The Perverts Paradise
By Mathew Maavak
(I decided to write this exactly the way I felt when this incident occurred. If the contents are offensive, so was my treatment at the hands of Austin’s airport thugs).
I was about to leave Texas and once more, I found myself slouching on a bench near the State Capitol. The park was immaculate, and the building never seemed to lose its magisterial magnificence.
“May I sit here?”
I was a tad surprised. He was Texan in his late 50s and I was a little suspicious at this accosting. Strangers rarely do that anywhere, when there are empty benches nearby.
“Sure.” “Nice place. I come here everyday. It’s beautiful.” The man looked more Texan than any Texan, but the accent came from another world.
We exchanged pleasantries. He introduced himself as Karim S., an immigrant from Teheran, and was glad to hear I was from Malaysia. “I like your Prime Minister, Dr Mahathir. That’s something I heard many times before. Are you a Muslim?”
Not for the first and certainly not the last time, I explained. No, I was not Catholic either and neither am I protestant. I was groping for the words “Antioch” and “patriarchate” which made him wonder whether I was an Armenian hybrid. But we moved on to other topics.
He was delighted that I knew a little about Iran, and exchanges over Cyrus, Xerxes and Persepolis followed, and an interesting historical discourse over the beautiful women from the Bakhtiar clan, who according to Karim, traditionally supplied women to the king’s bedchamber. All my attempts to trace their lineage to the old Bactrians came to naught due to the linguistic barrier. Occasionally I would help along with simple words like kitab Iskandar (Alexander the Great) and Injil.
We proceeded to the Aryan link. Iran stood for Aryan when India was Aaryaa varta (Land of Aryans). These two nations still hold the cultural mantle of the Aryan race. This is amply proven by Avestan and Sanskrit texts, long before the Nazis, KKK and George Prescott Bush made a mockery of the meaning of “Aryan” (Noble). The conversation was refreshing and the man’s ethnicity made it more so. My mind drifted off to old Nehemiah who had served Artaxerxes table. It was a beautiful thought, not one of subjugation but that of a noble king who allowed his enslaved subjects to rebuild the holy city of Jerusalem. In the perverse times we live in, Iran will be repaid with treachery, no matter how highly King Cyrus is spoken off in a bible that didn’t find it fitting to mention Alexander by name, except through allusions that are hardly flattering.
This is the great vandal of history, now eulogized as a great leader, who destroyed the enlightened Persepolis, and arguably, their great pairidaeza (paradise). Alexander’s present day martial beneficiaries, guised as “true Aryans” are still at it. Aryans? I wanted to laugh. Before parting, we exchanged a Payande Iran. There was one farewell advice. “Make sure whomever you marry understands you well. Your mind is very good,” he smiled, giving me something akin to a thumbs-up.
That means she should be able to understand this “live wire punk who seldom gets his hair done right, when he is not a 3am owl thinking of new ideas.” Fact is there are more women who understand me in a society where men of power get to know promising young individuals through male-volent bootlickers who’d gladly apply their saliva to another pair of dirty shoes, each time a top head rolls. And we dare complain that the West is conspiring against us, whenever we lose out on something…anything?
It’s no wonder I get a frequent advice like this: “You do not belong here. You should seek greater challenges abroad. A young man with your capabilities …”
When I hear this too often from accomplished individuals who equate humans with (collapsible) gilt-edged stocks, here is what I want to say:
I do not belong anywhere and there is no place to go except swim upstream, pausing here and there since the days of Ur. I am Jacobs’s son; I have no other identity. No torrent will blight my destiny. Beware!
Only a complete duffer would put on his thinking cap and reflect on Ur - in Texas - when he should don a Stetson and learn life’s struggles at a rodeo show. It distracts your mind from pondering over fallacies, fallacies and more fallacies, made more depressing by the fact that you get trapped in it from time to time. Alexander was Great, Saddam was a “friend” (pre-1991) and George W. Bush is a true Christian. I had enough of political commentaries. The Adventures of Matt the Hare seems a more invigorating literary pursuit.
The next day, I was on my way to the Austin-Bergstrom International Airport for a flight to Seattle. The airport is “international” coz they have one or two flights to Canada and Mexico. I lit up one of my last cigarettes before stepping in. My cousin Joe suggested that I check in my luggage while he finds a parking space for his swanky Honda coupe. The people at the ticket counter weren’t pleased to see me but I was used to that by now. After getting my boarding pass, I was told to check in my luggage. That’s when the trouble started.
