The Lies They Tell Page 6

  This place, what can I say, makes Germantown look like a nice, cozy neighborhood.

  I enter one of the abandoned properties and am shocked to see the level of destruction. Everything and anything that could have been stolen from here, down to wires and switches, has been stolen.

  I walk around the neighborhood and I see death lurking on every corner. The Last Zone is here, and the train of death is moving fast. How and why is this place allowed to exist in our day and age?

  I can’t answer this question.

  There are countless Western humanitarian organizations, funded to the tune of billions, that send activists all over the world to improve the lot of the downtrodden. Why aren’t they here? Come here, Human Rights Watch. Visit this place, Amnesty International. Issue a resolution, United Nations. Bring your shiny vans, Red Cross. Do something, Save the Children and Save Africa. Fly over here as fast as you can, NGO activists, if you dare.

  Where are those activists and organizations when people die like flies? Are they all Quakers?

  • • •

  My hotel in Dearborn, DoubleTree by Hilton, is offering shuttle buses to downtown Detroit. I jump on the opportunity. There’s no point in driving to downtown and then looking for parking.

  The driver, Matt, tells me that Dearborn is a historic place and that it’s here that Henry Ford created the American auto industry and built the headquarters of the Ford company. Why here? “Henry Ford liked this place.”

  So be it.

  Detroit, he also tells me, used to have eight million residents, but most left and now only about two million live in the city. I like learning history from van drivers. It’s special.

  What happened? I ask him.

  “Race riots.”

  Six million people running away during “race riots” must have been quite a deadly scene.

  “Not like in the Civil War, but bad enough.”

  It’s hard for me to imagine six million people running away from their homes, probably because I’m a bit sensitive to the “six million” number.

  But, hold on! Maybe it did happen, maybe that’s what the Red Zone used to be, long before Jay started calling it home.

  What were the race riots about? Maybe Matt will tell me next time. Now he drops me off at the General Motors Renaissance Center, a skyscraper by the Detroit River and across the river from Windsor, Ontario.

  Yes. Canada is just across the river.

  I don’t cross into Canada. I stay in the United States and enter the Renaissance. I have no idea what I’m doing here. All I know is that this place looks much better than the Red Zone, and that’s enough for me.

  I see some people on a guided tour, and I join them. A woman who seems to be twenty years past retirement age leads us along escalators and elevators, amid GM cars on display. She tells us about the time when America’s auto industry almost collapsed: “The decline started in the seventies, when people started to buy foreign-made cars. But that era is over. Today the Big Three [General Motors, Ford, Chrysler] are back to their old glory.”

  We follow her into a see-through elevator and we go up to the seventy-second floor, where there’s a 360-degree view of Detroit. Lovely. Yes. From here, let me tell you, Detroit looks plain gorgeous. What a rich, beautiful and fascinating city!

  Our guide points to different parts of the city and advises us where we could go to eat, shop, shop a bit more, dine, drink, shop again, see shows, take rides, shop more, walk and shop more. Detroit is there for us, and anything we desire could be ours today. No Red Zone and no Last Zone, only pleasures and beauty.

  These tourists will never know of the Red Zone. I leave the tourists and the guide and walk on my own. Somewhere in the midst of this building, between the escalators, I meet Frank. “The biggest ethnic group in Detroit,” he tells me, “used to be German.” That was around one hundred years ago, but today it’s a different story. “With the exception of downtown, Detroit is 98 percent black.”

  Would be very lovely to see the reactions of the Canadian tourists if I told them this.

  I ask Frank about the Red Zone, but he doesn’t know what I’m talking about. He knows Detroit, extremely well, but he has never heard of the Red Zone. I describe the place to him: It’s like a ghost town, a place for walking dead.

  Oh yeah. Now he knows of the place, except place is the wrong word; places is more exact. In other words: there are many red zones in Detroit. Jay’s Red Zone is not an official name; it’s a name based in reality.

