that she’s a Democrat.

  I ask the two of them to explain to me, a fat tourist, the difference between themselves.

  They oblige.

  The Republican says: “Being American means thinking of yourself first, which is the essence of capitalism.”

  The Democrat says: “Healthy societies care about their weaker parts. I don’t mind paying taxes as long as my money goes toward helping the poor.”

  Personally, I agree with the lady. The guy is too cold and too selfish for my taste. But there’s something in the way that the lady phrases her response that frightens me. She’s willing to pay more taxes, and she says it. She’s righteous. And righteous people scare me.

  Historically speaking, righteous people, knowing and proclaiming their righteousness, don’t have and don’t see any stop signs. When they believe in something, they will force their way through. Righteous people have done this from day one, when man first appeared on the planet – and, oh boy, how many people ended up dying because of the righteous! If you don’t believe me, open the annals of history and you’ll read it on almost every page.

  I light up a cigarette and watch these two argue with each other. Neither convinces the other, and each passionately hates the other, which makes it fun to watch.

  After a while, and to add a little fuel to the fire consuming these two, I throw in my “climate change, Israel-Palestine” question and ask both to respond. The Republican believes there is no “new” climate change, arguing that the climate has been changing for thousands of years, and he supports Israel. The Democrat asserts that he is utterly wrong on both counts.

  Yeah.

  • • •

  Before I make my acquaintance with more of the good people of Texas, I go for a little history lesson. Presidential history, in this case.

  In November 1963, President John F. Kennedy was shot to death from the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository in Dallas by Lee Harvey Oswald. Two days later Oswald was shot to death by a nightclub owner, a tough Jew by the name of Jack Ruby.

  This is more or less what the US government has been saying ever since, but no matter how often the government argues this case, there are more conspiracy theories out there than the total number of abortions and gay marriages all across the USA.

  The Book Depository of old is no more. In its stead is the Sixth Floor Museum, which I now enter. Here, on the sixth floor, in an area enclosed by glass barriers, visitors can see the exact location from which President Kennedy was shot, or not, but they can’t stand on the very spot. Why? I don’t know.

  Barriers or not, Americans flock to this place. Old and young, male and female – mostly white – they are here. Why are they here? I approach an older lady who is walking around the various exhibits at this museum, and I ask her: Fifty-two years have passed but you Americans are still thinking of JFK’s assassination. Why?

  “We don’t preserve buildings, like the Europeans. We preserve events. You are European, aren’t you?”

  I can’t believe she’s said this, so I try a retort: I’m German, and I think that you’re Jewish. Aren’t you?

  “I was born Jewish, if that’s what you meant.”

  What does it mean, “born Jewish”? Are you no longer Jewish?

  She points to her husband, standing next to her: “He is an Italian.”

  It takes her a while, but in the end she says: “Yes, I’m Jewish.” Her name is Ruth.

  I’m sure that any hypothetical mutual acquaintance watching Ruth and me right now would be exploding in laughter at the sight of two Jews hiding behind Germany and Italy.

  Just as I’m thinking of this I hear JFK uttering the eternal words “Ich bin ein Berliner” from one of the TV screens on the floor.

  The Sixth Floor does a great job in presenting not just the assassination but also JFK the man. In pictures and moving images we see JFK using the emerging new medium of his time, TV, to his advantage: “And so, my fellow Americans: ask not what your country can do for you – ask what you can do for your country.”

  Classic JFK!

  I leave the past behind, exit the building and am ready to make my acquaintance with the Texans living here and now. I walk just a few feet on the streets of Dallas when right before my eyes I see a Holocaust museum. What’s a Holocaust museum doing in Dallas?

  • • •

  The Dallas Holocaust Museum occupies the first floor of an office building. It is a small museum, really small, but it’s visually striking. At the entrance there is a graphic installation that depicts Europe in World War II. European countries are displayed in different colors, representing, for example, those who participated in Jew killing and those who resisted.

  When you see in such a stark visual how almost every European country joined the Kill Your Jew party, it hits you: this is the face of European culture.

  It is time I leave both JFK and the Holocaust aside and live in the real world, the one of today. I exit the building.

  I ask a white man walking by for the best spot in Dallas where I could witness the soul of the city. “Definitely you should go to Deep Ellum.”

  What’s that?

  “In Deep Ellum you will see the real Dallas, not the Dallas of the stories. Dallas is much more liberal and diverse than what the media will make you believe. In Deep Ellum you’ll see the diversity of our city: African Americans, gays, great bars and cafés; you will hear live music – jazz, blues, soul – and you’ll love it. Just go there. Listen to me.”

  Oscar of Chicago: I’m going to listen to music in the heart of Dallas!

  A few feet further down the sidewalk I meet a black man, whom I ask to tell me about Deep Ellum.

  “Deep Ellum? That’s the crime capital of Dallas!”

  These two people, the white and the black, live on different planets. I go to Deep Ellum. What do I see?

  “This is a gentrified area,” a white lady tells me. “If you go south from here you’ll hit a very bad neighborhood. Don’t go there.”

  Who lives there?

