Them

by Jon Ronson

  “My white brothers and sisters,” said Thom. “We’re not coming here today asking you to hate anyone.”

  “Fuck you!” responded audience members.

  “We don’t want you to hate black people,” said Thom.

  “I hate you, motherfucker!” yelled a black person.

  “We don’t want you to hate, because hatred doesn’t accomplish anything,” said Thom.

  “I hate you!” yelled the black person again.

  “What we want you to do is feel love, feel an intense love for your children,” said Thom.

  He said, “You see those people standing there yelling that nice little love word – well I guess they’ve got a limited vocabulary – they don’t hate me, personally.”

  “Yes we do!” yelled a protester. “We hate you personally!”

  “They don’t hate us,” said Thom. “They don’t even know us. They don’t hate our flags. They hate what we stand for. They hate white Christian America. That is what they hate.”

  “Fuck you!” came a far off response. “I hate your flags!”

  Thom attempted to outline his message of love for white children. Much of the audience drifted away. The press area thinned out. In the absence of an actual audience, Thom began to address people who happened to be in the vicinity.

  “You sitting on the street corner over there, you across the street, you up on the high-rise, you sitting round in your cars. You’ve been betrayed. I was born in Michigan…”

  “You were born in hell!”

  “I was born in Michigan, and I know your politicians, and they have betrayed you. My white brothers and sisters, I am not asking you to hate anyone. You’ve only heard words of loving. We’ve been speaking a message of love today. My white Christian America, we are going to close now…”

  “Hooray,” replied a few tired voices, their echoes bouncing off the distant tower-blocks that surrounded the car park. Thom sighed, and the amplifiers picked up his sigh and carried it back to the audience.

  “That was awful weak,” said Thom.

  Then his voice sharpened.

  “We’re going to try that again. Take deep breaths. Come on. Take deep breaths…”

  I looked up. This was something new. Something had changed in Thom. There was an edge now. I couldn’t understand it. There had been so few protesters, and they were such a terribly long way off. But they seemed to have got to him. The atmosphere was different now, and the flag-holders broke from their disciplined postures and looked over their shoulders at Thom because something was going to happen.

  “Reach out way down deep,” yelled Thom into the microphone, “way down deep, you know, way down deep, take a deep breath, try and muster up all the hatred you can in your little AIDS-infested lungs…”

  I gasped. But positivity was beyond Thom now. It was as if he couldn’t stop himself from sliding, sliding into caricature, sliding into becoming all the things everybody else wanted him to be – the press, the protesters, the supporters, the things that would get him onto TV, the things that had been defined.

  “Come on! Deep breath! Count of three. Say your favourite little love word. Come on. You can do it. One…Two…Three…”

  And Thom held the microphone out towards the audience. And, after Thom said ‘three’, there was silence, of course. Nobody rose to the challenge.

  “Boy,” laughed Thom, through the microphone. “They can’t even talk, they’re too dumbfounded. Duh! Duh! Duh! Doy! Doy! Doy-uhh! So anyway, my white brothers and sisters, there’s hope for America…!”

  We were back to the upbeat.

  “Love your heritage, love your culture, love those things that came to you through thousands of years, bought down to you at this very hour. And my white, Christian brothers and sisters in the audience, what are you going to do with it? America will either be white and Christian, or America will be what they want…”

  Thom waved his arm to indicate the remaining few protesters.

  “…A multi-racial, anti-white, anti-moral America,” yelled Thom. “Pray on it. Meditate on it. Look to the most high in heaven. Who guided our people. From the very beginning. And brought them to this land. And blessed them and nourished them and built them into a great Nation that only in the last thirty or forty years has been turned into a cesspool by faggot slime – ”

  Thom stopped abruptly. The flag-holders relaxed and laughed. Thom’s shoulders tensed, then they slumped a little. There was a sad silence, while the words faggot slime echoed through the car park.

  Faggot slime.

  Faggot slime.

  Faggot slime.