  “What you saw is just a small section of many similar places that exist in Detroit, spread around an area of 139 square miles.”

  That’s huge; that’s too many ghosts.

  In the sixties, Frank tells me, blacks were rioting on the streets of Detroit, burning and looting the city, which caused a “white flight” from it. Race riots. White flight.

  Historians disagree on what happened here in those days, Frank tells me, and some reject the term white flight. But he is from here and this is what he knows.

  What started those riots?

  “Martin Luther King gave his famous speech first here, before he did it in DC. He tried it out first in Detroit.”

  You are referring to the “I Have a Dream” speech, I assume.

  “Yes. After he gave that speech, and 200,000 people followed him, one thing led to another, the streets of Detroit were burning, and the Caucasians abandoned their properties, fleeing Detroit.”

  This Frank is super-PC; he wouldn’t say “whites.” Are you telling me that those “red zone” homes belonged to whites who were running away from the rioting blacks?

  “Yes.”

  In other words, there’s another story here: not that of the suffering blacks that we usually hear, but also of rioting blacks and suffering whites.

  Where was Martin Luther King in all this? American people are always told, by officials and the media, by intellectuals and by various leaders, that King’s movement was non-violent and that a racist murdered him. But somehow the part of the white flight is rarely, if at all, mentioned.

  Personally, I never heard of it.

  • • •

  The Fourth of July starts in just a few hours and I go back to Dearborn, to my DoubleTree by Hilton.

  If you’re curious: the swivel chair in this hotel works perfectly. Almost everything does here, with just a few minor exceptions. For example: the toilet doesn’t always flush. Sometimes it does, other times it doesn’t.

  It’s the Fourth of July in the morning and I need a cigarette. Down near the parking lot there are two benches and a table, a metal structure that is welded together, and two ashtrays are next to it. It’s the smoking section. And that’s where I go.

  I light up my Indonesian cigarette, which I bought a couple of days ago, and soon enough three men join me. They are visitors from Jordan and they want to smoke.

  They are real Jordanians, by the way; unlike me. Welcome to the lepers’ section, I say to them, and they smile in appreciation.

  “America,” one of them tells me, “is a fake place.”

  What do you mean?

  “It’s all fake here. People don’t relate to people, not even to their neighbors. All fake and wars. Who do you think blew up the Twin Towers? America and the Jews. You think that Arabs did that? Who are Daesh? American agents!”

  Of course, when one calls the other a “fake” he’d better be without fault. This is not exactly the case here. These guys are Muslims and today is Ramadan, when smoking is forbidden during the daylight hours. But they smoke, something they wouldn’t dare do in Jordan.

  What’s your name?

  “Ghazi.”

  Nice to meet you.

  “The food here in America,” he goes on, “has no taste. The Americans export terror but they don’t know how to cook.”

  I found myself just the right place to begin the Fourth of July. Now I need to do better. But what?

  The hotel staff gives me a few suggestions and I pick “America’
s greatest history attraction,” as the Henry Ford Museum defines itself. Seems like a good idea, and I go there.

  • • •

  The museum features a gorgeous display of the history of the auto industry. In a section called “Driving America,” I read this: “Americans didn’t invent the automobile, but we embraced it and quickly made it our own.”

  So true! I personally feel it. Yes, I embrace driving and, yes, I make it my own. I can vouch for every single word here!

  “The car,” it continues, “led us to reshape our culture and landscape like no other invention.”

  I think that my constant driving these days, after a life of almost no driving, is indeed shaping me. I’m not sure into what, but that’s beside the point.

  Henry Ford is credited here as the inventor of the assembly line. For him this was the best way to make the car affordable, not only for the rich but for the rest of the people as well.

  Henry’s car-to-all idea was an inspiration to Adolf Hitler, who embraced this idea wholeheartedly. Sadly, this is not the only thing these two men shared in common.

  To put it mildly: Henry was a flaming anti-Semite.

