Even Captiva is laughing. She should be crying.
Later in the evening I go to a local Indian restaurant and order authentic Indian food: fried trout and coleslaw. I can’t believe that they call this “Indian” food.
When I give the waitress my credit card she tells me that she is not allowed to take it from me. Why? Waitresses in this area have been robbed on their way from the table to the cashier, and the restaurant’s owner has had enough of it.
Welcome to Indian culture, pure Native Americanism.
At night, in pitch darkness, I hear loud sounds coming from a security system across the road from my hotel room: “Burglary! Burglary! Burglary!” But nobody is paying attention; they are probably used to it. It must be part and parcel of the Chosen People’s way of life.
• • •
How can it be that in our day and time, blood quantum and other forms of Indian racism are accepted by Americans, people who view themselves as anti-racist?
Perhaps because the real culprits are not the Indians. Who made it possible to have dirty Indian ghettos, populated by the ignorant and the drunk, with glitzy casinos in their midst? The nice non-Indian American elite.
Not being able to face the cruel murder of countless Indians committed by them, or their ancestors, they allowed those still alive to settle here and there, as if compassion had suddenly filled their hearts. It doesn’t bother the privileged whites that the reservations, and all other forms of sovereign appearances, are nothing but hotbeds of ignorance and crime as long as they, the non-Indians, look good and cool.
But perhaps there is something deeper here than first meets the eye.
The truth is that America is not the only country or culture on the planet that was founded on the fresh blood of those who came before. Every country, every nation, every culture was founded by butchers. Sorry, that’s life. Western people who today fly high the flag of human rights are the very children and grandchildren of yesterday’s rapists and murderers. I know. Most of my family was murdered by them in cold blood long before I was born.
In truth, murderers don’t change their nature, and the shameless butcheries of yesterday did not stop yesterday. At any moment when the Western human-rightists feel threatened by another culture, they will annihilate the “offending” culture with the most sophisticated of weaponry without blinking an eye.
This is the world, whether we like it or not.
This does not mean that you or I will soon turn into murderers or victims, but our respective societies will. And every society is the same: north, south, east and west.
Yet only America, an extremely powerful country, feels bad about its history of conquering this land. Why?
As far as I can tell, there is only one logical answer to it: Americanism is a culture of the fearful. American culture, a social experiment in creating a culture based on an idea, instills fear in its citizenry. To keep America as one entity, even though its people are glued to each other by artificial means, America’s leaders force the citizenry to be “nice” to each other and be “sorry” if they were not nice in the past. Nancy and Bruce, like a zillion other Americans, feel bad for what “we” have done to the great, lovely, highly spiritual, brilliantly charming Indians of yesterday and today.
Captiva, born and raised in the USA, is totally hurt when she hears this, and she wants to drive out of here fast. Somewhere along the path of our white flight I see an auto body shop, and in honor of Captiva’s curiosity we stop in.
• • •
The city we are in at the moment is Shelby, North Carolina. In the middle of the shop is an antique-looking red Chevrolet pickup truck. The engine is from 2012, the body is from 1965 and the parts assembled to rebuild it are for the most part new. Price tag: $60,000.
There are three people working on the pickup at the moment, and all seem pretty happy. What’s special about Shelby? I ask them.
Jason, the owner of the shop, answers. Shelby, he says, has the “best barbeque in America.”
What’s special about North Carolina?
“You can be on the beach, and then you can be in the mountains in about five hours.”
And what’s special about the people here?
“Nice people. The South is a good place to be.”
Do you have rednecks in this state?
“Oh, yes, sir!”
What’s a redneck?
“Beer drinkin’, deer huntin’, nice car lovin’,” replies one of the workers. “That’s about it, really.”
Jason is a redneck, he says, but he doesn’t drink because of “my morals. I’m a Christian,” he says.
What do you think of the State of Israel?
“We need to support Israel.”
I ask Wayne, one of the workers, if he agrees.
“They got to cure their problems themselves,” he says. “We can’t be no police for them, first of all. That’s what I feel about the United States. But, on the other hand, a Jew is a Jew and a Christian is a Christian. We can’t get those two things mixed up, in my opinion. But I do believe it’s God’s Holy Land.”
We talk some more and they explain to me what they think of the big picture: all three believe that the United States should support Israel, and all three believe that the Jews murdered Jesus Christ.
There’s one Jew, though, that the three of them like. He is a German Jew, half German, half Jewish, and he’s good. Why is he good? Because he believes in Christ. Jews who believe in Christ are the exception, and these people get along with them just fine.
To Captiva, this body shop feels like a hospital, and she has had enough. She wishes a speedy recovery to the red pickup and we drive on to Charlotte, North Carolina’s largest city.
Before we reach Charlotte, I get a call from Enterprise. What’s the problem? They want me to drop Captiva off at the nearest Enterprise branch. “This car was sold. We need it off the road.”
They are jealous bastards. They don’t like it that Captiva and I are so close. Captiva is crying, I can tell, but we have no choice.