  “And that’s the part they’ll put on TV,” sighed Thom. The rally was over. Thom stepped away from the microphone. The silence lasted right up until Flavis turned on the tape recorder and played ‘Amazing Grace’ once again. Thom walked slowly to the back of the podium and climbed down.

  ∨ Them ∧

  10

  Dr Paisley, I Presume

  It was lunchtime in the countryside near Yaounde, Cameroon, West Africa. A dozen people were crammed into a small wooden hut in the grounds of a local fundamentalist church. Nobody said anything. Everyone waited.

  The guest of honour examined the lunch that had been laid on for him – plantains, chicken wings, bread, pineapples, the centrepiece a dish of coleslaw, decorated with the words, written in carrot shavings, “WELCOME D.I.P.”.

  Dr Ian Paisley surveyed the shaved carrot abbreviation of his name, and we could see he was content.

  Ian Paisley was dressed all in white. A large, floppy safari hat covered half of his face. He is not a tall man, but he seemed enormous. His colossal bone structure and lung capacity were to some extent responsible, but there was something more. He exuded an abstract, transcendental enormity. Standing among the locals who surrounded him in a courteous, expectant silence, he looked like a lithograph of a great missionary from another century.

  ♦

  “O Father! We can see the great pan-nationalist conspiracy, with the Pope at its head, sending his secret messages to the IRA…”

  It was delightful, after all the code words, to spend time with a man for whom code words are anathema, the last of the great unreconstructed conspiracy theorists.

  “…the European Union is a beast ridden by the harlot Catholic Church, conspiring to create a Europe controlled by the Vatican…”

  For Dr Paisley, the occupants of the secret room were not Bilderbergers, nor Jews, but Machiavellian papists. But what he believes they are doing in there is essentially the same as what the others believe – a mystical cabal is conspiring to establish a European superstate and, ultimately, a nefarious world government.

  ♦

  This was January 1998, some months before the signing of the Good Friday Agreement at Stormont Castle. Ian Paisley had exiled himself from the Northern Ireland peace talks. He couldn’t have been further away from the negotiating table, here in this hut in the Cameroonian outback. He was not prepared to sit back and watch Ulster fall to the ecumenists and the papist conspiracy and become ‘rife with nuns’. So he had come to Cameroon to do God’s old-fashioned work, plain and simple. He had come to preach to the sinners.

  “Come on,” he announced in the hut. “Let’s have some lunch.”

  He sat down and surveyed the still-silent crowd.

  “What are you all waiting for? The Israelites shall sit at the main table with me, but the sinner must sit on his own at the little table over there by the window.”

  The sinner in question was, and there was no ambiguity about this, me.

  ♦

  My bad relationship with Ian Paisley could be traced back to the very first conversation I’d had with him, on the plane coming over from Heathrow some twelve hours earlier. I sat in 21F. He was in 21A. I smiled across the aisle a few times, but he just sat there, quietly reading his Bible. I could see that he had made notes in the margins. He later told me that he could recite the Old Testament in English and in fluent Hebrew. I
, myself, had been raised to learn Hebrew, and nowadays all I can remember is the opening line of the Shema, the prayer Jewish children diligantly memorize with the aim of reciting it at the beginning and the end of every day and, in the long term, as our final words before dying. Any grown-up Jew who knows nothing but the Shema is, one can safely conclude, lapsed.

  Feeling the urge to break the ice and form a relationship (I had been told back in Belfast that he had only very reluctantly allowed me to join the party) I cleared my throat and leant across the aisle.

  “I imagine that the Cameroonian singing style must be very different to the Northern Ireland one,” I said.

  “In what way?” he boomed. There was deep suspicion and gravity in his voice. I paused, sensing that I was entering some sort of minefield. In that moment I realized that people who were in proximity to Dr Paisley were required to adhere to a protocol that I had no knowledge nor understanding of.

