Them

by Jon Ronson

“You mean in terms of words?” asked Tony.

  “Yes,” I said. “Rather than just…you know…”

  “Spiritually?” said Tony.

  “Did they actually say anything?” I asked.

  “Only the rabbi,” said Tony. “He said something.”

  “What did he say?” I asked.

  “I can’t remember,” said Tony. He paused. “I just remember that it was something embarrassing. To tell you the truth, I wish he hadn’t opened his mouth.”

  ♦

  Two weeks passed. I was back in London when I received the bad news over the telephone from Tony. The spiritual aspect of the meeting with Michael De Luca had proved to be fruitless. New Line were taking Tony’s film away from him and releasing Edward Norton’s cut. Now, Tony said, he was going to put as much effort into destroying American History X as he had to creating it. Tomorrow morning he was going to fly to Canada to meet the director of the Toronto Film Festival. His intention was to demand that American History X be withdrawn from their competition.

  “Has this ever happened before?” he asked me over the phone. “Have you ever heard about anything like this ever happening before?”

  “Well,” I said. “Hunter S. Thompson was going to fly to Cannes to protest against the screening of Fear and Loathing…”

  “Oh, yeah,” said Tony Kaye. “Writers. Lots of writers go on about how crappy directors ruin their movies. But has anything like this ever happened before? A director flying to the Toronto film festival to stop his own film from being shown?”

  “No,” I said. “I don’t think anything like that has ever happened before.”

  “Exactly,” said Tony Kaye. “Can you be in Toronto by tomorrow morning?”

  “I can’t…”

  There was a long silence.

  “Oh,” said Tony, softly.

  “It’s just because my wife is about to go into labour…”

  “Oh,” said Tony.

  “But, look,” I said, “I’ll phone you in a few days to…”

  “And this is just the beginning,” interrupted Tony. “I’m going to bribe projectionists across the world to destroy the prints of the film. I’m going to position private security guards outside cinemas to stop the audience getting in. New Line won’t know what hit them.”

  He paused.

  “Bloody Hollywood,” he muttered. “Bloody America. I flew to the Caribbean last week to speak with a very wise man, a Nobel Prize winner, and he said that America was so bloody…so stupid…could you hold on a minute?”

  “OK,” I said.

  I heard Tony place the telephone receiver down onto the table.

  “I don’t mean it,” he said to someone, softly. “I love America.”

  “That’s fine,” I heard an American voice reply. “Don’t worry about it.”

  Tony returned to the phone.

  “America,” said Tony, “is a fucking amoral disgrace.”

  ∨ Them ∧

  9

  Living A Diamond Life In A Rocky World

  In the months that followed Thom Robb’s controversial keynote address at the Ku Klux Klan congress, in which he instructed his members not to use the N-word in public, word spread throughout the neo-Nazi movement that Thom had kissed a black baby for the benefit of the media. It was rumoured also that Thom planned to publish a Ku Klux Klan cookery book that included recipes for all his favourite dishes.

  Throughout the United States, in compounds scattered around the wildernesses of the Appalachian hills and the Ozark mountains, and in underground Klaverns across the country, racists were scandalized. Nobody seemed entirely certain where the baby-kissing had occurred, or whose baby it was, but the widespread belief was that Thom had simply gone too far in his quest to be accepted by the mainstream.

  I must admit I found myself siding a little with the outraged racists. A Ku Klux Klan leader kissing a black baby could have been a landmark in racial harmony, but the gesture seemed hollow. Furthermore, I did not think that Thom was genuinely interested in cookery.

  ♦

  I wanted to learn more about Thom’s standing within America’s racist movement. I drove to Butler, Indiana, to visit Jeff Berry – Jeff ‘Moron’ Berry as he was referred to in Thom’s keynote speech – the Imperial Wizard of the American Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, one of Thom’s chief rivals, a man famed for saying ‘nigger’ freely on television.

