Here Comes Trouble - Michael Moore [130]
The newscaster told the story of what happened in Vienna and Rome with a beginning, a middle, and an end—and, even though I had been right there, it was like I wasn’t. Someone who truly wasn’t there—this anchorman in Atlanta, Georgia—knew more than I did! And at that moment I became part of that select group of people from the late twentieth century who were present at an act of terrorism. I sat up on the bed and felt the way most said they had felt on the grassy knoll in Dallas on that day some two decades earlier. You knew something bad had happened, you think you saw something horrific, but it couldn’t be that, just couldn’t be that! And it was all over so quick your brain could not take the images fast enough from the corneas and process them into a reasonable explanation of what just occurred. As there was no play-by-play in Dealey Plaza or at the Vienna Airport, there was no one there to be your narrator, your guide—your calm, soothing voice that could make sense of it all for you. And to comfort you. But you can’t be comforted. Because you did not watch this on a twenty-five-inch screen in a bar in Boulder; you were there. And you are not your own narrator because it’s not a “story” to you—it’s a real goddamned moment of “Am I going to survive?” And what the fuck is going on here? The TV explained it all to me. On the plane earlier I was relatively calm—confused, yes; worried, definitely. But I kept it together, as did everyone else on the plane. We knew people had died. But we also needed to go to the bathroom.
Now, for the first time that day, eyes affixed to CNN, I began to shake, and then cry. Hard. The story on the TV box was more real than the real I had been so close to. I thought about those twenty minutes of the plane being late to that gate. I picked up the phone and called my wife back in America. She had been calling everywhere trying to find me. I was quiet. And then I began to cry again.
Hot Tanned Nazi
YES, SHE WAS HOT. Yes, she was tanned. She had long blonde hair and a sweet smile. What was she doing here?
I walked over to ask her that very question, but at that moment her Nazi boyfriend stepped in (no, I don’t mean her boyfriend was acting like a “Nazi,” I mean he was a real Nazi in a black storm trooper uniform). He took her by the arm and walked her over to his Ford Econoline van, slid open the door, and loaded her into the back so they could, I presume, make tender Nazi love on a sunny April afternoon.
A few weeks earlier I had received a call from James Ridgeway, the political columnist for the Village Voice in New York City. He wanted to make a documentary on the rise of the extremist right wing in the Midwest in the wake of the Reagan recession. The economy was in the toilet for any place that did manufacturing, and Flint, Michigan, was especially hard hit. The various far right movements saw these out-of-work autoworkers as potential recruits for their Aryan supremacist movement. They had a simple answer as to why Flint was beginning to come apart: “It’s the niggers and the Jews!” That didn’t play well with most people, but it did draw enough of those who were at the end of their rope to consider the teachings and preachings of these men.
Robert Miles was the former head of the Michigan Ku Klux Klan. He was born in the Washington Heights section of Manhattan, and if you looked at him you’d never guess he was one of the most notorious Grand Wizards of the Klan. He was soft-spoken, intelligent, literate, and had this disarming New York accent that made him sound more like a priest in a Bing Crosby movie than an avowed racist who spent seven years in prison for setting fire to ten school buses in Pontiac, Michigan, his contribution to trying to halt that