“What do you think happened to Minsk?” Shoboater asked.
“I don’t know.”
“So they got Tremonisha to direct.”
“Yeah,” Ball said, looking down at his beer. He grinned.
“But you were the one who went about bad-mouthing her after Wrong-Headed Man hit the big time. What made you change?” He grinned even wider.
“I’ve matured. You know my play Suzanna, well, it was written at a time when these guys were into a big macho thing. You know, going around bragging about how they knocked this bitch over and that bitch over. Now we’ve entered a new period. I’ve grown with the times. I’m used to working with Jim, but I can adjust, I am adjusting.”
“Yeah. The Jews were the only ones keeping you guys going. But instead of expressing gratitude, the fellas keep coming down hard on the Jews, and commenting on the Middle East when most of you don’t even know where it is on the map. Instead of fighting the Jews, you ought to be like them. They’ve survived all of their enemies, the Assyrians, the Babylonians, the Persians, the Pharonic and Ptolemaic Egyptians, Rome. All dead. In fifty years they will have outlived the Germans, a vanishing race hung up on Föhn. Germany’s population growth is zero. They don’t have the will to continue. It’s as though they’ve been obeahed or dybukked. Günter Grass has written a book about it: Headbirths, or The Germans Are Dying Out.” He kept on yammering about how the blacks ought to be like Jews. The waiter took the plates away. Ball was glad. He was really getting sick. How could Shoboater eat that shit, he thought.
“These blacks ought to save their money instead of loafing around and break-dancing.”
“Brashford said that the reason the Jews came up with monotheism is because they were too cheap to buy idols.”
“You’re still hanging out with him, huh. He hasn’t written a play in over twenty years and the only reason they’re still backing him is because of that long monologue in the middle of his one and only play where the character renounces militancy and the end where that black guy comes out dressed in drag. He knew what he was doing. And then in the epilogue all of the black male bar patrons go off and register for World War Two so’s they could fight Hitler. That’s how the clever second-rate writer got to Broadway. That monologue in the middle and the ending. That’s what got him over. The producers propped him up so that they wouldn’t have to deal with Randy Shank. Incidentally, what happened to him? He was quite a character.”
“He’s working uptown as a doorman at Tremonisha’s apartment building.” Shoboater got a big kick out of that. He thought it to be so hilarious that he didn’t stop cackling for a couple of minutes.
“Serves him right. He alienated the women, the Jews, and now he’s out on the street. All those things he said about the Jews. Now he’s suffering the retribution that eventually catches up with all of their enemies. That Jehovah, or Jah, is the Dirty Harry among the gods. He don’t play. You fuck with his people, he’ll get you. Now you know if he punishes his own followers so harshly, calling the children of Israel harlots and nasty things for disobeying him, you can imagine what he has in store for his people’s enemies. The Jews are the only ones standing between black people and these barbarians from Europe that are over here. What do you think that the Posse Comitatus, the Order, and the other right-wing outpatient clinic is talking about when they say “bleeding heart liberals.” They’re talking about the Jews. Plain and simple. And every year I send one-tenth of my salary to the Anti-Defamation League because they’re keeping an eye on these people who not only hate the Jews but hate blacks too. You can’t depend upon this black middle-class to do that, or the black intellectuals. All of them have become buppies. They spend an hour sometimes talking about condos and these wine-tasting clubs they belong to, or their computers. If it wasn’t for Jewish morality these people would be burning niggers left and right. The Jews went into Europe and civilized these Anglos Nordics and Germans who were painting themselves blue and eating one another. Go read their texts. Read Hamlet— the play that tells you about the Nordic souclass="underline" a cold-blooded serial murderer who kills all of these people because he heard voices. Man, the only difference between Son of Sam and Hamlet is that Hamlet speaks blank verse. And their music, full of killing, like those Wagnerian operas where people ride into fire and things. Man, that’s where this whole idea of nuclear war comes from. When one travels through Europe and visits the museums as I have done”—big deal, Ball thought—“one is struck by the violence on those walls. If violence is as American as apple pie, then Europe provided the oven, because on the public buildings, in the churches, and in the paintings there are scenes of violence. People stabbing one another and hacking each other to pieces, or beheading one another, and when there are no scenes of that they’re killing dragons. Armies clashing and people wrapped up by snakes. They even have these women warriors there, Amazons who are dealing blows to men left and right. It’s all over the place. The most frequent object you see in European art is a weapon. And their stories. Full of murder and mayhem. Man, if the Jews hadn’t gone in there and tried to civilize these people with their blood-thirsty Viking gods, these people would still be on the rampage. And every time there’s a period of reaction against compassion and mercy, these gods start to rumble again. They even named this new laser weapon The Excalibur; they can’t get swords out of their minds. If Judaism hadn’t required those people to renounce their blood-thirsty war gods, the world would have been finished long ago.” The waiter brought Shoboater a tiny cup full of espresso. Ball was on his third Pabst.
“Man, is that all you’re going to drink? You don’t touch your food. I’m on an expense account. What’s the matter with you?”
“I’m not hungry,” Ball said.
“Black people are strongest when they emulate the Jews. How do you think they got through slavery? Those old biblical metaphors, that’s how. They used them. They identified with the children of Israel. That’s how they survived their suffering. Through the gospel they were able to define their situation. These intellectuals who denounce the Jews are making the same mistake that Hitler made.”
“I don’t understand.”
“If Hitler had listened to the Jews, he would have won the war.”
“How’s that?”
“The V-1 rocket designed at Peenemünde was the ancestor of the modern missile. It would have enabled Hitler to strike England and the U.S. with A-bombs. He rejected the A-bomb. Called the theory behind it ‘Jewish physics.’ His wrongheaded bigotry finally did him in.”
“Tremonisha says that Hitler was Jewish and that the reason he hated the Jews was because he actually hated himself, or wanted the approval of white people.”
“She got it all wrong. It was the German nation that tried to become white. You ask a Swede, a Norwegian or a Dane, or an Icelander whether the Germans are Nordic, as Hitler claimed, and he will laugh in your face. I mean, this Nibelungen thing that Hitler was raving about — it doesn’t even belong to the Germans. It’s under lock and key in a museum in Reykjavik. It’s the sacred work of the Nordic people. Written on cowhide, and in different colors of ink. The Germans have too much Tartar blood to be Nordic. The Khans left onion-shaped domes all over Germany, and that is not all they left. Hitler probably had more Mongol blood than anything else; most of those people come out of central Asia. There’s still no hard evidence that Hitler was Jewish, regardless of what Tremonisha says. It was the German nation that went crazy trying to be white; they tried everything, they tried to claim the Greeks, they tried to claim the Egyptians. Nothing worked, and so Hitler came along and said you’re white so often that they believed it, and so for as long as Hitler was in power, every German person stood in front of his mirror and didn’t see himself, but saw a blond, blue-eyed Aryan. Talking about schizophrenia. He had them mesmerized.