  “Blacks and Spanish.”

  The gangs are over there?

  “Yes.”

  Gentrified. Gentrification. To the lady here, a white lady, “gentrified” is good. To the cabbie in Washington, DC, a black man, gentrification is bad.

  Gentrification, to put it mildly, means getting poor residents out and putting in rich residents in their stead. In other words: getting the blacks and Spanish out, putting whites in. Real estate people like to do this. They buy out (usually for a low price) or evict poor people living in low-rent neighborhoods, then renovate the properties and rent them out or sell them for high sums. That’s how they make their millions.

  The new residents, whites, are often self-described liberals or progressive liberals who tell everybody listening that they dedicate their lives to helping the poor blacks and Spanish of America. In reality, they are the very ones who drive the blacks and the Spanish into homelessness. To blind you, and themselves, to this reality, they frequent a local bar where a black guy plays the blues, and they feel really, really good and very, very liberal.

  It is good that Captiva is not listening to any of this. Had she done so, I’m afraid, she would have rammed herself into one of the newly expensive homes and totally destroyed it.

  • • •

  Captiva and I move to Fort Worth, another city in the huge state of Texas. Fort Worth bills itself as a city of cowboys and culture, two things I’ve been missing for a long time. Will I find them here?

  In downtown Fort Worth my feet take me to the Sid Richardson Foundation, which houses an exhibition of cowboy paintings by Remington and Russell, kind of a cowboy and culture combo.

  Darlene, an attractive lady with tons of energy, welcomes me. “What can I do for you?” she asks.

  I would like to know, I tell her, which of the paintings I should try to steal in order to get rich fast? W
ithout blinking an eye she shows me her favorite painting in the exhibition.

  I like this lady. She is the sort of woman Oscar had in mind, the thought occurs to me.

  Who are you, Darlene, and what do you stand for?

  “I’m a Zionist.”

  Excuse me? What?

  “A Zionist.”

  Why are you a Zionist?

  “I grew up in Turkey, because my father worked in Turkey, and I traveled a lot in the Middle East. If a child misbehaved, the parents would say to him: ‘The Jews will come and eat you.’ Everything they blamed on Jews. That’s why I’m a Zionist.”

  Are you Jewish?

  “No. I’m agnostic.”

  Are your parents?

  “I grew up in a Catholic family.”

  I wanted cowboys; I get Turks.

  • • •

  Will I, at least, get a little culture in this Fort Worth? Across the street from Darlene’s, my eyes spot a small local theater, the Jubilee. Theater is culture, isn’t it? I cross the street.

  The Jubilee Theatre is a small black theater (147 seats) and this season it celebrates its thirty-fifth year of existence with the play Lady Day at Emerson’s Bar and Grill, which appeared on Broadway last year. The play is a solo performance about the great black American singer Eleanora Fagan, known as Lady Day and, most famously, as Billie Holiday.

  When I enter the house I notice that most of the people in the audience, about 80 percent of them, are white.

  As a play Lady Day lacks structure, and, drama-wise, it’s poorly written. But, still, it offers some great lines. For instance: “In this country, getting arrested is a colored tradition.” Likewise, when Billie talks of her days in Philadelphia: “Philly’s been rat’s ass for me. Shit. I used to tell everybody when I die I don’t care if I go to Heaven or Hell long’s it ain’t in Philly.”

  These lines are what you would call razor-sharp. But as performed here, even taking into account that this performance is a preview, the lines get lost long before they leave the stage. And despite the fact that the script deals with the awful treatment of blacks at the hands of whites, not one iota of pain registers here.

  Who directed this piece? I wonder. A white lady did. And it shows. None of the blacks’ pain registers on the stage, because it could not. You’d need a black director, one who can understand this unique pain, to extract it from the actor.

  When the show is over, a black guy affiliated with the production points to the audience and says to me: “These white people will tell their friends tomorrow that they saw a black show in a black theater last night. That’s why they come here. It makes them feel ‘progressive.’ It’s all fake.”

  I give up on culture and go to see a rodeo. Rodeo, at least here in Fort Worth, is very much like baseball – a fun place where people sing, drink and eat. Moments after I enter, hundreds of people stand as one and sing:

  And I’m proud to be an American

  Where at least I know I’m free.…

  I love this land

  God bless the USA.

  The “Star Spangled Banner” follows, with its immortal words: “O say does that star-spangled banner yet wave / O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave.”

  The rodeo itself, at least as performed here, is pretty boring. God bless the USA.

  • • •

  Next morning, Captiva says, Let’s go! We go. Direction: the good people.

  On the road, like on many other roads in this big country, there are pawn shops all over. One after the other. To have all these pawn shops you need many poor people.

  Sad. Is this the powerful America? Yeah.

  Even Captiva doesn’t feel good seeing these, and she picks up speed until we reach Fredericksburg. Fredericksburg? Sounds German. We stop to take a look. Gotta find the fifty million!

  Fredericksburg is one of those cities founded by Germans and to this day it celebrates German, whatever that is. There are stores here that have distinct German names, but when I try to speak German with some people, they think that I’m speaking Japanese. They don’t even know what German sounds like.