  “Well,” I continued, “take the vocal harmonies. I assume that the Cameroonian approach to vocal harmonies must be very different from the hymn singing in Ulster…”

  I trailed off. Perplexed, I could see that Ian Paisley was now furious with me. He went glassy-eyed and the lower part of his face trembled. He exhaled noisily and shook his head from side to side, like a wild horse, as though to expel the unpleasantness he had been unfortunate enough to hear. This was followed by a steely silence that continued for many hours – the entire flight, in fact. It continued all the way through the descent and the landing, through disembarkation and customs and passport control, through baggage, through the lobby of Yaounde airport, and into the courtesy bus, where it finally, and mercifully, ended.

  “We Ulstermen are outgoing people,” he announced suddenly, as the bus bounced through the potholed suburbs of Yaounde. “We’re friendly people. We’re hospitable people. We’re good singers. These are characteristics which are sadly lacking in some Englishmen.”

  ♦

  Now, in the hut, Dr Paisley addressed the crowd.

  “I’m under police surveillance. Everywhere I go, I have policemen sitting with me. Now I have a journalist. And he wants to record me, to use my words against me in future days.”

  “Of course,” I said, “David Livingstone had a journalist along with him too.”

  “Well,” replied Dr Paisley, “he had a journalist who caught up on him. Mr Dr-Livingstone-I-Presume. And Stanley, as a journalist, took all the glory. As if Livingstone was lost!”

  I felt that the best course of action, at that point, was to deride journalism. So I mentioned that Stanley lived to regret uttering those famous words, because the music-hall comedians of the time mocked him for it. This information seemed to please Dr Paisley a lot.

  “Well, don’t you be saying it to me, or all the comedians will laugh at you too. And, anyway, I’m not lost in Africa. I’m saved. It’s you that’s lost. You’re the lost soul. The lost sheep of the house of Israel. Am I right?”

  “That’s right,” murmured the Revd David Mcllveen, Ian Paisley’s travelling companion. “The lost sinner in Africa.”

  “That’s right,” said Ian Paisley.

  Recklessly, I took this as a new opportunity to ingratiate myself.

  “As I am an Israelite myself,” I said, “I will join you at the main table.”

  I sat down. David Mcllveen and Dr Paisley exchanged a glance.

  “Are you a Jew?” said David.

  “Yes I am,” I said.

  “Are you practising?” said Ian Paisley.

  “Well…” I began.

  I then gave an impassioned speech about the importance of Judaism in my life. Although I am not practising, I said, and although to my shame I haven’t visited the synagogue for many years, I still feel guided by my Jewishness. We discussed how the Jews and the Free Presbyterians share a commitment to the Old Testament. And I ended, with a flourish, by quoting the opening line of the Shema. “Shema Israel,” I said, “Adonai Elohaynu, adonai echad.”

  “Ah,” said Dr Paisley, “tis a beautiful verse!”

  “Thank you,” I said.

  ♦

  I added then that, by the way, my wife is a Presbyterian.

  “Does she sing the Psalms?” asked Dr Paisley.

  “No,” I admitted.

  There was a silence.

  “Oh,” he said.

  Still, he seemed pleased that there was a Presbyterian in my life.

  In stressing the sincerity of my Old Testament beliefs, while adding that I had married out of the faith to one of Dr Paisley’s own, I felt I had had my cake and eaten it with aplomb. I had managed to portray myself as a good Jew and, by proxy, a good Protestant too. And, in admitting my shameful failure to keep up with the teachings, I had given myself an opt-out in case Dr Paisley tested me on the fundaments of my faith. It had gone terrifically, and I felt that I had forged some kind of Old Testament bond between the two of us.

  ♦

  The final member of the Paisley party sat to one side during all of this, eating coleslaw. A local man, Joseph Ename, he was there to translate the sermons, line for line, from next to Dr Paisley in the pulpit. Joseph had told me earlier that it was a golden opportunity for him to watch Dr Paisley preach and to examine his technique close up.

  “It’s all in the hands,” said Joseph. “Watch his hands.”

  “The way he raises his hands?” I asked.

  “The rhythm of his hands,” said Joseph, “and the rhythm of his voice. And the words too. He is a fantastic preacher.”

  “Did you see the coleslaw?” said David Mcllveen to Ian Paisley. “It spelt out ‘Welcome Dr Ian Paisley’. But Joseph spoiled it. He took a spoonful.”

