The Ugly American

The Ugly American
a fragment by The Marginalized Mazola Queen©1997

She arrived at Chicago's O'Hare airport with the rest of the American tourists she'd boarded with in Holland eighteen hours and 3,532 nicotine-free miles earlier. There'd been a delay due to high winds at New York's Kennedy airport, and since they were scheduled to clear customs at Chicago, they were held captive for two hours on the runway in the 747 filled with the stench of one night's twisted sleep and morning breath from 357 passengers packed in the craft for flight 222 from Amsterdam Schipol to O'Hare. Here, it was morning and the light of day came cascading in through the puissant haze of jet lag and jogged memories circulating in her head. She'd fled under the cover of night.

They filed off the plane and approached the yellow line taped to the linoleum airport floor. Following the directions on the bold black and white signs posted on square columns spaced at 12 foot intervals, each 7 feet in front of a customs agent's raised desk, they placed both feet firmly in the middle of a 14-inch inlaid cube on the floor, where they were subjected to a brief visual once-over, then instructed to proceed to the line on the left or the right. She'd been sent to the left and, after all but she and four or five European nationals were left waiting to clear customs, she asked the middle-aged man in uniform blue what the hold-up was, "We need to do a computer check on your visa."

"Visa?" she squinted, incredulous. "Uh," she pulled the tattered royal blue document with the strung out eagle embossed in gold on its cover from her pocket, and said--waving it in his face, indignant, " I am a citizen of the United States, I don't need a visa." The thick German accent lingering like a hangover on her tongue was incongruent with the facts at hand, rendering her obviously European persona doubly suspect to the Anglo-American blue-collared redneck customs agent whose knowledge of German nationals was restricted to what he may have seen in passing on the Hitler Channel when commercials interrupted the game and he was forced to surf through those events in the course of history deemed viewer-unworthy by the Disney and Discovery channels. European immigrants, these foreign, unpredictable elements--unshaven and unclean --were revered in certain intellectual circles where it had become fashionable to drink coffee from oversized, environmentally sound 100% recyclable plastic product cups touting the designer label of Starbucks or Caribou (depending on whether you stood to the right, left or center of a line you dare not cross), but were despised by customs agents and language teachers, and certainly were not welcome in these parts.

What she hadn't known until she'd arrived at the checkout counter in Amsterdam was that the country she was returning to now in the aftermath of ten years' self-imposed exile in Germany was itself caught in the throes of a long-festering race-war, unidentified as such and all the more insidious for that. She'd sought refuge in Germany of all places--Ruth Goldstein with her so undeniably German-Jewish name, eyebrows crowding together to form a bridge across her forehead as if to separate the upper cranium from the rest of her petite, olive-skinned frame -- the "I-like-books-look" encased behind tiny round rims of wire-thin granny glasses served to complete the stereotypical image of the Jewish American princess camouflaged now in the guise of some smart-assed girlkraut coming to sap the life out of the clean-cut, hard-working American middle class.

After ten years as a permanent resident of the Federal Republic, she'd suddenly sensed a surge of sentimentality, and, while she couldn't explain it herself, was stricken with an irresistible desire to return home to that brave New World, the land of the free from accountability and home of the depraved she'd fled so many years before. Even while going through the motions of packing belongings and bidding farewells, she wondered what the point was and finally chalked it up to some Marcus Garveyesque back-to-the-roots urge driving her to do what she knew no one could ever do: you can't go home again. She hadn't known then that the strictures of the politically correct in the land of her birth would bar her from so much as considering anything she thought or did remotely related to Marcus Garvey or Malcolm X. These were Black heroes and their reverence reserved for Black folk; their wisdom, salvation for the souls of Black folk. In the context of the Great American White-Out, there was no room for any white bitch to come along and make heroes of these men. Even the women, like Sojourner Truth, were off limits. It was a Black thing she wasn't allowed to understand much less respect because it jarred expectations, threatened the status quo and tore at the firmament of the racial divide at the core of the American social fabric. In the ten years since she'd left, a kind reverse racism had become as American as white supremacy and Kentucky fried chicken. They met in the middle at Mickey D's, better known as MacDonalds to the mis-placed majority.

In retrospect, she wondered why she hadn't turned on her heels the moment she heard the news. The Dutch KLM clerk, politely speaking German with Ruth who, even without the stereotypical garb that might have identified her as German this side of the Atlantic--dirndels and lederhosen, or socks inside sandals--cast a skeptical glance across the counter when Ruth told where she was headed, "So, you're going to America, are you?"

Ruth responded, betraying an impeccably vernacular Teutonic tongue and temperament, "Ja...wieso?"

