Them

by Jon Ronson

  “What does scare you?” I asked her.

  “Nothing,” said Violet. “Not even the death threats. We’ve had phone calls, describing our house, describing our animals, voices like out of The Exorcist. Alex definitely has stalkers.”

  “Sir!” bellowed Alex at the engineer. I could hear him through the window pane. “It’s starting to get ridiculous. My nationally syndicated radio show has gone down. Again! You people have been cutting my lines, giggling and smiling. And your bosses deny you even exist…”

  “Sorry,” said the engineer.

  ♦

  Defeated by technology, or by covert censorship, we headed off to the local TV studio where Alex was scheduled to present a live TV talk show. We sat in the foyer while he prepared himself for his broadcast. There was a bank of monitor screens behind the reception desk, broadcasting all of Austin’s TV output.

  For a while I watched all the channels at once. Then I noticed a figure on one of the screens. He had a face I recognized from somewhere, long ago, a middle-aged man with long, greying hair and sharp blue eyes. I walked over to the screen and turned up the volume. He had an English accent. He seemed to be talking about lizards – specifically about how the leaders of the New World Order, the clique of international bankers, are genetically descended from giant lizards.

  And then, suddenly, I realized who it was. It was David Icke.

  “Alex!” I called. “What’s David Icke doing on television?”

  “Oh,” sighed Alex. “He’s big news.”

  “Really?”

  “You know him?”

  “Well,” I said, “he once announced on the Terry Wogan chat show on the BBC that he was the son of God.”

  “That figures,” said Alex, wearily.

  “He seems to be saying that the Bilderberg Group are twelve-foot lizards,” I said.

  “DAVID ICKE,” yelled Alex, suddenly, “is A TURD IN A PUNCHBOWL!”

  “What do you mean?”

  “He talks about the global elite, the Bilderberg Group, these power structures which are all real, all true. Meat and potatoes! Something you can bite into! And then at the end of this he says, ‘By the way, they’re all blood-drinking lizards.’”

  “Really?”

  “Al Gore needs blood to drink. So does Prince Philip. He’s discrediting the whole thing. You’ve got a nice fruit punch. Icke takes a great big dump right in the middle of it, and now nobody’s going to drink out of that punchbowl. That’s his job, and he’s doing his job well.”

  “Are you suggesting that David Icke is in league with the global elite,” I said, “employed to make the whole thing seem ridiculous?”

  “He’s either a smart opportunist con man,” said Alex, “or he’s totally insane, or he’s working for them directly.”

  ♦

  “Let’s take some calls.”

  “Hi. This is Marsha.”

  “Hi, Marsha. What’s your point?”

  “I just wanted to ask you a little about your background,” said Marsha. “Have you travelled a lot?”

  “Yes,” said Alex.

  “Where have you been?” asked Marsha.

  “Where have you been?” said Alex.

  “You haven’t answered my question,” said Marsha.

  “You’re an aggressive twit, ma’am!” yelled Alex.

  “Well, there’s no need to be rude.”

  “I don’t like snivelling passive-aggressive people like you!”

  “I just wanted to know your background.”

  “I’m taking action!” roared Alex. “I’ve rebuilt the church at Waco. I’ve exposed black helicopters. Lady, you don’t want to face the truth of what’s happening! I KNOW ALL YOUR LITTLE PSYCHOLOGICAL SICKNESSES, LADY! YOU DON’T COUNT! YOU ARE FURNITURE! WE’RE FACING THE ENEMY AT THE TOP OF THE PYRAMID! CAN’T YOU FEEL IT? IT’S EPIC! NOW IS THE TIME. NOW! WE’RE ENGAGING IN AN INFO WAR, SIX HOURS A DAY! GIANT SHORT-WAVE TRANSMITTER TOWERS WORLDWIDE BEAM MY VOICE! SO THANK YOU FOR CALLING, LADY.”

  I was getting a bit of a headache, so I slipped out of Alex’s TV studio for what I assumed to be the relative calm of the production booth. By now, Mike Hanson, Alex’s producer, was himself addressing Marsha on the phone.