To make life easy for these paranoids, my only hand luggage was Georges Lefebvre’s The French Revolution. The guy manning the scanning machine made no pretense of his racial dislike. A humiliation was on the cards. He would tail me like a diseased leech till I before I boarded the plane.
Before loading my bags into the conveyor belt, he graciously warned that the powerful X-Ray machine would destroy films rolls inside. I should take them out. As if a real terrorist, with a mission far more costly than a roll of films, would care. You are hunting for terrorists this way?
Stupid ape!
I had no choice but to dig into my bag for the camera, in full view of others who glided by – without any check - while this guy kept peering tactlessly into what was inside. After a few minutes, I found it and my cousin who turned up to watch the spectacle seemed a little embarrassed. I think a question or two was directed at him. I was thinking of those who escaped this moron’s attention throughout this time. Fantastic security!
I didn’t want to stay long inside the airport and took the opportunity to say the perfunctory valedictions outside the airport. I couldn’t concentrate on what Joe was saying as the monkey was standing behind us, pretending to exchange something on his walkie-talkie. He kept looking at us, intently, as if the building might blow up any minute, making him miss that paid tryst to his senorita in Guadalajara.
Someone like this would be generously endowed with a cluster of neurons the size of a pea - dangled by a strand of infected gametic cells lodged in the wrong place (Is this why some males do not think with the right head?) This brain has limited functions. It has an inordinate preoccupation with the moustache, regarded as a true manly symbol. The other function involves stalking, and this skill is honed when the body is instructed to tail a wife around Austin. If she is seen talking to a neighborhood grocer, those neurons take on an autonomous function, instructing hands to beat the pulp out of her. Perhaps that’s how he got a job here; those little incidents make a great resume. Call this prejudice, a result of anger, but White Americans speak a lot about this breed. Not to forget well-qualified Asian women who have had their Latin romance turn sour all because they discussed business with a colleague over coffee or something like that.
And if the US national statistics on this matter are a blatant lie, blame it on George W. Bush who is planning to welcome more of them to vote him in, and of course, create a permanent underclass of cheap laborers. If some people think life is stacked against them, then try comparing the achievements of newly arrived Tamil or Cambodian kids and the Mexicana ones ten years down the lane. The statistics don’t lie in this case. My cousin may not have noticed but the presence of this ape who was making my blood boil.
Herr Amigo. Wir sind nur kleine Fische! [1] (We are just little fish). That’s something our cosmopolitan wannabe UTA-scholar would understand too well.
There was going to be big trouble from this tall, almost white mongrel. The other passengers were breezing through without getting an eye-lid batted and if there were any terrorists who looked like Karim or a blonde-haired blue-eyed Lebanese then it was going to be Mission Possible everyday. Or Dress up as a Rabbi, flashing your Anti-Defamation League card as your photo ID, and nobody will dare harass you here.
Joe told me to check in early, as in “your case, things might be different.” He was right. As soon I walked in, there was queue of passengers being handed plain green, orange and red cards. Rather unfortunately, I was standing behind a young man who looked Indian. If he had a green card, they would have to let him go, as the sight of both us being groped at once was not politically correct.
When his turn came, he flashed a card that looked green to me; it could have just been the UTA student ID. I don’t know. There was another Indian ahead, but he had a suit and was traveling first class, and no American airline is willing to tick off their top revenue earners, terrorism or no terrorism.
Ini mini myni mo! Do I get the red or the orange?
I would have got the red if this were a real international airport. That mongrel had left his detective work outside and was ready at the frisk-all-you-like corner. So, it must be the orange, and orange it was. After taking off my shoes, my belt and even my Routledge classic, I was asked to stand at a cordoned area, separated from the other passengers by belt-like ropes. Would Kunta Kinte understand how I felt? No, he wouldn’t. That’s just fiction, judging by his descendant’s reaction.
Sensing my discomfiture, some of the staff in there started giggling. One was a tubby little porch monkey. That burnt the last straw, something I referred to in Part 2 of this series. My anger was murderous.
Screw your Louis Farrakhans and Jesse Jacksons and that dumb White House picaninny who got her National Security Advisor post coz she sanctioned this racial profiling. I wonder where she got that slight, very slight, brown hue.
