“And when is this going to happen?” I asked.
“As soon as the nigger decides to make his move and this economy that the Jews have built up falls apart. In about twenty-five years.”
Standing next to him was his girlfriend. She, too, was dressed in the same black Nazi uniform as the others, but she gave it a bit of flair with a powder-blue scarf and a shiny pendant. She wore her shirt without a tie, and she had unbuttoned a button or two (or three). She had long, curly-permed blonde hair and a hat with no swastika on it. She spoke in a high, soft, sexy voice, her eyes highlighted with indigo eyeliner, and she had an even tan from head to toe. I waited for half the day to make my move.
“Hey,” I said to her after lunch, “can I talk to you for a second?”
“Sure,” she said, in a sultry way.
I lowered the volume of my voice. “What the heck are you doing here?”
She smiled.
“You don’t look like the typical Nazi. You know, the ones we’re used to seeing in the movies,” I said, surprised at the flirtatious sound coming from someone who, at thirty-two, hadn’t yet figured out how to flirt. “You could be in a Coppertone commercial!”
She giggled. “Ohhhh,” she said in an aww-shucks tone that was a cross between Marilyn Monroe and The Dukes of Hazzard. “I’m just against Jewish people. And blacks.”
She batted her eyes. “You know—white power.” Another big smile. Yeah, white power. Hot.
On the final day of the hate expo, I sat inside the living room of the farmhouse with a number of the “pastors” of the Christian Identity movement. They each operated “churches” within their communities and preached a gospel of white superiority, not because they believed they were better than black people, but because God said they were better than black people.
“I have more contempt for the so-called small-c Christian leaders than I do for the colored,” said Allen Poe, the pastor from Grand Rapids, Michigan. “The [Billy] Grahams, the Falwells”—and then under his breath he derisively muttered, “Schwartz!” (This was his way of indicating that he didn’t believe “Jerry Falwell” was his real name and that he must be a Jew.) “If we really wanted to take this country by force, we should stack those people up and silence them.”
“Not you or me but somebody else,” came a voice from across the room, conscious of the cameras being on.
“We are into computers now,” the reverend from Grand Rapids continued. “And we are making lists. Lists of those white people who are not with us, lists of those who are not on the side of their own race. We are sharing these lists of race traitors with each other. So that when the day comes for the revolution, we will know who we have to deal with.”
At one point he looked me right in the eye.
“When they do squash us, where are we gunna look for you? Under the same steamroller?”
Did he just threaten me? I looked over at Kevin. I didn’t know the proper documentary protocol for handling a moment like this. Kevin looked at me with his free eye and smiled.
“You will never see the day that you want to see come to be in this country,” I said coolly. “You are not going to be able to do jack shit about any of this.”
Wow. I couldn’t believe I just said that. Everyone in the room felt I had crossed the line—our side, their side, even the gay dog over in the corner. My words turned Rev. Poe’s face purple and he exploded, looking as if he were about to pounce on me. His eyes were on fire.
“Mr. Man, we’re not going to lose!” he shouted back. “I don’t care if there’s ten of us left. We’re going to win!”
Then he pointed to the ceiling. “He says so.”
I readied myself for a possible attack. Poe looked at the camera and then realized that striking me would not make him the hero of this movie. After all, who was I—just some lowly production assistant on a little documentary who got wrangled into asking some questions. But I had heard enough of “Nigger this” and “Nigger that” all weekend long, and should he attempt anything with me, my principles of nonviolence were going to have to go stretch their legs and come back in a half hour. He sat back in his chair.
It was clearly getting time for us to pack up and go.
We went to say good-bye to Grand Dragon Miles out in his barn. Once inside, Kevin had something he wanted to get off his mind.
“Why did you let us come here?” he asked Miles. “You can probably guess we don’t share the same beliefs. So why did you do it?”
“We invited you here so that we could use you just the same way you were using us,” Miles said quietly. “But what you don’t know is how we were using you. We have used you to get our message out to a wider audience. True, for every hundred people you show this film to, ninety-nine may hate us—but one will love us. And that’s how we will build our movement. One here, one there, one at a time. You just make sure you show this to as many hundreds or thousands of people as possible. We’re just looking for that one soul in each and every audience. And you will have made that happen for us.”
It was a sobering and bitter pill to swallow as we heard Bob Miles say these words. We knew what he was saying was true. So what would be our responsibility in all this? Is it better never to film people or events like the Aryan Nations, to just ignore them? Or is it better to expose them outright, hoping that will become our best defense against them?
We stopped at the gas station on our way out of town. There was a sign in the window that read: MOVIES ON HOME VIDEO HERE!
“Wow,” I said. “Look at that. You can rent a movie at a gas station. Is that what it’s coming to? Movies are now sold like a bag of Doritos or a Hostess cupcake?”
“I think that’s the future over there,” Anne said, pointing to a large satellite dish in someone’s backyard. “And I’m sure our Aryan friends will find a way to make good use of it.”
“This was a good shoot,” Kevin remarked. “Thanks for setting it up for us,” he said to me. “You were a real natural with these folks. You should think about doing more of this.”
