Here Comes Trouble - Michael Moore [135]
“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