“But you just put a lot of money into this plant,” I replied. “Hell, it used to stink up the whole town. Now you can't smell it. Maybe that EPA does some good after all.”
“You think so?” asked Jim. “You're right that we had to clean up our processes here, and we did put some money into the place. But the main thing we did was move most of the work on the fresh hides to Mexico. That cut 23 jobs here, jobs now held by Mexicans. I guess you can't make Mexico stink any worse than it already does.”
“And the EPA still isn't done with us,” he added. “They've got another investigation going now, which will cost us tens of thousands in legal fees even if that's all it does. Seems they think we're still doing something to the river.”
“River looks clean to me,” I replied.
“It is clean. It's cleaner than it's ever been, at least since industry, and jobs, first came to this valley. But that doesn't count to bureaucrats in Washington. They've told us we might have to build a full water treatment plant, which would cost us millions. If they rule that way, it'll be the end of the company here. It would take us 50 years to pay off that debt. There's not that much money in leather any more, not up against the foreign competition.”
I thanked Jim for his time and drove back to the old place. My mind was no easier. Next day I'd pull my last ace out of my sleeve and go see my cousin, who had a car restoration place down near Pittsfield. I knew he was doing well, restoring old cars and selling them to the Summer People.
“Sure,” Ed said, when I stopped in on him, “business is good and I need a couple folk. I know you'd do good work. But I can't offer you or anyone else around here a job. EEOC won't let me.”
“EEOC?” I'd heard the initials, but didn't know much more about it.
“The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. They come around and tell you how many blacks, Hispanics, women, whatever you have to hire. Of course, all my employees are white, because everybody up here is white. I guess Maine winters are kinda hard on black folk and those from south of the border. Anyway, that doesn't count with them. They've issued an order that the next six people I hire must be blacks. The effect, of course, is that I can't hire anyone, not even you.”
This was the nuttiest thing I'd heard yet. “You must be kidding,” I replied. “How can they make you hire blacks where there aren't any?”
“I don't know,” Ed said. “But I can't fight the EEOC in court. I'm a small business and can't afford it. I just can't expand, is what it comes down to. And you know how badly we need jobs up here.”
I did, from growing personal experience. “But someone must care that this is completely absurd,” I said. “There has got to be a limit somewhere to what Washington can do to us.”
“If there is, I don't know where,” Ed replied, obviously a beaten man. “You and I, and most folk up here, are members of the middle class. That means the government doesn't do anything for us, it only does things to us. If you know a way to change that, I'd like to hear it. But these days, unless you're some kind of “minority,” you don't have any rights. Frankly, it's just not our country any more.”
That summed it up pretty well. Somewhere along the line, in the last 30 years or so, somebody had taken our country away from us.
We remembered what our country was like. It was a safe, decent, prosperous place where normal, middle class people could live good lives.
And it was gone.
I was beginning to think that what I wanted to do was help take our country back. How I could do that, and how I could earn a living, were both puzzles. But where there's a will, God often opens a way.
Chapter Five
About a week later I got a letter. It was from my old company Gunnery Sergeant, a black fellow and a good Marine. He was also a husband and father—rare among black men by the 21st century—and a Christian. He wrote to ask for my help.
Gunny Matthews had gotten out about a year before I did. He had done his twenty years and had a pension, and felt it was time to move on. He knew that the catastrophe that had overwhelmed many urban black communities in America by the 1970s—crime, drugs, noise, and dirt—was not due to white racism. It was due to bad behavior by blacks, toward other blacks as well as toward everyone else. He wanted to try to do something about it.
It was a measure of America's decay that one of the most important issues facing the country—race—simply couldn't be talked about. Not honestly, anyway. Oh, there was lots of talk about “racism” and how evil it was and how whites were to blame for everybody else’s problems. But we all knew it was bull.
The fact was that America's blacks had crapped in their own mess kit. They had been given their “civil rights,” and had promptly shown they could not, or would not, bear the responsibilities that went with them.
Freedom is not doing whatever you want. Freedom is substituting self discipline for discipline imposed by somebody else. But nobody told America's blacks that, so they just went out and did whatever felt good at the moment. The result was a black rate of violent crime twelve times the white rate. Most of the victims of black crime were also black.
Of course, not all blacks were into instant gratification and the drug-using, drug-dealing, mugging, car-jacking, fornicating, and whoring that it brought. But tribal loyalty was strong enough that most of those who lived decent lives wouldn't condemn those who didn't. The rest of America saw that in every city with a black government, which promptly descended into utter disorder and corruption. Detroit turned into 6th century Rome.
As early as the 1970s, the average white American spelled black c-r-i-m-e. That wasn't prejudice, it was statistics. Anywhere near a city, if you were the victim of a random crime, the criminal was almost certain to be black. The only exception was if you were in a Hispanic neighborhood; the Hispanics were rapidly going the same instant gratification route the blacks had taken, with similar results.