  Among his many activities and possessions, he owned the Dearborn Independent newspaper, which ran articles, and also a series called “The International Jew: The World’s Problem,” accusing Jews of every bad thing under the sun. For years he made public his accusations that Jewish bankers were responsible for World War I and that they killed Christians for their personal enrichment. Following a lawsuit, he in effect apologized for his anti-Semitism, but later on in life he repeated such claims over and over.

  I’m not in the habit of thinking about this Henry, but shortly after entering the museum his history pops up in my brain, and when a guide approaches me to ask if I need any help I ask her to show me the section in the museum that deals with this particular part of Henry’s history. The guide, a nice lady, looks at me in total disbelief, as if I had just asked her to commit a major crime.

  “What did you ask, again?” she asks. I repeat the question.

  “I am not aware of what you are saying,” she replies. “I don’t know anything about that. But, if you want, you can use our help screens. If there is anything to what you say I’m sure you’ll find all the necessary info in our computers.”

  She gives me a card to be used with the research computers on the floor.

  Great!

  First, I have to register with the system, which I do, and activate the card, which I also do. That done, I can now start using the most authoritative database about Henry Ford in the world.

  Fantastic!

  I start my research. I put “Henry Ford and Jews” in the search area and I get this: “This search returned no results.” I try “Jews” and I get the same response.

  I give up and walk around until I reach a big sign, “With Liberty & Justice for All.” This must be interesting. I go over there, and another guide approaches me. Would I like help? Yes, with pleasure. Could you direct me to the section that deals with Henry Ford’s anti-Semitism? I ask her.

  She gives me a sweet, innocent smile.

  Were you never asked this question before? I ask her.

  “No. Nobody has ever asked me this question.”

  It’s a historical fact, as far as I know –

  “My husband worked all his life for the Ford company and he never mentioned anything about it.”

  I give her a friendly smile, one of my more stupid ones, and I ask her: Is this the first time you’re hearing about it?

  “Since you put it in those words: Yes, I heard about it. But not here.”

  Do you know why they don’t deal with it here?

  “Here it’s all ‘hush hush.’ Why are you interested?”

  I’m a journalist.

  “I didn’t say anything. Don’t quote me. It’s between you and me.”

  I won’t use your name.

  “Then it’s okay.”

  Why don’t they –

  “Here we talk only about positive stuff, not about problems.”

  But this is not exactly true. This museum does deal with this country’s problematic black history. It features, for example, Martin Luther King and Rosa Parks.

  In Rosa Parks’s case they even have the actual bus on display here. Rosa Parks became famous in this country for refusing, in 1955, an order by the bus driver to give up her seat in the front of the bus for a white man, which was the law of the land in those days. I go on the bus and ask for the exact seat Rosa Parks was sitting on, and then sit in it.

  Within minutes another lady from the museum comes by to help me with my historical Henry question. I’m inside the bus, she’s outside – and we chat. The guide, of a higher rank than the guides I’ve encountered before, tells me that there’s a reason the issue of Henry’s anti-Semitism is not dealt with in this museum. No, it has nothing to do with trying to hide anything. The reason is much simpler: the Henry Ford Museum is about cars, not about history.

  I’m sitting on Rosa’s seat, correct? I ask her.

  “Yes.”

  Hello. I’m Rosa, not a car.

  She feels like a total fool. “I don’t know what to tell you,” she says in a low voice.

  And this is how it works in the Information Age, as our era is often described: Henry was a nice, pleasant man and Detroit is a city of stores and restaurants.

  Good.

  I get off Rosa’s bus and move on to look at some exhibits. As I walk around I see a chart titled: “Population of Detroit, 1900–2010.” Here I read that at its height, in 1960, Detroit had a population of about 1,800,000 and that in 2010 the population of Detroit was less than 700,000. These are different figures than the ones I was given by Matt the driver. Somehow I think that on this issue, the museum got the history right.