  “WE’RE TRYING TO RUN A SHOW HERE!” screamed Mike, “WHAT YOU ARE YOU? SOME KIND OF HIGH AND MIGHTY…YOU KNOW WHAT? YOU DON’T KNOW YOUR ASS FROM A HOLE IN THE GROUND! FUCK YOU, TOO.”

  Mike slammed down the phone.

  ♦

  “That was a B minus,” said Alex, once the TV show was off the air. “I do A-plus shows all the time.”

  “You have a very powerful voice,” I said.

  “Yep,” said Alex.

  “So has Mike, your producer,” I said.

  Alex looked confused.

  “What do you mean?” he said.

  “Well,” I said, “when I left the studio I went into the production room and Mike was yelling at Marsha down the phone.”

  “Was he now?” said Alex. “Is that so?”

  ♦

  “WHAT ARE YOU TRYING TO DO?” screamed Alex at Mike.

  “UPSTAGE ME? OH, I KNOW WHAT YOU’RE UP TO! MAKE A BIG SHOW OF SHOUTING DOWN THE PHONE! STEAL THE LIMELIGHT! AND THEN JON WILL WRITE ALL ABOUT YOU!”

  “FUCK YOU!” yelled Mike, “YOU’RE PARANOID!”

  “FUCK YOU!” yelled Alex.

  “STOP IT! BOTH OF YOU!” screamed Max, the young and until now serene bespectacled vision mixer in the corner.

  Both men abruptly stopped yelling and turned to Max.

  “What’s wrong?” said Alex.

  “I’m just sick of you two shouting at each other all the time,” sobbed Max. “I’ve had enough.”

  Max grabbed his coat and ran out of the studio. Alex and Mike glanced quizzically at each other. They shrugged. “What was that all about?” said Alex.

  ♦

  In the summer I flew back to Montana to visit Rachel Weaver. The last time I had seen her – when we had gone shooting in her back garden with her now ex-boyfriend Josh – she had offered me an open invitation to visit what was left of the cabin.

  Ruby Creek was a two-hour drive from Rachel’s home in Montana. She did the driving. The bumper sticker on her 4 by 4 read: “HEY DUMB ASS! IT’S NOT GUNS! IT’S BAD PARENTING!” She put CDs into her car stereo. She played Fatboy Slim and the Jungle Brothers, and a song she said was one of her mother’s favourites, the Statler Brothers’ ‘Flowers On The Wall’.

  We stopped off for lunch. We sat at the counter. I asked her more about her family’s religious and political beliefs up in the cabin. She said it was hard to remember now. After her mother was killed they pretty much gave it all up.

  “Let me think,” she said. “We didn’t have pictures or stuffed animals because we believed that was a recreation of what the Creator had already made. We didn’t eat meat unless it had a split hoof and chewed its cud, like a cow or a deer. Marine life had to have fins and scales. No shark or eel. Um. Marrying your own race. Keep your race pure. Oh, I can’t really think. It was way deeper than that. I just can’t remember it.”

  Rachel paused.

  “Oh, yes. We held our Sabbath on Fridays.”

  “Like the Jews,” I said.

  “The Hebrews are not Jews,” said Rachel. “It’s all been twisted and rewritten.”

  I looked quizzically at her.

  “You should have seen some of the literature Mom showed us as kids,” she said. “It totally proves that the Hebrews were not Jews. I’m sorry if I’m offending you.”

  “And you definitely weren’t white supremacists?” I asked.

  She looked at me aghast.

  “No way! We had nothing against Jews. Mom wouldn’t have turned anyone out. Never! She had the biggest heart. We never felt the white race was supreme to all others. Plus, we were the safest people when it came to guns. That’s why I’ve got such a problem with Josh. Yeah, we carried our guns a lot. I can see why that would be intimidating if you didn’t know us, bu
t we’d never aim a gun at anyone.”

  I believed Rachel. Once the siege had begun – once they’d locked themselves into the cabin – the only shots that were fired came from the outside, from the FBI snipers.

  We paid up and got back into her jeep and Rachel played me some more songs: The Bloodhound Gang and Hot Chocolate – ‘You Sexy Thing’ – and Dusty Springfield’s ‘Son of a Preacher Man’.

  “Do you remember visiting Aryan Nations?” I asked her.

  “Yeah,” she said. “I remember the treasure hunts. We’d get together and find little pieces of paper that would lead us to clues. It was fun.”