Obviously, what was needed was a major crackdown. If a people cannot govern itself, then it must be governed by others. But the white Establishment hewed to the line that said blacks were victims, so their crimes could not be held against them. It was pure Orwellian Newspeak: criminals became victims, and the victims (at least the white victims) were the criminals because they were “racists.” So nothing was done, and blacks were emboldened to believe they could get away with anything.
The result, in time, was a full scale race war, which was in turn part of America's second civil war. The blacks’ so-called “leaders,” most of whom derived fat incomes from their impoverished supporters, never seemed to care that when one tenth of the population goads the other nine-tenths into a war, it loses.
So Gunny Matthews had taken on quite a job. His letter told me how he'd tried to go about it.
The Gunny had grown up in Roxbury, near Boston, so that's where he retired, “to help the people he knew best,” as he put it. There's always advantage in fighting where you know the ground. A number of his friends and relatives lived in public housing, so he picked that as his Schwerpunkt, his focus of efforts. In most black communities, that was the worst place you could be. Drug dealers, drug users, prostitutes, the whole ugly smear ran the place, with normal people living in terror.
I'd seen in my job hunt the way government stuck its nose in where it wasn't wanted, messing up people's lives in the process. Gunny Matthews saw the other side of the coin, how government failed to do the things it was supposed to do. If there was one duty any government had, it was to protect the lives and property of ordinary, law-abiding people, regardless of their color. In the United States in the 21st century, it no longer did that.
The Gunny saw the problem in terms of counter-guerilla warfare. The scum were the guerrillas, and the key to defeating them was organizing the locals so they could stand up to the scum. He saw an opening, a “soft spot” as we called it in military tactics, in the fact that one public housing development had been given over to the tenants to manage. They formed a tenants association, and the Gunny helped t
hem draw up rules for tenant behavior, a patrol system that tracked and reported violators, and liaison with the police. As soon as they identified a drug dealer or other scumbag, they got witnesses, brought the cops in and threw the trash out, permanently. Very quickly the place turned around. For the first time in years, the nights were not punctured with gun shots, there were no hypodermic needles in the halls and kids could play safely outside.
Then the feds came in, in the form of the Legal Services Corporation. Legal Services used tax money to pay lawyers to defend “the poor” in court. Only they had no interest in the honest poor. They were always on the side of the scum. They quickly went to court and stopped the evictions, on the grounds that the rights of the drug dealers and their molls were being violated. Just as quickly, the drug dealing, mugging and shooting started up again, and Gunny Matthews and his tenants association were back where they started.
He asked me to come down and give them some help. I knew how to fight enemy infantrymen, not lawyers and judges. But I also knew I couldn't ignore the Gunny's plea. If I was going to do something to take our country back, this was a place to start. So one snowy February day I loaded up the truck and headed to Boston. On the way, I did some thinking.
This wasn't law, I realized, this was war. The Legal Services lawyers, the liberal judges who gave them the rulings they wanted, their buddies in the ACLU, they were just enemy units of different types. More, they were the enemy's “critical vulnerability.” The scum depended on them; no lawyers, no scum (a point we have enshrined in Victorian law, where you must represent yourself in court). The tenants had already shown they could kick out the trash, if we could get the lawyers off their backs. So that had to be our objective.
The Gunny had set up a meeting with the tenants association for the night I arrived. They were a pretty down lot when it started. One mother of three kids, the association's leader, tried not to cry when she explained how they thought they'd made a new start, then had it all taken away from them, thanks to Legal Services. They didn't know what they could do, now. If I could help, they'd be grateful. But it's clear they weren't expecting much from a white boy from Maine.
“Okay,” I said, “here's where we start. You're in a war. You know that. You've got the bullet holes in your walls and doors to prove it. What we have to do is take the war to the enemy.”
“Amen, brother,” was the answer. “Are we gonna start shootin' those lawyers?” one voice asked.
“That's tempting,” I replied. “But you know that while they won't put the drug dealers in jail, the law will come after honest citizens in a heartbeat. We've got to fight, but we've got to fight smart.”
I laid out a plan. The starting point was one of Colonel John Boyd's maxims. Boyd was the greatest American military theorist of the 20th century. He said war is fought at three levels: moral, mental, and physical. The moral level is the most powerful, the physical the least (The old American military, in its love for hi-tech, could never understand that, which is why it kept getting beaten by ragheads all around the world.). We would focus our war at the moral level, and use the physical only as it had moral impact.
We'd start with the churches. Most of the black folk who were on the receiving end of black crime were Christians. We'd mobilize the Church Ladies–a Panzer division in this kind of fighting. We'd get them and the black ministers to go to white churches all over Boston and invite their congregations to visit the housing project. We'd let them see what those Legal Services lawyers and their friends among the judges and politicians were protecting. We'd take them through the drug markets, past the prostitutes, over the dazed, crazed addicts lying in the hallways. Then we'd ask them one question: Would they tolerate these people living in their neighborhoods? On the way out, we'd hand them a list of the names of their elected representatives with phone numbers.
