My wife left me six months later. For a year I was too distraught to take a more than abstract interest in current events, which I tried to look at from the point of view of the 25th Century, so I simply wondered what else could you expect from a people who still ate meat. My faith in God had cracked when my wife left our nation of two. Six months later my mother, the last person who could re-enforce my Christian belief systems, also died. But I didn’t consider her saved.
A year after my wife left me, I signed the divorce papers, and called up the local rabbi to confirm something that would have possibly upset my mother. By Jewish law, I am a Jew, and eligible for Israeli citizenship. I also quit my job because of anxiety attacks. I went to see a doctor about getting medication for bipolarity, now that I no longer wanted to please a Christian Scientist. I started taking medication and, lo and behold, I stopped hearing God speak to me.
I think you might understand why I consider “faith” a dirty word.
I found myself in a world where, despite the propaganda, I had a reasonable doubt there were “weapons of mass destruction” to be found in Iraq. As I told the fellow who said he’d fight if he was called, I had supported #43, but now, I could no longer make that act of faith.
Instead, I was making an act of faith so small I could pass it off as self-therapy or an act of community. So I continued to stand as the cars drove by with their “Viva Bush” signs pressed against the passenger windows so they would not have to see us, hearing the cries of “Get a job!”
A state trooper passed by and flashed us a peace sign. One of the other reasons I had come to this demonstration has a news teaser on the
“Criminals,” Jonnie said, “they’re talking about us. That’s it, I am going.” He spent the night trying to make a sign saying “J’Accuse” before his medications kicked in. I arose the next day, but he was dead to the world when our ride arrived, and didn’t make it.
A woman shouted at us from her car, “Are you pro-life?”
“I am pro-life and pro-choice,” I hollered.
“She didn’t get it,” the woman next to me said.
“I would respect the anti-abortionists more if they extended the right to life beyond birth,” I said, “but try to get that message across by hollering.”
More cars pass, more signs posted as statements of faith, doing their job as blinders so we need not be seen, as if the passengers were the mythical ostrich. “Viva Bush” “Viva Bush” “Viva Bush”, they pass.
When the redlight halted them, I started to chant. “Viva la muerta!’” “Viva la muerta!’” The women standing by me join in. In a conga-line sing-song we all chanted “Viva la muerta!’” “Viva la muerta!’” Then a woman shouted at us, “You can’t sing in Spanish! You aren’t Hispanic!”
The young women with me were shocked. They had never heard anything like that, but I remember signs that said WHITE ONLY, and I remember invisible lines of caste that said speaking Spanish was beneath us. I remember my Grandmother’s continual embarrassment at being mistaken for Spanish, and I know my families’ dirty little secrets.
“Are you Hispanic?” one of the women on the street asked the Republican in the SUV. She didn’t look it, and I couldn’t hear her reply, if any. Was it old white shame that we descended to using the language of the lower classes? If she was some Hispanic rica herself, then it just goes to show that the more things change, the more they stay the same, and scum always rises to the top.
I remember my super-ego telling me when I was ten, “You are a white male American, and people like you rule the world.” My reality principle insisted that was more of a cause for shame than pride, and my ego felt great guilt at what a shoddy racist conscience I had. I started to work on building a better one, but I knew my enemy and the guilty roots of self-righteousness. Whatever her ethnicity, I gave the advocate of linguistic segregation a parting shot on her own battleground. “I’m part Mescalero,” I shouted, “my people have been here longer than any of you.”
Those are the dirty little secrets. My mother’s people hid the fact they had been Jews, and my father’s people hid the fact they were “half-breeds”, or so I believe, based on the second hand testimony of my parents. Both halves of my ethnicity strove to hide the fact they “passed as white.”
My mother claimed her people had been Christian Scientists since 3rd Century Georgia, and she didn’t acknowledge the significance of our ancestor’s name “Abraham Weiner.” My father never gave me the straight story on his grandmother’s tribal origin until he used it to try to top me after I told him I was a Jew in the maternal line. But then, my grandmother’s cover story had been really colorful. In her version, her grandfather was a peddler with three wives, one in Texas, one in Kansas, and a squaw for the road.
If either story is true, then either my great-grandmother or her stepmother were the last people in my family to be slaves.
Finally the crowd thinned out, and we did the same, proceeding to the Democratic rally in Mesilla. As we wandered about looking for the site, I told Friar V. and the young lady driving us the story of how Jonnie and I had found New Mexico Southern University one evening. We made the wrong turn off the freeway and were lost in old Mesilla, so I told Jonnie…
“I am going to try holistic navigation,” an idea lifted from Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency by Douglas Adams.
“What’s that mean?” Jonnie asked.
“It means I assume that person,” I said, pointing to the car in front of us, “is going where I want to go.” I quickly turned to follow the unsignaled maneuver of my target. “Now, I don’t want to frighten them, and I don’t want to lose them. I appear to be in their blind spot. That works for me, unless they make an unscheduled turn,” I said, by which point they moved without benefit of signal one lane to the left into the turn lane, and I followed them with a screech of tires across two lanes of traffic and in the teeth of a yellow light.
“Twain, what are you doing?” Jonnie wailed.
“I’m assuming they are taking us where we want to go. It’s an experimental act of faith, but it’s worked for me before. It’s gotten me to the freeway from inside DFW when I had driven from Dallas to Ft. Worth without being able to find it,” I said. By then I had followed my guide around another unsignaled turn. Their car sped up, and so did I.
“Twain, you’re making them paranoid,” Jonnie tried to appeal to my good manners.
“The paranormal does make you think something’s out to get you, Jonnie. Until we disabuse ourselves of our illusions of causality, it can’t be helped!”
“Twain, you’ve got to stop this. Not only are you scaring those people, but its ridiculous to think it will work,” he said as I beat another yellow light around a corner, “and there’s the University!” he added in the same indignant tone of voice.
“Turn here,” he insists, still afraid of the fright I am giving the people in the car I am following. So I turned aside as my target drove on into what proved to be the parking lot next to the hall we were looking for.
“Did that really happen?” Friar V. asked.
“Yep, and Jonnie can tell you it worked again when I used holistic navigation to find Ardovino’s.” I have every expectation it will work for me again in the future, if I have occasion to use it. The world is a mysterious place, but despite Douglas Adams getting that one right, I haven’t been able to fly by falling hard and missing, nor do I believe that Adams meant George Bush when he said the answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything was 43. Wait, did he say the answer was 43, or 42? It was supposed to be what you get when you multiply six by nine.
In any case, Bush is neither the Answer nor the Antichrist. He doesn’t have the international support for it. His leadership does remind me of Holistic Navigation, though. His followers simply assume he is leading them somewhere they want to go.
