Here Comes Trouble - Michael Moore [133]
I was not alone in this thinking. Kevin and Jim suggested we head back to the van and regroup. When we got outside of earshot of the supremacists, Jim expressed the collective sentiment of the group.
“I don’t want to be on camera,” he said to Kevin. “I don’t think any of us should be on camera. It’s too dangerous.”
“The last thing I want,” added Anne, “is for them to know who I am or where I live when this film comes out.”
“I think that’s smart,” said Kevin, concurring with the sanity being expressed. Then he turned to the least sane one of the group.
“How ’bout you, Mike? You doing OK? I like how you interacted with that guy. You feel like doing more of that?”
Kevin, the director, was now casting—and he was casting me as the sacrificial lamb! I had no clue why you would have to worry about people hating you once they see you in a movie mocking the shit out of them.
“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