• • •
We reach Charlotte and we separate. So quickly! I feel like an Indian, thrown out of my abode, divorced from my dearest American mate.
To compensate me, the Enterprise people say that I can take a pickup truck for the same price. Captiva is watching, I can see, and so I say no. I’ll take a van, a minivan, in memory of my beloved mini SUV.
We say goodbye and hope we’ll soon reconnect again.
• • •
A survey published today by the Pew Research Center asserts that 89 percent of Americans believe in God, a drop from the Pew’s last survey of seven years ago. The survey, based on responses by thirty-five thousand Americans, also claims that there are significantly more nonreligious people among the Democrats than among Republicans and that the younger generation tends to be less religious than the older generation. The survey is not totally conclusive, as in some areas it points to stronger faith in large segments of American society.
All in all, religiously speaking, America seems to be closer to Iran than to Sweden.
That said, based on what I’ve seen while traveling the country, surveys are limited in scope.
As already mentioned in these pages, the people of this land are afraid to speak up when first approached, and this applies even to homeless people, such as in the case of Mad Dog in Hawaii. As strange as it may sound, Americans would sooner drop missiles on a foreign country than tell you who they voted for in the last election.
I do hope that my DNA test will confirm that I’m a liberal. Why? Liberals live longer. How do I know? I read it.
The New York Times, in a piece written by Paul Krugman: “Life expectancy is high and rising in the Northeast and California, where social benefits are highest and traditional values weakest. Meanwhile, low and stagnant or declining life expectancy is concentrated in the Bible Belt.”
In simpler words: liberals will live forever, and conservatives will be dead in an hour.<
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My new car, a Dodge Grand Caravan, is my biggest car yet. It reminds me of the Dodge in Maryland. Naturally, we are strangers to one another, and in order to make our acquaintance I drive without stopping. Just drive. Direction: more south. Happy, SoulO?
I drive, drive, drive and drive. And when I get hungry, I stop next to a Waffle House in Rock Hill, South Carolina. Yes, I’ve just entered another state.
Gate Twenty-Six
People who talk to the Lord eat muffins
I’M IN WAFFLE HOUSE AND I MEET SOME LOVELY WAITRESSES WHO SPEAK in a wonderful accent, real Southern. I ask them how much they make per hour. I know that the federal minimum wage is $7.25, and that in some states it’s higher, up to fifteen dollars an hour.
How much is it here?
Three dollars an hour, they tell me. How come?
Their bosses are aware of the $7.25 minimum, but they claim that with tips the wait staff will make $7.25.
Unbelievable.
Is that legal? I ask around, and am told that it is. Actually, it’s legal to give waiters a base salary of $2.13 an hour because somebody figured that with tips they will get the minimum.
Not one waitress at the Waffle House, by the way, is complaining. They work six and sometimes seven days a week to make ends meet. But they love their job because they like to work with people. “Two-bedroom apartment here costs $450; this is not New York,” one of them says to me.
I give them a big tip and drive on, moving further south, and I reach Charleston. I came here for a reason.
• • •
Charleston is the city where, last summer, nine blacks were shot to death in the church by Dylann Roof, the guy whose photo with a Confederate flag has caused a chain reaction that’s being felt to this day. I started my journey with this story, but only now I feel that I can “handle” it.
The name of the church is Emanuel AME Church. What’s AME? African Methodist Episcopal. What’s that? I have no clue. I park the Caravan and go to the church.
It has been months since the murder took place here, but when you pass by the church it seems as if it had happened only yesterday. There are flowers on the metal gate in front of the church, quite a big church, plus photo displays of black people with quotes inscribed on their bodies. “Across cultures, darker people suffer most. Why?” reads one of the inscriptions. Another reads: “To be a Negro in this country and to be relatively conscious is to be in a rage almost all the time. –James Baldwin.”
Services in this church are held on Sunday and there is a Bible study on Wednesday, but today, Tuesday, nothing’s going on. The office is open and I talk to one of the people working here, Maxine. The church has “about 550 members,” she says.
Did membership increase after the murders?
Not really. “Just in small numbers,” she says. But “people come to the service on Sunday; they want to be in the building, they want to be in the church. Since the incident we have anywhere between seven to eight hundred people attending the service.”
Is this a black-only church?
“We don’t have white members at this time.”
I’ve heard it before, the fact that whites are not eligible for membership in this church – yet it still rings strange in my ears. “But on Sundays,” she adds, “we do have white people who come.”
How many whites come on Sundays?
“Two hundred or more. But before the murder we had no whites.”
A similar thing, she tells me, happens in the Bible study, where presently about one hundred people attend. Almost all of them are white. At the time of the shooting, in June, only twelve people had showed up for Bible study.
Do you get more donations now?
“We have gotten a number of donations from all over the world.”
Probably double or triple what you used to get…
“It’s quite handsome.”
Ten times more…?
“I’m not at liberty to say.”
What she is at liberty to say is this: “The sympathy that came as a result of the murders did lead to the [Confederate] flag coming down in many places.”