The key judge, the one who always ruled in favor of the scumbags, was a federal magistrate, Judge Holland P. Frylass. We couldn't touch him through the ballot box. But I thought there was another way. He was keen on making the folks in the projects live among the drug dealers and muggers and carjackers, but I suspected he would prefer not to do so himself. So we'd hold a raffle. We'd get black kids selling raffle tickets all over Boston. The proceeds would go to purchase the house next door to Judge Frylass's home in that nice section of Cambridge. We'd move in some drug dealers, whores, and gang members and see how he liked a taste of his own medicine.
Then a young mother, carrying one baby with two more grabbing at her coattails, spoke up. “That's all fine, I guess,” she said. “But I got a drug dealer workin' right outside my door. Somebody come after him, those bullets will shoot right through my walls and my babies and me. What you gonna do about him?”
“Swarm him,” I answered. The physical level of war also had its role to play.
“What you mean, swarm him?,” she asked.
“Wherever he goes, or stops, we surround him. Twenty, thirty, fifty of us. We don't touch him. We're just there. We're always there. We're on every side of him. How much business do you think he's going to do?”
“And just what do we do when he starts hittin' out?,” asked another woman in the crowd.
“Someone will always have a cell phone. He makes a move, we get it on camera. Then the cops can come in,” I replied.
But they knew the ground better than I did. “Hon', we appreciate you comin' all the way down here,” began one matron. “I think you've got some ideas we maybe can use. But this sure ain't no boxin’ match. When these boys hit out, it's with guns. Some of us gonna be dead if we try swarmin' him like you want.”
Now, I knew how to use a weapon, and I guessed I could shoot better than the average drug dealer. But I also knew I'd be the one in jail, not the drug dealer, if I got in a fire fight. And for a young, white, middle class male, jail in the 21st century meant homosexual gang rape. It was funny that the same bleeding-heart lefties who opposed the death penalty never made a peep about a punishment that would have appalled Vlad the Impaler. But I wasn't anxious to have the joke be on me.
Gunny Matthews came to my rescue. “You folks know I've got a good relationship with the cops. You let me work on that one. I'll get us some protection, protection that can shoot back. My question to you folks is, are you willing to do what the man says? We can talk here all night. But we've got to act, not just keep talking. Or give up.”
As a German general, Hans von Seeckt used to say, das Wesentliche ist die Tat. Always, in war, that's what it comes down to. The important thing is the deed.
The Panzers were ready for battle. One of the Church Ladies got up. She was dressed perfectly for a shopping trip to Filene's in 1955: floral print dress, pillbox hat, white gloves. “I can speak for my church,” said Mrs. Cook. “They sent me here as our representative. I don't know whether it will work or not. But the Lord blesses those who try. He may bless us with success, and he will still bless us if we fail. I say we do it.” She turned to the young mother with the drug dealer camped outside her door. “Honey, I'm an old lady. If that bad man outside your apartment shoots me, I'm ready to go to Heaven. I'll swarm him, as the man here says, even if I have to do it all by myself.”
“You don't have to, Melba.” Her neighbor in the project was on her feet, in similar uniform, which events came to show was Urban Combat cammies. “I'll be there too. I've got a heavy purse and a strong umbrella, and I know how to use both of them. We'll swarm this no-account piece of nigger trash all the way back to Alabama.”
With that the congregation were on their feet, Amening and Halleluliaing. I could understand now why, back in the 1950’s, so many Americans were enraged by the South's segregation laws. It was the Mrs. Cooks they'd made sit in the back of the bus. If young blacks had tried to be like Mrs. Cook, integration might have worked.
What a pity so many chose Malcolm X and Snoop Dogg as their heroes instead.
Chapter Six
I gave the Gunny a lift home after the revival meeting. I w
as interested in how he thought we could get the police to help. I guessed the cops themselves would want to, but they worked for the politicians, who would probably want them to protect the scum from the Church ladies.
His answer proved to be important beyond our fight to save one housing project. “A number of cops around here are former Marines. We've got a network set up among us,” he explained to me. “We're getting together tomorrow night. Can you come?”
“Of course I'll come. You think I'm some staff puke who comes up with a plan, then sends someone else off to execute it? I've done some thinking up in Maine. The real war is the war for our culture. This is a battle in that war. I'm in,” I replied. “Do you know a cheap place I can put up for the duration?”
“Sure, stay with us. My wife and I would be honored to have my old CO as a guest,” he said.
I was happy to accept.
The meeting with the cops was at the Tune Tavern, in Boston's South End, the Irish ghetto. Nobody in Southie was likely to remember anything he overheard in a discussion among cops.
About twenty guys showed up, mostly city cops, with a few state troopers and even one transit cop thrown in. All were former Marines. I hadn't known any of them in the Corps, but they knew who I was and why I was there and they had no problem with that.
Victoria: A Novel of 4th Generation War Page 3