The other sniggering lady was an anemic Shiksa, who, if she had volunteered for an SS Lebensborn stud farm long back, would have got a quick ticket to Auschwitz instead, where the embarrassed SS officer at the train station would have barked a crisp links for fear of being taunted by his Jewish prisoners.
There was nothing incriminating in my book and shoes but the pervert needed his thrill. The cordon belt was lifted and I was taken aside for a body search. Now, nothing I had seen on TV compared to this. It was deliberately slow and deliberately humiliating. He was passing an electronic wand all over me, a couple of times, even over my book, which I wasn’t sure contained any “coded terrorist messages”. On and off, his eyes glanced at my crotch, more out of phallic insecurity than any terrorist concern, I am sure. If he wanted a closer scrutiny, I could have obliged with a burst of Uric Acid on his face. The anger was now uncontrollable and the mind does think of some strange, nasty things at a moment like this.
I wanted to tell him that while my ancestors received the Oracles of God on Mount Sinai, his were Neanderthals who were still swinging from trees to trees. I wanted to tell him that I came from the oldest, yes, the oldest Christian community in the world, while he became a Catholic after some spent slut was ravished by an unwashed Spanish Man of War.
Matt the Hare would have to wait. The political commentaries will resume. The struggles of my hero, the Patriarch Jacob, kept popping in my mind. The purported Davidic lineage, which, I didn’t care much as I never like the great king for some reason, was now my undeniable heritage. His sword was gleaming; there were pagans to reckon with, yet again. David was poetic with his uplifting words; I will spit out the damaging ones. That’s the effect of rage.
The charade went on. The tiny studs – there were just four or five - on my cargo pants were given a closer look, not once but over and over. My butt must have looked good and I wanted to disgorge some methane on his face. I am pretty sure I did. And then, it was my shoes, the made-to-explode variety from the posh Richard Reid label. This went on for a long time, a poke here and there, a grope on my hips, a command to stick up ‘em airport style, reminiscent of the crucifixion, and a repeat of the same commands.
This esclavo was likely taking out his envy on someone whose ethnic brethren formed America’s second richest community. They'd rather use their cunning and ingenuity rather than whine about “poor educational opportunities” and “lack of affirmative action”. We are better at beating the odds. Prejudice is no barrier and no affirmative action is needed.
But there is nothing new under the sun, as historians say. This man, pale and almost white, reminded me of old Rome’s barbarity. My people were marked out for extermination when the first barbarians arrived from Portugal five centuries back. Joas de Castro, the Portuguese Viceroy in Goa in 1548 had remarked that the Roman Catholic sword was wielded “mainly against the centuries-old (St Thomas) Christians of Kerala (India)”. They were more preoccupied with killing fellow Christians than Muslims in Malacca, again showing you what religious solidarity meant then and now. Or for that matter, the “Clash of Civilizations”.
This was not Rome’s first attempt at slaughter. They tried this before at places like Masada and no qannai was going to let this slight go away easily. You can forgive your brother 7 X 77 times, but you certainly don’t “cast your pearls before swines.” Animals only learn some things the hard way, when you place a steel claw that cuts into their scrotum each time they turn sadist. For every slight like this, one needs to avenge 9 X 11 times. Since there were two airport incidents, that would be 9 X 11 X 9 X 11 = 9,801.
Only after that, will I settle down to pure literary pursuits. Did the Justice Department order this treatment again? Like I am enamored of this dump so much as to jump over barbed wire fences like this mono’s parents? After what seemed like eternity, I was waived through. He had all the time in the world to let real terrorists, if there were any that day, to pass unchecked.
That only happens in a bogus war on Terror where racial profiling provides a nice pretence of tight security and a reminder that the “War President” is keeping White Americans safe. And he lets the dung of “Aryans” do the job.
If I had explosives stuffed onto my body, my anger itself would have totaled this building. I needed a cigarette and could only smoke outside the airport. I was warned that I would have to go through the same security checks again. While I smoked outside, our tall monkey tailed behind.
Hundreds of thoughts flashed through my mind. I am getting this torture all coz I was visiting:
1) My favorite Christian Evangelist
2) My Seattle-based girlfriend. (Chronological order)
These were two individuals who gave me hope during my darkest hours, and they are Americans. Undeniably, you still get the best in America!