  “You don’t remember any weirdness?” I asked.

  She narrowed her eyes. “I remember a cross lighting. Oh. And they tried to do a swastika one year.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “They put a big old swastika on top of a couple of 2 by 4s. They were going to burn it. But it was top heavy. So it fell over.”

  We drove through Bonners Ferry, a lovely little town on the banks of the Kootenai River, and then out into the country, past the Deep Creek Inn, the bar and restaurant where the Weavers used to go for special occasions, birthday meals and so on.

  The cabin wasn’t as far from civilization as I’d imagined. There was a golf course within three miles. We drove up a little mountain lane, the jeep bouncing precariously along the potholed roads. Rachel’s gonk, her little red and black stuffed toy, fell off the dashboard. The tree branches scraped the windscreen and the paintwork.

  “Oh, I should have bought pruners,” she winced, her hands clutched tightly on her zebra-print steering-wheel cover. The road narrowed even further.

  “We used to build tree forts around here,” she said. “We used to play war games.”

  I remembered the surveillance video the FBI had released to the media during the siege. The surveillance tapes were shot in the weeks before Sammy and Vicki were killed, grainy footage filmed from across the mountain, showing Rachel and Sammy and Sara running around with guns.

  We reached a small clearing.

  “OK!” she said. “This is it!”

  She parked up next to a giant rock that overlooked their driveway, the rock upon which Randy had fired Vicki’s .223 into the air, full clip, on hearing of his son’s death. She jumped out of the jeep and ran around the corner. I followed her. Then I stopped.

  Rachel was standing on a square of linoleum where her kitchen used to be. The walls and the roof had gone now. They collapsed in the snow in 1998. All that was left of the cabin was the floor, jutting out over the ridge to a panoramic view of the Kootenai river valley, thousands of feet below. Rachel stepped into where her living room once was.

  “Mom and Dad’s bedroom was above the kitchen,” she said. “Sam’s bedroom was right here.” Rachel indicated a space in the air.

  “The sink was over here on this side,” said Rachel. “We used to have a back porch right there. About right here was where the front door was.”

  An overturned cooker lay in the doorway. There was a book on the floor. Rachel picked it up.

  “Restoring Junk,” she read. She rested the book back on the floor. “Mom was good at that.”

  There were more books and magazines scattered around – The Borrowers, and an old copy of The Spotlight newspaper: “Everything you ever wanted to know about the men who control our world…”

  There were bottles of a ‘delicious whey-based drink’ called Yenka Nutri-Whey, a hanging basket, an old pair of Sam’s shoes.

  “Can you hear that?” said Rachel. I couldn’t hear anything. “Someone’s on their way up. Now we can run out onto the rock and see who it is!”

  Rachel bounded over to the giant rock that overlooked the driveway. She climbed on top of it and listened.

  “Nah,” she said. “It’s someone going up even higher. Yep. That’s what we used to do every time we heard a car. We’d all yell ‘Ooh! Somebody’s come to see us!’ Jeez. Something so simple can bring back all that excitement.”

  I rummaged through the debris scattered around the cabin floor and the surrounding land, finding remnants of life in the cabin before the siege. I picked things up – cardboard boxes containing some empty spice bottles her mother used to keep, Elisheba’s baby chair.

  “What are you doing?” said Rachel. “Its just a bunch of junk.” She laughed. “All the things that used to be important to us were junk to other people,” she said. “The books and stuff. Now its junk to me and important to you.”

  We wandered back to the jeep.

  “Funny to think that they called this place a mountain fortress,” I said.

  “Yeah,” said Rachel. “Our plywood house. They said it was a compound. That’s why they could sneak up within fifteen feet of us.”

  ♦

  We drove back to the Deep Creek Inn and ate dinner on the porch overlooking Ruby Creek. Just as we were finishing, a man wandered out of the inn. He was holding a guitar.

  “My name is Dallas Pike,” he said to Rachel. “I’m a musician. I moved up here about a year ago. What happened to your family is the reason why I moved to Idaho. I’ve been coming up here to that bridge every August, and I’ve been praying that I would finally get a chance to meet you or your sister or your dad. I have a feeling you might appreciate this song.”

  And, without warning, Dallas began to play.