“Hanging out with hot Nazis?” I asked.
“Yes, that,” he replied with a grin.
I went inside and got them all some coffee and other snacks.
Parnassus
IN 1986, I WAS WITNESS to a murder plot. I was there, in the room, when those in charge hatched their plan to kill the American Middle Class. It took place in a penthouse of an exclusive Acapulco resort, in a private gathering organized by top officials in the Reagan administration. I snuck in and I saw it, I heard it all, and I got out alive so I could tell a story that, unfortunately, no one at the time wanted to hear or believe. “The death of the middle class? Planned by our own government? HA HA HA HA HA HA!!”
But, forgive me—I think I’m a bit ahead of myself.
Let me begin again:
I used to think all liberals and lefties were the same: good hearts, good politics. It took a real wake-up call in the capital of liberalism, San Francisco, for me to realize that there were various forms of “liberals,” and the one I had never encountered back in Flint was the Wealthy Liberal Who Loved Humanity But Hated People. He’s the liberal whose conscience is eased by the generosity of his checkbook—just as long as you, the recipient of his largesse, look the other way and not consider how he came to have that money in the first place.
But I’m ahead of myself again.…
For the nearly ten years I edited and published the Flint Voice (which, in 1983, became the Michigan Voice), I never earned more than $15,000 a year. On two different occasions, the Voice was so broke I had to lay myself off. It was not unusual for me to be late on paying the $200 a month for my rent. There weren’t a lot of businesses interested in advertising in a muckraking paper that was constantly raking the muck out of the very businesses being asked to advertise.
Case in point: the local Howard Johnson’s Motor Lodge. They had a policy of not hiring blacks and refusing to rent out rooms at night to anyone who was African-American.
How did I know this? A clerk who worked there told me. One thing I learned as a journalist is that there is at least one disgruntled person in every workplace in America—and at least double that number with a conscience. Hard as they try, they simply can’t turn their heads away from an injustice when they see one taking place.
Such was the case with Carole Jurkiewicz, the head desk clerk at the Howard Johnson’s Motor Inn on Miller Road in Flint. One day she walked into my office and brought with her a number of applications filled out by people looking for a job at Howard Johnson’s. Many of them had a star marked in pen at the top.
“These are the white people who apply,” Jurkiewicz said. “I was told by management to star the application of anyone who was white. I would then see the manager rip up any app from someone who was black.” Out of 130 employees, only seven were African-American (in this now majority-black city)—and four of them were related to each other.
Jurkiewicz was told by her manager on various occasions that: “Black people don’t mind being called niggers… They drive big cars… They’re lazy… They usually make trouble… They talk back, have no respect… They all look alike.”
This was the 1980s, and this story simply seemed too rotten to be true. This was not the South of the 1950s. This was Michigan, a state that bordered Canada. And this was Howard Johnson’s, a respected national chain of restaurants and hotels, not Billy Bob’s Grits and Grinders. I asked Carole if she would sign a sworn affidavit attesting to these facts, and both she and another employee did so.
To further verify it, I decided to see what would happen if a black friend of mine went over to Howard Johnson’s to apply for a job. Lamont went in, filled out an application, and left. Then Dan, a white guy, went in a half hour later to also apply for a job.
The next day, Carole brought me copies of both apps, and sure enough, the white applicant had a big red star plastered on top of his form. Lamont’s, though, had none.
It was then time for part two of the sting. George Moss, an African-American teacher at Flint’s Beecher High School, walked into Howard Johnson’s the following evening, and asked for a room. Outside, on the lawn, I lay facedown on the grass so no one inside could see me. I crept closer to the window where I had, with my long-lens 35mm camera, a clear view of the front desk. And, sure enough, as I snapped through a roll of film, George was turned away after being told that there were “no vacancies.”
Ten minutes later I motioned for Mark, a white guy, to head in to try and get a room. “No problem,” the man behind the counter said, and signed him up for a single with a double bed—all of this, of course, captured by my camera.
I put it all in the Flint Voice, and it wasn’t long before the civil rights commission brought the hammer down on Howard Johnson’s (they were ordered to pay a $30,000 fine to one of the black women who had applied for a job and been denied). There would now be one less business that would discriminate in Flint—and one less business to advertise in the Flint Voice.
Doing stories like this every month for ten years had the uncanny knack of depleting advertising revenue, and I began to see why the larger media is loathe to tell the public the truth about anything that may cost them cash. Before long the Voice was the pariah of not only the business community in Flint but also of its political establishment (which was owned by the business community) and the local media (also dependent on the same advertising revenue).
By the end of 1985, with unemployment in Flint well above 20 percent, there were fewer and fewer ways available to fund the Voice. Our main benefactor had been the wonderful folksinger Harry Chapin. Years earlier, I had snuck backstage at a concert of his in Grand Rapids. A security guard grabbed me as I approached Harry’s dressing-room door.
“Where the hell do you think you’re going?” he barked at me.
“Oh, I’m just stopping by to see Harry,” I said matter-of-factly.
“The hell you are,” he said, as he started to drag me away by my collar. The commotion was loud enough to cause Harry to open his door.
“What’s going on out here?” Harry asked.