  This was a journey that many reporters before me had undertaken (much to Thom Robb’s bafflement and annoyance). There have been so many exterior shots of Jeff Berry’s bullet-riddled house (he has so far survived sixteen drive-by shootings) that he has cunningly erected a huge neon-lit sign in the garden that reads WHITE PRIDE WORLDWIDE alongside a toll-free contact number. You certainly can’t miss it. (An advance deal is often made between the Klan and the TV networks in which Jeff Berry agrees to the interview on the condition that this exterior shot is included, lasting five seconds minimum, with the toll-free number clearly visible and unpixelated.)

  Jeff Berry has three guard dogs that jumped out in attempted frenzied attack whenever they saw me, only to be yanked back by their restraining chains. The yanking seemed to make them angrier. The dogs didn’t get comfortable around me at any point during the time I spent at Jeff’s house. Jeff has long, straggly, hillbilly hair and a wonderful, baritone speaking voice.

  Jeff also has a young live-in armed bodyguard called Dakota. Dakota was polite to me and a little shy. He looks like a teenage skateboarder who watches MTV and endorses multi-culturalism. He searched me for weapons and he made us all coffee.

  We sat in Jeff’s office. His walls are covered with the sorts of posters and drawings that Thom criticized in his keynote speech at the Klan Congress. There’s a drawing of a Klansman holding a noose. It says: ‘Fetch the Rope’. There’s also a ‘Nigger Target’, for gun practice.

  “Rumours?” said Jeff. “They ain’t rumours. Thom Robb is chickenshit. He’s a sissy. He kisses black babies. He had it all once, but now he’s politically correct. Did you know Thom Robb’s going round telling people not to say nigger?”

  “And he’s banned robe usage,” I said, bitchily.

  “Well, that’s just sickening,” said Jeff. “Why is our organization the most powerful Klan group in America right now? Because we’re doing the opposite of what Thom Robb says. I appeal to the working man. I don’t think I’m God almighty like Thom Robb does. A man who tells people not to say nigger, he’s a dictator. That’s what the Klan’s about, freedom of speech. If Thom Robb don’t change his ways, and the way he runs his Klan, all he’ll have left are his memories and that building he’s got.”

  The building Jeff referred to is the unusual white building in Thom’s grounds. Now I learnt that the building was infamous amongst America’s white supremacists for being showy. Some of Thom’s competitors in the neo-Nazi movement have dubbed it his Bavarian Hunting Lodge.

  Jeff Berry took me outside to show me his bullet holes.

  He said, “You know my house has been shot up sixteen times? But I’m still here. If I want to say nigger, I’ll say damn nigger and I’ll say dirty baboon.”

  “I’m going to visit a Ku Klux Klan historian called Richard Bondira this afternoon,” I said to Jeff. “He lives about two hundred miles away from here, just south of Indianapolis. Do you know him?”

  Jeff nodded.

  “What kind of man is he?” I asked.

  “He ain’t no man,” said Jeff. “He’s a sub-human.”

  I told Jeff that I ought to leave if I was going to make my appointment with Richard Bondira. Jeff replied, a little sulkily, “How long did you spend with Thom Robb?”

  “A few weeks, on and off, so far,” I said.

  “So you spend weeks with Thom Robb and, like, an hour with me?”

  There was a slightly awkward silence.

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  ♦

  I had found Richard Bondira on the internet, selling Klan merchandise suc
h as posters and statuettes and advertising himself as the keeper of a Klan museum. He lives in Rockville, Indiana, in a ramshackle house at the end of a long suburban street. His windows are all blacked out with sheets. This is to stop the light coming in and fading his original Klan posters and pamphlets, but the overall impression is rather eerie: a ramshackle house with blacked-out windows and swastikas and Ku Klux Klan memorabilia stacked up in every corner.

  But Richard turned out to be well dressed and welcoming and highly knowledgeable about Klan matters.

  “I’ve just been to see Jeff Berry,” I said to Richard, by way of small talk, shortly after I arrived.

  “That man, in my opinion,” replied Richard, “is pus-infected maggot slime.”

  Richard told me that he was an impartial observer when it came to Klan affairs. He wanted it on the record that he was a man of many interests that were unconnected to the Ku Klux Klan.