"Well, I hear all the fires are out." Ruth was confused and embarrassed--in the hustle and bustle of the move, she hadn't read the papers for a good two weeks and was entirely out of touch with current world events. "Fires....what fires?" she asked, sliding American passport across the counter, "Ich habe seit Wochen keine Zeitung mehr gelesen." The clerk was expecting a drab green DIN document with a Bundesrepublik Deutschland stamp on its cover and was somewhat taken aback by the faded blue presidential seal that crept across the counter -- it did at least explain why Ruth hadn't known about the fires. Americans had to be the most capriciously uninformed people on the planet. You sometimes wondered if they'd be able to identify their own country on a world map. She was amazed that some of those pilots ever made it to Schipol and didn't end up in Tokyo instead, just like Columbus in 1492. But since Amsterdam's economy was fueled to a large degree by tourist dollars brought in by a generation of pot-smoking Americans too young to remember the days of national smoke-ins and "less-than-an-ounce" laws and now came thrill-seeking to a place with marijuana on the menu in the bars and cafes, she maintained an accommodating air of acceptance and the whole incident even managed to assuage her inborn Dutch derision of the German volk, thinking, "Well, at least those fucking Germans read the papers." Secretly, she could hardly believe a citizen of the US boarding a plane for Chicago on May 2, 1992 did not know about the fires blazing in nearly every major metropolitan center of the US. It had been all over the news ever since the white cops had been acquitted in the brutal, video-taped beating of a certain Rodney King less than a week earlier. The clerk put on her very best "have-a-nice-day-demeanor"--something they'd learned in a crash course on how to handle American tourists in Amsterdam--and politely explained, as she might tell a child why it was unwise to cross the street before the light turned green, that the country had erupted under the pressure of racial tensions--that there were firebombs flying and buildings burning all across the country.

Five years later, Ruth wondered why that chapter went down in American history as the "LA riots." Clearly, the incidents had originated there, but the violence had spread like wildfire throughout the country. Maybe what made her wish the fires that blazed in Detroit and Chicago would at least put those places on the map for something other than Jimmy Hoffa, Ford Motor Company, Motown, Al Capone and Oprah Winfrey was the same impassioned regional patriotism for the Great Midwest that had prompted her to board the plane in the first place. "Typically American," she thought to herself in German, "diese Amis"--mitigate the damages by minimizing their scope. Just sweep it under the carpet, pretend it never happened and "have a nice day." It was like applying a band-aid to a severed limb and hoping the pain would go away. But the bleeding never stopped.

Arguing with Americans about America in America had become a matter of routine for Ruth Goldstein, whose self-proclaimed reputation as the Wicked Witch of the Midwest had flourished since her return and, in recent months, had reached the shores of San Francisco and New York simultaneously. Years after her return, after she'd finally found an American journalist who seemed to confirm at least some of what Ruth was seeing and expounded at length on the subject in his latest book, warning of a worldwide fascist takeover at the hands of American money interests, she got into it with a member of the Ba'hai International while standing in line at the checkout counter at Kinko's copy center. The woman was dressed in the latest designer fashion from Dayton's oval room--Ruth suspected the woman had probably plundered the sales rack, even though she really didn't need to do it--gold bracelets bobbled up and down her arm as she flipped the pages on and off the glass plate on the Xerox machine and she finally butted in to the conversation Ruth was having with Sam the sales clerk about how utterly destructive and dangerous life in these dis-United States had become, "Well, you know," she spouted in ignorant bliss, "it's a lot better here than it is anywhere else."

"I beg to differ," Ruth countered and asked, pointedly, "have you ever been outside this country?" She'd hit a nerve--never having needed a US-passport was entirely passé, especially for people in that woman's income bracket. Ruth kept hoping that a careful consideration of empirical evidence might someday jolt her fellow Americans out of the sleepy-time tea state keeping them from voicing the slightest shred of dissent. But, she'd finally been forced to conclude that you can't expect a people whose government was dedicated to a proposition-- not to the facts--to ever look the truth in the face. Ingeborg Bachmann must have been wrong: Humanity cannot handle the truth.

"Well, no," the bobbled babe admitted, turning her attention back to the Xerox machine, "but I have a second cousin living over there and she says the terrorist acts are just terrible."

