profilin'
In between composing anti-semitic diatribes and managing the subscription lists for the state chapter of NAMBLA, I like to relax by taking my mother out for drives. She's 89 and almost gone. I'll be amazed if she's still alive a month from now. We live together, in a trailer in a trailer park. The trailer is falling apart. The people who run the park will be very keen on replacing the trailer we live in with what's called an "Advantage" home. They're mass-produced move 'em once mobile homes. So it's almost a certainty that after my mom dies I won't be able to live here. I have no money, no savings, a junker car, a computer, at a flea market I might be able to scrounge 3 or 400 dollars. Once. We've been living on my mom's pension and Social Security. Running out of money at the end of every month. She doesn't know that because she's pretty out of it, but that's how it is. The phone and cable are going to be pretty nebulous next month even if she makes it through.
So there's that.
Tonight, or this evening, the sun was still up though close to the horizon, we were driving downtown, in this coastal California town, not much traffic, and we saw, or I saw, I didn't mention it to my mom, a young guy, maybe in his twenties, dark-complected but not African-looking, he looked Arabic or Persian to me, though he might have been some kind of South Asian. He looked aware and alert but subtly so, that kind of full-radar thing that blacks used to have so intensely and still do I suppose though I think it's less dramatic in some areas, for some black men. Not for Arabs though I bet. So I saw him, and I thought, "I wonder what that's like."
That's what I used to think about other races when I was a kid, "I wonder what that's like." This is a college town, mostly all middle and upper class white people, blacks were rare when I was a kid and it was a distinct social ranking, now blacks are still relatively rare, though less so, and the social ranking is less pronounced as well. But even in my isolation I can feel the mindless hate of things Arabic especially young Arab males. So as I drove along, for a while , I was thinking about that, how disgusting it is, how wrong, and how it would be to be like the guy I saw a young Arab male walking alone down a street in a small American town. But in the back of my mind was the monitor, the fact-checker, the paranoia meter, saying that it wasn't that bad, that people weren't that hysterical.
Then , when we got home, after my mom watched Raymond, I turned the TV on Fox News for some reason. I think it was the country hip-hop excretion on the ACM Awards show, kind of softened me up for evil input. And it was the O'Reilly Factor, a show I'd never watched for more than twenty seconds before. And of course he was featuring Mr. Ashcroft's Most Wanted list. The 7 evil Arabs among us. And they also said they could be recruiting European-looking young people, who might be traveling with families as a disguise.
So there's that.