  At Greenfield Village, which is part of the Henry Ford Museum complex, the concert “Salute to America,” in celebration of the Fourth of July, is about to take place. Thousands of people have shown up here, and we are treated to musical compositions such as “None So Beautiful as the Brave.”

  This event is a “salute to our troops,” a speaker at the podium says.

  If you dropped from Mars into this place you’d think that America is in the middle of a huge war, and that its survival is at risk. “Our troops.” Salute to our troops. Beautiful Braves. I never think of “our troops” in New York, but this is not New York. This is Michigan.

  The people here are in a celebratory mood. Some carry the American flag and some wear it – a hat in the image of the flag, or a shirt or pair of pants. Almost all the people here are white.

  But not everybody is happy. A young employee, with not a trace of a flag nor a hint of happiness, arouses my curiosity. I approach her.

  What’s cooking, girl?

  “Welcome to the Land of the Free!” she says, sarcastically. “This is the Henry Ford Museum. Do you know who Henry Ford was?”

  Yes. A Nazi sympathizer. But the other girls wouldn’t admit it.

  “True. During training they teach us that if a visitor asks about Henry Ford’s racist history we should say that we never heard of it. We have to pretend to help the visitors and we give them research cards to research on their own, knowing full well that they won’t find anything.”

  Where can I smoke here?

  “Nowhere. We are outside, but you can’t smoke anywhere. Land of the Free. Where you from?”

  Europe.

  “I wish so much to move to Europe! We have new healthcare, you know, in this country. In theory it sounds so good, but in reality it’s a whole different story. My husband used to have a good healthcare plan. Everything was included and no additional expenses. Not anymore. Since the new healthcare took effect, the insurance companies make us pay more because now they need to subsidize the Obamacare [the Affordable Care Act, which President Obama pushed through Congress and which is considered his “signature” legislation]. My husband and I are $20,000 in debt, which
we incurred in the last two years in medical expenses. Healthcare? I want to leave. I’m sorry I dropped this all on you, but it just came out.”

  What I’m learning here today is immense. The Henry Ford Museum, a mainstream giant, is shamelessly engaged in spreading lies. In the enlightened age of the twenty-first century, nobody says nothing.

  Where is Abe Foxman when we need him?

  • • •

  Michigan is not a small state, and so I keep roaming within its borders to get over its Ford. I reach Frankenmuth. Sounds and looks Germanic.

  Am I finally going to meet the Germans? I shall see. Frankenmuth celebrates Christmas all year round, and as you enter it – we are in July, to remind you – you are greeted by a big sign: “Merry Christmas.” And as you drive through, you feel as if you were in a Bavarian village on Christmas – only the signs are mostly in English, and Santa Claus, America’s favorite grandpa, is presented in very large scale. Frankenmuth’s specialty is Christmas goods, as becomes ever clearer while walking through here.

  In Frankenmuth they serve German food and the waiters are dressed very cutely. The girls at the restaurant that I go to, the Bavarian Inn Lodge, look like an exact replica of the Nazi-era photos that featured beautiful German girls greeting Hitler. I can’t believe this image comes to my mind.

  The food here is good, if you care to know. At this very moment they serve brunch, buffet style, and I get myself a bread pudding that reminds me of home, wherever that home is, and a mouth-watering cherry strudel, a little bitter and a little sweet, just as I like it.

  But enough about food. Let’s get spiritual.

  Today there is a “Patriotic Prayer Service,” which is to take place at the largest building in Frankenmuth, the Festhall. About four thousand people attend, which is almost everyone that lives in Frankenmuth.

  In a brochure printed for this occasion, I read:

  We are glad you’re here today!

  We welcome you to this special time of praise as we worship God and the gift of His Son and for the blessings we enjoy as citizens of the United States of America. This is also a wonderful opportunity for us to honor all who have served our nation and those who continue to protect the freedom we so deeply cherish.