  “Did Joseph spoil it?” roared Dr Paisley. “Thanks for spoiling it.”

  David Mcllveen smiled softly to himself.

  “Well,” said Dr Paisley, “what can you expect from a friend but bad treatment?”

  There was a distinct edge to this teasing. The coleslaw had said, “Welcome D.I.P.”, and so etiquette dictated that the first spoonful should be taken by Dr Paisley. Joseph looked contrite. He knew he had done wrong. He said nothing.

  “Come on, my Jewish friend,” said Dr Paisley, standing up and heading to his jeep. “Don’t dilly dally.”

  ♦

  The visit to Cameroon was to last for eight days, during which time the four of us – Dr Paisley, David, Joseph and I – would travel across country in two hired Toyota jeeps, while Dr Paisley preached the gospel thrice daily to the unsaved locals.

  We had walkie-talkies to ensure that nobody got lost on the long journeys down dirt roads between preaching engagements. Ian Paisley’s jeep led the way. I followed. An hour into the journey, my walkie-talkie crackled into life.

  “How are you doing back there, my Jewish friend?” roared Dr Paisley.

  “Fine,” I said. “Over.”

  “I hope you’re not going to try and overtake us!” he said. “David Mcllveen says you can try, but you won’t succeed! Over.”

  “Is that a challenge?” I said.

  “That is a challenge from a gentile to a Jew,” said Dr Paisley. “Did you hear me? Did you hear what I said?”

  I was finding it difficult to respond in kind to Ian Paisley’s teasing. My customary esprit de corps had eluded me since I joined the Paisley party. I think I realized instinctively that it was OK to receive his banter with cheerfulness, but unwise to return it with banter of my own – had I thought of any, which I had not. But I did my best to join in the spirit of the conversation by adopting, at least, a bantering tone of voice.

  “I shall rise to the challenge,” I said.

  “There’s a good degree of racism in us all,” hollered Dr Paisley, over the walkie-talkie. “Did you hear that?”

  “Yes I did,” I said.

  “Did you hear it? Did you hear what I said? Racism – in – us – all! Over and out!”

  ♦

  A few hours’ driving followed. It had been impossible for m
e to attempt to pass the Paisley jeep along these tiny, rural dirt roads. But the truth was, I had forgotten all about his gentile-Jew overtaking challenge. Then, suddenly, the walkie-talkie crackled into life once more.

  “Germany calling!” hollered Dr Paisley. “Germany calling! Germany calling! Germany calling! I see you are still behind!”

  There was a pause.

  “I – um – got a bit of a crackle there,” I said. “Could you repeat that, please?”

  “You got no crackle at all,” he yelled, abruptly. “You got the message loud and clear. Do not tell lies. Over and definitely out.”

  I was plunged, then, into a long radio silence.

  I became paranoid. What had happened back there? Had Dr Paisley realized that ‘Germany calling’ was, under the circumstances, a tactless thing to say? Was he embarrassed? When I asked him to repeat it, did he take it as an opportunity to bat the guilt back to me? In visualizing his displeasure, I found myself all the more eager to please him, and I wondered whether that was what made Dr Paisley such a good leader. During the miles that followed, I even fabricated spurious reasons to call him on the walkie-talkie, just to see if he really was angry.

  “Do we turn left?” I asked. “Have you enough water?”

  But my questions were met with an icy silence.

  Finally, just as we reached the church, Dr Paisley crackled onto the walkie-talkie again.

  “Are you all right?” he boomed.

  “Yes,” I replied, hesitantly. “And you?”

  “Excellent,” he said.

  And then he said, “What we’ve got is…um…we’ve got some light…‘Jew’…down on the road for you, so be careful not to skid if you overtake us! Ha ha! Over and out!”

  ♦

  Our destination was a small stone and wood church at the end of a long dirt track. We parked up. David Mcllveen approached me. There was a smile on his face.

  “Hello, Jon,” he said. “How are you?”

  “How are you?” I said.

  “Very well,” he said. “Did you have a good journey?”

  “Yes,” I said. “Did you?”