  Not far from me is a guy standing next to his Harley-Davidson, a Harley man. He could be one of the Harleys who participated at Greg’s father’s funeral procession; you never know. I ask Mr. Harley for the best restaurant in town. I want to have some good German food! “Ashander,” he says. Ashander? Yeah. Actually, he’s not so sure how to pronounce the name. “It’s in German,” he explains to me.

  I try to find the address of Ashander but it doesn’t exist. Mr. Harley says he just ate there. We check together, Google and Shmoogle, and discover that the name of the restaurant is actually Ausländer (“foreigner” in German).

  To Ausländer I go. Upon entering, I see three men dressed in Wehrmacht (German military) uniforms from the Nazi era, drinking beer with much pleasure. Am I seeing what I’m seeing? Pinch me, bitte. Nobody does, and so I go to meet the soldiers in person.

  Lance, whose Wehrmacht uniform fits him extraordinarily well, speaks perfect German, and he is quite surprised that I know what his uniform represents, since everybody else in town thinks that it is of the US military. While we are talking about the subject he tells me that neither he nor his friends are Nazi soldiers. They are, he explains to me, actors whose job it is to “reenact” some of the Wehrmacht’s activities during the war.

  Yes, he knows German, but only because he studied the language. As for his ancestors, they were English.

  Lance loves politics. He believes, he tells me, that climate change is a process that’s thousands of years in the making; he’s pro-life and pro-Israel. “Palestinians,” he tells me, are a work of fiction. Listening to him talk you’d think that he was a right-wing Jew, not a twenty-five-year-old man with a perfectly tailored Nazi uniform.

  I order some food. What can I tell you? The food here is nothing to brag about. I eat little. This ain’t really “German” food, even though it looks like it.

  And that’s Fredericksburg, a cemetery of the German culture – a culture dead and buried.

  Perhaps it’s time I get in touch with a culture that’s not melted, just to see the difference.

  I consult with Captiva and she agrees to drive me to Laredo, a border city to Mexico. When we arrive I leave Captiva at my new hotel, La Posada Hotel in Laredo, and start toward Mexico on foot.

  • • •

  “After you cross the border you can walk only in the first five blocks but no further,” Mexican Americans tell me. “It’s dangerous there. Shootings, robberies. Drugs. Murders. Drug cartels.” I listen and I keep moving toward Mexico, approaching the bridge that separates the two countries.

  Crossing into Mexico requires some investment on my part, as might be expected. The Mexican government – or the US government, I’m not sure which – charges me seventy-five cents to cross the border. I pay the whole sum in cash and cross into the Latin world, or whatever this new world is.

  The first sight that catches my attention in this border city, Nuevo Laredo, is the Mexican soldiers – or are they the police? – who either stand around or patrol this entry point with an impressive array of machine guns. I snap a picture of these beauties, and one of them, with a big gun, immediately crosses the street toward me, demanding that no pictures be taken in this obviously top-secret location.

  Abruptly, I get a call from my belly. “Gimme food,” it says.

  Okay, I’ll try.

  Back in the States I do everything humanly possible to avoid Mexican food. My personal experiences with Mexican food, long and painful ones, always ended badly. But I am in Mexico now. Maybe, just maybe, in Mexico they have different Mexican food than the Mexican food in the USA.

  I walk in search of food. The first five blocks, where it’s “safe,” are guarded by armed Mexican security personnel. But after the fifth block I don’t see them anymore. I keep walking, another twenty blocks or so, just to see how many times I’ll be killed, drugged, robbed and taken
hostage by the famed Mexican drug cartels.

  Before any of them has the chance to shoot me, I try some local food from a street vendor. It costs less than one US dollar, but is divinely delicious. I don’t know what it is, was, but this is the best return I’ve ever made on one buck.

  I keep walking, block after block, in search of that elusive perfect restaurant. These streets remind me of eastern European and Middle Eastern countries. Everybody walking around here, all Mexicans, behave as if they were members of one family, one big family. I look at them and I can tell that each of them shares something with the other, something that’s bigger than themselves.

  And it hits me: a tribe.

  These Mexicans share a culture. When they communicate with each other, their communication is not made only of words but of other elements, such as gestures and body language. They understand each other in ways I never will. There are layers to their communication that are under the surface, known only to them.

  They are a tribe, not a “diverse” society. Mexico resembles a barrel of old wine, its people savoring the taste of time. America, as I see it now that I am outside of it, is a melting pot of sour grapes mixed with pizza and asphalt.

  American society is a man-made society, like the ponds and lakes of Qatar. Somewhere deep inside, Americans must know this. Maybe, a thought comes to me, the real reason why so many Americans refuse to discuss politics and religion is because they are afraid that the artificial glue that binds them together will dissolve the moment they start talking and reveal what they really think.

  Who are they? Not one society, but many – many competing societies, each one afraid of the other.

  I keep walking. Walking, walking and walking. So far, nobody has even thought of robbing me. What’s wrong with these Mexicans?

  I finally settle on a restaurant, whatever its name, and order food that I can’t pronounce.