With each puff, my options were getting better. Lets see, I have heard of traitors in lands far away, of shady American business practices I personally recorded for a future date, the chain of command at US multinationals that ends up somewhere very interesting, the transaction-enabled surveillance that tracks down targeted individuals anywhere in the world, a novel way to counter the Patriot Act, and many, many more that a fertile mind can think off. I didn’t learn psychological warfare for nothing. And it’s nice to be underestimated all the time.
I returned inside and the pervert sensing this, hurried to his favorite spot. Another monkey, this time the porch variety, wanted to see my passport. He kept looking at my Japanese visa, and when I offered to show him the US one, he asked, “But what’s the difference?”
Because, you ape, anyone can forge a document in Kanji which you can’t read. A US visa can be verified instantly if you are so concerned about terrorists. You are after real terrorists, aren’t you?
I got the Orange card, and faced the same frisky Capitán Pervertido again. This time, I wanted to dictate terms, if possible. My book and camera were X-rayed again. The magic wand kept hovering. It beeped. I had forgotten to take off my belt. I took it off real slow, like how this man would, I suppose, when he is having his romantic preamble with that senorita. He was slightly pissed. The wand went off again. This time it was some coins, which had “Liberty”, stamped on them. I wanted to laugh. This is American “liberty”?
The wand sounded off again. Now, it was my parker pen. I gave it one hard look before handing over to that guy who grabbed it. Now, he was holding back his anger.
“Have you taken off everything.”
I am not your puta Amigo! That's your mother!
“I think so.”
The wand went off again and I think this time it was my cigarette lighter. No terrorist plays this game, but he wasn’t giving up. It would hurt his masculinity and watching senoritas would laugh. Finally the wand could only settle on my studs, and the butt was given a scrutiny, and so was the crotch. He wanted more, but I was getting cavalier, a smile was appearing on my face.
That little psychiatric data must be right. How else do you explain white grandma’s getting strip-searched? Or European women, “whiter than snow”, who endured something similar? This is a pervert’s paradise, fit for the maggoty refuse of warmongering “Aryan” thugs. With the benefit of hindsight, and speaking relatively, Alexander must have been a truly great leader.
Pervertido was now checking my camera, giving it dorsal, ventral, horizontal, and what-not look. Like the great commander George W. Bush, I think, he even looked at it the wrong way. My shoes were poked in many conceivable ways, the way a carnicero tries to fob off meat taken from a dead cow to assure a desperate slum dweller. You can call these traditional instincts. I was told to go.
I repeated the slow motion routine. I pictured myself in this simian’s cheap shoes. Must dress up slowly after those passionate moments to impress that senorita, even if that belt takes two minutes to buckle. The shirt must be tucked in right. The shoes should take longer. He was now holding back from smacking me, and the earlier incident at Dallas airport was nothing compared to this. My behavior seemed very odd. Every Third World thrash like him, or his parents earlier, are dying to get here. And here I was showing the least reverence for my US Visa. This must have alarmed him a little. He shot off to pick the first white guy that passed security. The white man protested. “I’ve got to catch a plane in half an hour.”
Gee, what happened to that two-hour waiting period? “I am sorry, sir, this will be quick.” Ahh, our esclavo is being apologetic. Brave hombre.
The man protested again. The disgust on his face made our tall simian a little frightened. The check was as perfunctory as my pleasantries earlier; it was a farce to show that security measures here were indiscriminate. I need not add that the redhead got off earlier than me, even if my preening took some time.
There was one final reminder that this was the American south. Another mongrel, who checked the boarding passes gave me one long scowl before I entered the seedy plane, seated of course next to a black guy and an Asian Indian. Minorities are now usually grouped together on US flights.
It’s only when I reached Seattle that I would forget this for a long time. It was a lovely place and the people were pretty friendly. In fact, when I was leaving Seattle airport, a lady security officer advised me to file a complaint over my Texas ordeal. A burly officer at Chicago’s airport said likewise. They even told me to write about this account! From what I have seen, the civil war fault line still runs between the American North and South.
March 30, 2004
Copyright © Mathew Maavak 2004
[1] Most of my free time in Austin was spent reading William Manchester’s The Arms of Krupp. Hence the heavy usage of German phrases, that uncannily fit well into my Texan experience.
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