“This guy says he was coming to see you,” the bouncer said.
“Well—let him come see me!”
The guard reluctantly let me go and I walked into Harry’s room.
“So, you wanted to see me?” Harry asked, smiling.
“Uh, yeah, I’m so sorry about causing a ruckus. I just wanted to ask you a favor.”
“Shoot.”
“Well, a bunch of us in Flint want to start an alternative paper and we were wondering if maybe you could help us by coming to Flint and doing a benefit.”
As I said the words, I could not believe how presumptuous and ridiculous they sounded. “Hey, rock star—you’ve got nothing better to do—come to Flint and perform for us!” Jesus.
“Tell me about your paper,” he said. And so I did. I told him about how the local daily was in the pocket of General Motors and that we wanted to present the news that wasn’t being covered.
“Sounds like a worthy effort,” Harry said. “Here’s my manager’s number. Give him a call and I’ll see what I can do.”
Dumbfounded, I left the backstage area on cloud seven (for some reason, my eternal pessimism about myself always kept me from getting any higher). I returned to Flint to tell the staff what happened. Within months, Harry Chapin was in front of a sold-out audience in Flint, and we now had the money to fund our paper.
And for the next five years, until a tragic accident on the Long Island Expressway took his life in July 1981, Harry Chapin came to Flint each year, doing a total of eleven benefit concerts for the Flint Voice. Those proceeds kept us afloat, and after Harry’s death, his brothers, Tom and Steve, and his band would continue the tradition of playing the annual concert in Flint.
But by 1985, it was not enough to sustain the paper, and the struggle to continue its publication was worsening.
It was at this time I received a phone call from a man in San Francisco. He was Adam Hochschild, the multimillionaire liberal who ran the foundation that owned Mother Jones magazine, the largest circulation publication on the left. He said he had been following the Flint Voice and liked what he saw, and he wondered if I would be interested in doing what I was doing in Flint, but on a national scale.
The offer sounded too good—and it was. I closed up my beloved Voice, sold everything I had, and moved to Parnassus Avenue in the Upper Haight district of San Francisco. It wasn’t long, though, before I realized what a huge mistake I had made. I wanted to turn Mother Jones into a magazine for the working class (the namesake of the magazine, after all, Mary “Mother” Jones, was a radical union organizer from the nineteenth century). Hochschild (whose family fortune and inheritance came in part from the mines of the then-apartheid South Africa) wanted a more erudite and “sublime” periodical of commentary and reporting that would rival the New Yorker or the Atlantic. In fact, his second choice for his new editor had been Hendrik Hertzberg, an instinct he should have gone with. (Hertzberg later became executive editor of the New Yorker.)
I was a true fish out of water in San Francisco. I didn’t understand the way things were done at this magazine, and my efforts to make changes were met with much resistance. They wanted neo-nudnik Paul Berman covering the Sandinistas in Nicaragua. I had wanted Alexander Cockburn. They wanted to do an investigative piece on herbal teas; I wanted to give a monthly column to an autoworker on the assembly line in Flint. They were Mars and I was Bluto. On the day after Labor Day, after just four months on the job, Hochschild fired me. He said we weren’t “a good fit.” He was right. I sued him for breach of contract and fraud and won $60,000.
There was now no newspaper for me to return to in Flint, and all attempts to seek employment with other lefty/liberal publications on both coasts were met with the embrace one gives a leper. No one on the left wanted to upset Mother Jones. No one wanted this guy from Flint. Other than the people who worked at Ralph Nader’s office in D.C., there
was no one who would offer me work.
And that, my friends, was supposed to have been the last you were to have heard from me. My fifteen minutes on the national stage were over.
After a month of lying in bed and bemoaning my fate, I got up one day and went to a bookstore. There, while mindlessly roaming through the racks of magazines, I ran across a notice in a business publication that caught my eye. It said:
“EXPO MAQUILA ’86”
PRESENTED BY
UNITED STATES DEPT. OF COMMERCE
AND
THE AMERICAN CHAMBER OF COMMERCE IN MEXICO
DISCOVER HOW TO USE MEXICO TO BETTER YOUR BUSINESS
‘MOVING PRODUCTION HERE SAVES JOBS AT HOME!’
BY INVITATION ONLY CONTACT USDOC
Huh. I wondered what this was about. I contacted the Department of Commerce to find out.
“This is a three-day conference in Acapulco to assist American businesses and help them grow,” the woman’s voice from the Department of Commerce on the phone said. “It is only open to business owners and executives, not to the general public or the press.”
“I see. I own a small auto parts company in Michigan,” I said, making it up before I knew what I was doing. “How can I get more information?”
She said she would send me a packet.
I didn’t know what I would do with the packet but it sounded interesting. I had been talking to the people in Ralph Nader’s office about coming to Washington to do some work for them. They had two dozen public interest projects going, including a magazine called the Multinational Monitor that did pretty much what its name implied. I told them about this crazy conference happening in Mexico, that it had to be some sort of joke, because why would our own Commerce Department be helping to eliminate jobs here in the U.S. and move them to Mexico?
Here Comes Trouble Page 31