• • •
Outside the church I meet a tall black man who wears a yellow shirt and a big cross. His name is Johnny and he tells me that the murders “brought whites and blacks together and made Charleston known all over the world.”
Do you have white friends?
“A lot of them!”
Johnny is not part of any denomination, he says, but “my teacher is Minister Louis Farrakhan,” the leader of the Nation of Islam. Denomination or not, Johnny is a Muslim.
Why are you wearing a cross?
“This is not a cross, this is an ankh, an old Egyptian symbol that represents life!”
But, he says, he also attends services in a church down the road, and I ask why.
“Because we draw no distinction. They are our family!”
That’s an interesting concept. I wonder how far this “no distinction” stretches, especially since Minister Louis Farrakhan is a known anti-Semite, a man who has repeatedly spoken out against Jews and Judaism. And so I ask Johnny how he feels about Jews.
“As a group?”
Yes.
“Not all of them are bad.”
What do you think about how the Jews treat Palestinians?
“This is stuff that’s going on for centuries!”
Israel was founded in 1948, but I don’t mention it.
He knows Jews and thinks they are good people. Some are rich, he says, “like in our government. You got Jews in the United States government. Lot of them!”
They run the government?
“Yeah!”
Do they run President Obama?
“Oh yeah! He can’t make decisions without them. He is like a puppet.”
If President Barack Obama heard you saying that –
“He know! That’s why he’s all gray-headed now!”
Because of the Jews?
“Yeah. They run this country. For their own gratification. That’s life.”
So good to be a Jew!
Jews or no, Charleston is one of America’s nicest cities. Here you have big white buildings with grandiose columns, lovely houses, small streets, tons of fine stores and, according to the US Department of the Interior, Charleston is also home to Kahal Kadosh Beth Elohim synagogue, “the country’s second oldest synagogue and the oldest in continuous use. The American Reform Judaism movement originated at this site in 1824.”
Interesting.
I go to see this temple. The thing I like the most about it is the sign outside: “Thou Shalt Not Park Here.” So biblical. I love it!
I don’t know why, but every time I pass by an old Jewish building I start getting hungry. Where can I find good food in Charleston? Charleston, I hear, is damn proud of its four-block City Market, a tourist destination and a “must-see” for every visitor.
I go to the market, hoping that it will offer the best food available in the world. Well, here I can buy handmade baskets, shirts, necklaces, jewelry and more handmade baskets. I don’t want baskets, I want food, and the food choices here are quite limited.
Can you tell me, I ask a black guy who sells three million types of home-prepared oils, where a fat man like me should eat?
“The best food in Charleston,” he says, “is at Hyman’s. When I feel like treating myself, I go there.”
I keep on walking, hoping to find Hyman’s once I’m out of the market, and when I reach the end of it I meet a lovely black lady, who tells me that she believes in Jesus. She also tells me that Jerusalem is next to Israel, that the Jews are the richest people in America, and that I should try the food at Hyman’s, which is owned by a rich Jew.
Hyman’s again. I go there.
Eli is the owner of this restaurant, and I get to meet him before I eat his food. He was born in this city, lived in Israel for a few years, even served in the Israeli army, and in truth he would like to still be living there.
He doesn’t because his wife, a Jewish lady from Sweden, wouldn’t move with him. “She wears the pants in our house,” he tells me.
I don’t want pants, I want food. Eli serves me.
This restaurant, just so you know, is a Southern restaurant. Fried this and fried that, delicious this and delicious that. Eli feeds me various fish dishes, each of them better than the one before. This guy is a magician, let me tell you. I don’t know how he does it, but he does. Here I eat the best Southern food in the United States. Thank God that he has a bossy wife who wouldn’t let him move out of here.
Food finished, I have the urge to find some non-Jews in this city.
• • •
I step into the house of the Trinity Worldwide Outreach Ministries. Don’t ask me what it is; I like the name, and that’s enough for me. I meet Minister John.
Minister John loves everybody, he tells me, and so does the Lord. Good to know. Minister John also tells me that “the Jews own everything in New York.”
How about Charleston?
“Also in Charleston!”
• • •
It is Wednesday and I go to the Emanuel church’s Bible study, where I will have the pleasure of meeting one hundred mostly white people who, since the murder, have been attending the Wednesday Bible study.
In reality, there are about twenty people here, half white and half black, plus a policeman and a BBC reporter on assignment to witness the whites who out of sympathy come to study the Bible here. Like many things in America, this church’s PR is one thing but its reality is another.
In a row behind me there’s a Jew from Massachusetts. He didn’t come to study the Bible, he came to “sympathize.” The BBC reporter, who finds his very being here newsworthy, immediately runs to him and asks for an interview.
Today’s study, in case you’re interested, is about prayer and fasting. Next to the speaker, a female pastor, is a big cross with the nine names of those murdered here nailed on it. Jesus was nailed on a cross, and so are they. Next to the cross is an American flag with this line above it: “One flag, state, nation.”
The Lies They Tell Page 32