Here Comes Trouble (42 page)

“Sure, I’ll do whatever you need. I don’t mind interviewing these guys.”

“You mind being on camera?” Kevin asked, double-checking.

“Well, I can’t stand to see a picture of myself, that’s for sure!” I answered honestly. “But I’ll go on camera and mix it up with them if that’s what you want. I’m not really afraid of these whatever-they-are. I live around them. Lots of angry white people.”

I told them the story of the Klan burning a cross in my grandparents’ yard because she was a Catholic and he was Protestant.

“Happy to do what you want me to do,” I said.

“You should think about this before agreeing,” Anne said. “When this movie is out, they may not like it. You have to live here.”

I reminded them that, due to the worsening economy, I had decided to close my newspaper down. I had taken a job in San Francisco, so I wasn’t going to be back in Flint.

“It’ll be OK,” I reassured them. “I think Flint and I have seen the last of each other.”

“Fine,” Kevin said, “just trust your instincts and we’ll be able to capture what you do with them. Let’s just all get out of here alive.”

And so began my foray into the movies. At least for this weekend. It seemed like it would be fun, and I quickly found my groove with my fellow white Christians.

“We are here to defeat the ZOG!” one man explained to me. I quickly rifled through my memory, thinking he was referring to the god in the movie
Zardoz.

“What is ZOG?” I asked.

“The Zionist Occupied Government!” he responded. “That is what we have now—a government occupied by Jews and race traitors.”

Inside his barn, Miles had set up a stage and podium and chairs for different plenary sessions. These were certainly the funniest of the weekend’s events as each speaker tried to out-kook the previous speaker. One man stood up and said that his white power group accepts no members from anywhere south of Milan, Italy.

“We will not take anybody in our clan below Milano,” he said, showing off his mastery of both European geography and the Italian language. “If they’re down below there, they’re not our people. Won’t take anybody below the border between France and Spain. No way.

“We’re more Nazi than the Nazis,” he concluded.

The next speaker stood up and talked about the time he paraded his Aryan group down a main street in North Carolina.

“I yell out, ‘We thought y’all had some niggers down here. Where are they at?’ And we got about two more blocks and I seen where they was at. They were about eight deep on each side of the street and we marched right in the middle of them. But we didn’t have any trouble because they didn’t attack anybody. They just jumped up and down on the street. If you’ve ever seen monkeys when they get excited, how they jump up and down, that’s what it looked like.”

A friend of Miles’s went on the stage with his slide presentation pointing out on a screen how whites would take over the Pacific Northwest, and other races would be given other parts of the U.S.A. after the revolution. This angered a man in the audience.

“I’d have to say it’s the most stupid and ridiculous proposal I’ve ever heard in my life,” he shouted from his seat. “If we’re the Aryan warriors that have conquered the world, why in the hell should we back into some corner of the country? I don’t care how pretty it is.”

This rattled the man on the stage, but he went ahead and asked his wife to hand out the maps to the audience. Clearly things had taken a turn as the place was now in agreement with the man who was opposed to “moving off in some corner.”

“I live here in Michigan,” another man chimed in. “I ain’t movin’ nowhere.”

Things calmed down as William Pierce took the stage. He was the closest thing to a rock god here.

Pierce spoke like an intellectual, and far from turning off this wildly uneducated crowd, he wowed them with his vocabulary and his passion. It must have felt good to have someone this smart (and not Jewish!) on your side. He had a physics degree from Rice University, a master’s from Cal Tech, and a doctorate from the University of Colorado. In the 1950s he was cleared to work at the Los Alamos laboratories. He then went on to become an associate professor at Oregon State.

Pierce spoke eloquently of the need to have their movement use scholarly works and even “racially oriented comic books” to reach new people. There was also a new technology that could help.

“Most American homes will have these VCRs that allow them to play videotapes,” former KKK leader Don Black chimed in. “What we will have is our own private network of video programming.”

For two days the speakers droned on, and just when you thought you’d heard everything, a new speaker would present his theory about how “race mixing is now occurring just by working and breathing too close to the colored,” the scientific evidence that a black sperm fertilizing a white egg is no longer the only way to get “nigger blood” in your body.

“Studies have shown that you can pick up nigger cells just by being in their proximity.”

“You don’t see a turkey mating with a chicken, do you?” one old man asked me during a break outdoors. “Or a dog with a cat? Animals mate with their own. We’re the same way. It’s unnatural any other way.”

At that moment an aroused German shepherd mounted another dog. I appreciated the timing of such an act, and I noticed that Kevin was right on it with his camera. In fact, I noticed that Kevin would film with one eye in his lens and the other eye open, looking for what else may be going on outside the peripheral vision of his camera.

But the copulating dogs quickly went from being a source of amusement to a huge problem.

“Hey!” said one man, “Is that a female, the light-colored one?” He realized that, in fact, both dogs were male. He was now in the presence of gay humping dogs. He was witnessing his first homosexual act, and I felt a sense of pride being able to share its viewing with him.

The other men nearby did not think any of this was funny. To even imply that the
dogs
of Nazis were queer was too much for them to handle.

“Stop filming that!” one of them said. Kevin quickly apologized and pulled the camera away from his face—but was still shooting everything. It took real balls, I thought, to keep that camera on.

We moved over to another area, and I began engaging with more of the participants. I asked some of the young adults what they were doing for work. One worked in a record store, one was in the auto industry, another was unemployed. Their leader spoke wistfully of a time when they would make their move.

“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: M
OVIES ON
H
OME
V
IDEO
H
ERE
!

“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

I
N 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!!”