  “I am a published poet,” said Richard. “My poems have been published in racial harmony magazines. I am an artist as well as a taxidermist. All these paintings, and the stuffed birds and fish you’ll see all over the house, are my own work. I am a sculptor too. Those cement lions over there, next to the painting of the Klansman on the horse, were my own work. I am a motorcycle mechanic also. Here are my certificates. So although I have been studying the Ku Klux Klan for eighteen years, I am a rather diversified individual, as you can see from my accomplishments, and all my certificates on the wall.”

  Richard took me over to his bookcase.

  “However,” he said, “I am also an authority on the Ku Klux Klan. All these books about the Klan, from there to there, have featured contributions by me.”

  “What do you know about Thom Robb?” I asked Richard.

  “He’s a word merchant, a dream seller,” said Richard. “He’s your old-style medicine man. He’s a propagandist.”

  “How’s he doing, in terms of his image makeover?” I asked.

  “He’s a washed-up has-been,” said Richard. “He just wants to make money. I call him Thom on the Robb. You send him your twenty dollars for a T-shirt and it arrives in the mail, like, eight months later. You know that song ‘Band On The Run’? Well, I’ve written some new words that apply to Thom Robb. It goes, ‘Thom on the Robb. Thom on the Robb.’ And I’ll tell you this. He’s lost a lot of support since he started kissing black babies.”

  “Did Thom really kiss a black baby?” I asked Richard.

  “Yes, sir,” said Richard.

  “I can’t imagine Thom kissing a black baby,” I said.

  “Oh, really?” said Richard. He chuckled to himself. “I can.”

  There was a silence.

  “Thom says he wants to become the voice,” I said.

  “He’s always wanted to be the voice,” said Richard. “He wants to be the new Adolf Hitler. Jeff Berry wants to be the new Adolf Hitler. They’ve all got their eye on the number-one position and they are all pathological liars. Thom Robb is falling apart. A lot of your Klan groups today are people who split off from Thom Robb. And all these little fractured fragments continue to break down into their subatomic parts. Every group has in-fighting and rivalry. They split. More factions form, like individual little fingers that are never drawn together into a fist.”

  Richard clenched his fingers together to form a fist.

  “And Jeff Berry is ignorant low-life. In my opinion, he’s rude, crude and lewd; he does not have a high IQ. Nobody is going to pay attention to an uneducated ditch digger, not even his own mother, but the minute you throw on a bedspread and a pillow case and proclaim yourself an Imperial Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, you have instant stardom. Now everybody is listening to you. Maybe Jeff Berry will do like Jim Jones and poison his congregation. You never know with these guys.”

  Richard said, “I want to show you something. Let’s go downstairs.”

  What Richard wanted me to see was a video expose of Thom Robb.

  “Who produced it?” I asked.

  “One of Thom Robb’s people who split off in disgust when he kissed a black baby,” said Richard. “His name’s Dennis Mahon.”

  Richard pressed play. Dennis Mahon’s video expose consisted of two men, Dennis Mahon and someone identified only as Mike, sitting on an orange sofa in somebody’s front room. The camera-work was anxious and jumpy, and Richard’s tape looked to be around tenth generation, which gave the video even more of a jittery and restless feel.

  Dennis Mahon was in his late thirties, and dressed in Klan uniform, a blood-drop patch sewn into his shirt. He was goodlooking with tightly cropped hair and a handsome boxer’s face. Mike was middle-aged and well dressed. He looked like a well-to-do lawyer. Like Dennis Mahon, Mike was once a friend and supporter of Thom Robb’s.

  Dennis and Mike’s conversation lasted an hour. Every so often a kitten jumped, purring, onto the sofa, and Dennis suspended the discussion so he could grab it and fling it yelping across the room.

  Dennis explained that both men were sad having to expose Thom Robb but that they needed to wake people up to his activities.

  “You know,” said Mike, “I once heard him interviewed and they asked him what was the problem with a race-mixing couple, and he said, ‘Well, if that’s what they want to do there’s no problem…’”

  “He actually said that?” interrupted Dennis.

  “Yes,” said Mike. “He said, ‘As long as they don’t force it on me…’”

  “A Grand Wizard of the Klan saying this?” said Dennis, clearly startled. “Oh, man!”

  Back in real life, Richard Bondira sat curled up on his sofa, nodding supportively.