"Oh?" Ruth raised her bushy black eyebrows, "funny, my friends in Berlin haven't reported any acts of violence even remotely comparable to the Oklahoma city bombing. Not since the American disco in Berlin was bombed in 1986. But even that was different. Those men in the disco had agreed to fight to defend what they thought was right. They were enlisted men. Military service is a career opportunity in this country, not a civic responsibility. We've grown so accustomed to fighting for our rights without so much as thinking that the battle might end in the grave, I guess they probably weren't fully aware of the risks they were taking. And there were only a handful of them-two to be precise, servicemen: career killers, enlisted men. One innocent Turkish woman bit the dust as well. Collateral damage. But 168 people went to their graves in Oklahoma city, 19 of them children. Black children. And they're still trying to prove it was an `olive-skinned' stranger who planted the bomb, not a good old crew-cut American boy whose dreams of becoming one of the few and the proud had finally backlashed into disaster in the heart of America, but--"

It was too much for the dues paying member of the Ba'hai International to take. Flustered, she interrupted Ruth's tirade, proclaiming her allegiance to the faith and the flag, "Well, that's no reason for you to be getting all up in my face."

"I'm not in your face, ma'am, this is a free country, and I'm just exercising my constitutional right to freedom of speech. You're certainly not obligated to listen. Besides, you're the one who butted in on this conversation. I wasn't even talking to you."

The lady left with a flippant, "Yes, this is a free country. Love it or leave it." She didn't stick around long enough to hear Ruth's last laugh, "You betcha," she said, "I do love it, I have left, but now I'm back--live with it or leave it, lady."

After she'd gone, Ruth turned to Sam and said, "I'm starting to think we read different dictionaries because when I say `free' and they say `free' it means two different things--obviously, for them `free' means without cost or responsibility--no strings attached, you know?"

Sam was one of the few people around who took Ruth even half seriously. He sometimes smirked silently and she suspected he was secretly shaking his head. Still, she had to give him credit for agreeing with her on some level, maybe even admiring her courage to say precisely whatever was on her mind. It was something the Europeans had adored. The Americans just chalked it up to poor taste, bad manners or improper breeding. She'd become something of a living legend in Germany, where friends flocked to her apartment for coffee and cake on a regular basis in the hope of setting her off so they could sit back and listen, entertained by her witty rants accented by wild gesticulations and clouds of blue-grey smoke that seemed to emanate not from the ashtrays brimming with hand-rolled pure Virginia tobacco butts imported--untreated--via New York to Holland where they were sold in mind-boggling masses to a people whose cancer rate was about half that of the American population with its fanatical, almost fascist fascination for smoke-free environments, but rather from some inner core at the center of the five-foot-one-ninety-eight pound wizard of words. They'd laugh and remind her, again and again, "Du bist echt ein Unikum, Ruth, weisst du das?"

"All I can say, Sam," she said on her way out the door, "if this was my constitutional guarantee, I want my money back." Sam just turned around and rolled his eyes amicably behind her back.

Ruth's theory was that, as a Jew and an artist, it was her job to piss people off. That was part of the problem: art and politics didn't mix in the melting pot her home had become. It was kind of like the implied separation of church and state: It was something you certainly didn't do openly, if at all, and to proudly proclaim and profess it to be the god-given truth was simply out of the question. She never failed to make a scene at the post office, which was why she bought stamps in books, not individually, because she figured one of these days the police would pop in, cuff her wrists and haul her ass off to jail for creating a public nuisance or being a menace to society. "To this day," she would say to the familiar face at the postal service, "I do not understand how any country that can put a crook like Richard Nixon on the front of a US postage stamp could ever have achieved the status of a world power." Or, "For God's sake, don't give me the ones with the flag on em." Of course, she tended to save that line for situations in which some manicured bitch reeking of Rive Gauche with Republican regression written all over her face was impatiently shifting her weight behind her in line. These "AR's", as she called them--Anal Retentives--were her favorite targets. She sometimes wondered whether the way they waddled their cellulite bottoms could really be attributed to nervousness or if they weren't trying to politely scratch the itch of hemorrhoids bulging out between the cracks--it was, of course, entirely inappropriate to touch any of those private parts in public here. It was better to butt your way up to the front of the line, then high-tail it out of there, race to the quiet comfort of the Chevy Cavalier where you could at least wriggle and squirm in the seat to still the unmentionable discomfort burning between your buns. It was the American way--whatever you didn't talk about or touch would eventually go away.

But the thing that really turned the American dream into an American nightmare for Ruth Goldstein wasn't any of this. It wasn't anything that had anything to do with the murderous reality of living in a city dubbed "Murderapolis" by the New York Times because of its high crime rate while, at the same time, people who called themselves `friends' often revealed themselves to be culture vultures--predatory capitalists trying to tap into something strange and exotic they thought Ruth may be able to provide and still had the gall to ask her if she hadn't been afraid to live in Germany--what with her Jewish name and the rampant rise of neo-Nazi extremist groups you read about in the paper--Ruth had responded by saying that in Germany you had to at least be visibly foreign to be the target of an attack, which she wasn't. Here, all you had to do was work at the wrong post office or attend the wrong school.