  Blood stains in the snow, bloody ridge, Idaho

  Blood stains in the snow, bloody ridge, Idaho

  Some buffalo hunters and the FBI

  Killed this land before our eyes

  Blood stains in the snow, Vicki Weaver and Waco.

  I looked over at Rachel. She was in floods of tears. Dallas finished his song. He began crying too. He touched her hand.

  “What happened up there happened to a lot of people,” he said. “I can’t tell you what an honour it is to meet you and to be able to sing my song for you.”

  “Thank you,” said Rachel. “It really is a great song.”

  Dallas stood up and walked back into the inn. Rachel was quiet for a while. Then she said, “I don’t know what to say to people when they do that.”

  I got the sense that Rachel had enough on her plate without becoming a legend of the Wild West.

  ♦

  Rachel went to bed and I found Dallas sitting at the bar. We took a walk out to the river.

  “Vicki Weaver was butchered like a buffalo,” he said, “standing in the doorway of her own home, holding her baby and crying out to God to protect the rest of her family from the mad dogs that had already shot her son in the back from an ambush.”

  Dallas looked out at the river.

  “But it’s beautiful out here in Idaho,” he said. “Sometimes you have to sit back and smell the pine trees. I come as often as I can. I stay as long as I can. I listen to the water. I’m very content here. I play my song and I travel hither and yon. I didn’t sing that song to make her cry. I sang it so she’d know she wasn’t alone. Just last week I played it down at the Rainbow Festival in south-east Montana, and this great big biker guy, tears were running down his face, he got up and came over and threw his arms around me and hugged me and kept crying. I played it at Nashville. You could have heard a pin drop.”

  Dallas told me that he thought Vicki Weaver was one of God’s prophets.

  “She spoke about how close we are to a totalitarian government,” he said. “She spoke about the one world order, the single world currency. The military-industrial complex. She spoke about the Bilderberg Group. I did my own research and I found out just how right she was.”

  We sat and listened to the river for a while.

  “The truth is out there,” said Dallas. “Just like in the X Files. You just have to look between the bullshit and the murders.”

  ∨ Them ∧

  3

  The Secret Rulers Of The World

  At the National Press Club on Pennsylvania Avenue, Washington, DC, Big Jim Tucker left a coded message on the answerin
g machine of a friend.

  “Mother. Your dutiful son is playing kick the can on Pennsylvania Avenue, Tuesday morning, 10.30 a.m., thank you.”

  Big Jim placed the telephone back on its receiver. He lit a cigarette and glanced around the lobby with a routine vigilance. Even here at his club, his gentleman’s club, he considered himself not entirely safe. Anyone could discover that this was where he had breakfast every day, three strong black coffees and some pastries on the side.

  “If they ever got me,” he said, “they’d make it look like a typical Washington mugging. A mugging on the sidewalk. Killed for a couple of dollars. Another three paragraphs in the newspaper. Or maybe they’d dump my body outside some bar somewhere. Oh yes, they’re smooth operators.”

  Jim paused. He pulled on his cigarette. His heart is not strong due to his habit of smoking unfiltered Camels at all times, pack after pack. He is quite huge, an elderly southern gentleman in a crumpled suit and a newshound trilby. He has a voice like gravel (a result of cigarette-induced emphysema which, by a happy accident, gives his speech an enigmatic rhythm, like a charismatic Sam Spade down on his luck) and an office downtown with Venetian blinds.

  He said, “The thing is, we don’t know how much time we’ve got left. And suppose I just so happen to ‘drop dead’ in my office on Tuesday afternoon. It could be the following Monday before someone says, ‘Where is that boy?’ I don’t want to be burnt bacon when they find me. I guess I’m just too vain to be found that way.”

  Big Jim laughed in a hollow manner.

  “So I phone my friend every day just to announce I’m still kicking the can and still hunting the macaroon. Still breathing, see? The day she doesn’t get that call is the day she makes enquiries.”

  Here at his private members’ club, Big Jim could pass for a venerable old star commentator for a heavyweight daily newspaper, but he isn’t. He works for an underground journal called The Spotlight. Mainstream journalists keep away from him. This is, Jim says, because certain high-ranking members of the overground media, even some members of his own club, are in league with the secret rulers of the world.