  “Did you know,” said Mike, “that in 1982 Thom Robb’s trailer burnt down? He lived in a trailer with his family and it burnt down and he wrote in his newspaper, ‘Oh, it’s such a terrible thing that happened. Our trailer burnt down,’ and he insinuated that the Reds or the Jews did it, or ZOG did it…”

  Richard Bondira said, “ZOG is the Zionist Occupied Government.”

  “Thanks,” I said.

  “…and please send money for him to find a place for him to live,” said Mike.

  “I sent him several hundred dollars,” said Dennis, “and he never did get another trailer.”

  “So his trailer burnt down,” continued Mike, “and he moved his family into a goat shed on their property, a goat shed about twenty-five foot square with no heat and he had his family in there for two years living like cavemen and God bless his wife Muriel how she put up with that guy I’ll never know.”

  “Can you tell me who really did burn down his trailer?” said Dennis.

  “Nobody burnt it down,” said Mike. “It was an electrical fire. His daughter’s bedroom had a socket that was smoking.”

  “That’s dangerous,” said Dennis. “A smoking socket is dangerous.”

  “It was an electrical fire that burnt the trailer down,” said Mike, “not the Jews.”

  “Well, that’s just carelessness,” said Dennis.

  Richard Bondira picked up the remote control and pressed pause.

  “Actually,” said Richard, “it wasn’t a goat shed. It was a tool shed. But everything else is true.”

  He pressed play again.

  “What really gets me,” said Dennis, “is that he’s going around saying awful things, like putting down Klan violence. And he’s saying that we don’t hate anybody.”

  “Do I not hate mine enemy with a perfect hatred?” said Mike. “That’s theological.”

  Dennis looked straight into the camera.

  “I believe he has a deal with ZOG,” said Dennis.

  “So do I,” said Mike.

  Abruptly, the video expose ended. Then Richard and I said our goodbyes. He saw me out. He stood on his porch, which was decorated with cement lions, hand-crafted by him, caught mid-roar. We both squinted in the winter sunlight.

  Richard waved me off all the way until I reached the corner. Then I saw him look around. A young boy rode up the leafy street on a bicyc
le, swerving in and out of the leaves that gathered around the picket fences that belonged to his neighbours.

  Richard shivered in the cold. He went back inside again and closed his door. I turned the corner.

  ♦

  The following week I did something that Randy Weaver had done. I visited Aryan Nations up in Idaho, a seventy-mile drive from the Weaver cabin. Swastika flags and American flags and the Union Jack flew on the main road. I drove in to see a skinhead mowing the lawn. I waved at him. He instantly stood to attention and gave me the Sieg Heil.

  I parked up, jumped out of the car, and immediately found myself in an environment I can only compare to the scene in Poltergeist where everything in the room is spinning around. I was surrounded by a dozen skinheads, getting right up into my face, yelling questions at me.

  “Who are you? What do you want?”

  One of them took a photograph of me.

  From the corner of my eye, I noticed someone scrutinize the profile of my nose and murmur something to his companion.

  My perception of Aryan Nations was very different to Rachel Weaver’s. I saw no treasure hunts, just rage and psychosis and I wished somebody could wipe this place off the face of the otherwise beautiful and idyllic Idaho. But perhaps this was unfair of me. I had invited myself to their compound. They hadn’t come looking for me.

  I explained I had been with Randy Weaver, and I wanted to meet Pastor Richard Butler, Aryan Nations’ founder. Now in his mid-eighties, Butler was the grandfather of American racism. There have been few racist murderers these past years who hadn’t passed through Aryan Nations’ doors.

  And now I passed through their doors, stepping over an Israeli flag that they used as a doormat, and into their church, where Butler was sitting below a portrait of Adolf Hitler. During our short conversation, I was flanked by half-a-dozen skinheads and a man called Staff Leader Reichert Von Barron, who struck me as the least unpleasant of the neo-Nazis there. At least he smiled at me.

  “Randy Weaver came out here to be away from the multicultural trash that’s infected our nation,” explained Pastor Butler. “Very sad his son and wife were murdered. The philosophy of the New World Order is to murder children.”