There’s a reason I don’t like staying at hostels, and it’s the same reason I should probably do so more often: I always attract the odd types. This time I was staying at a hostel in Chicago, sitting in the foyer, minding my own business, reading a book about fourth-century aristocrats in the western imperial court, when a large, heavy-featured, middle-aged guy deposited himself on the chair next to me.
“Just gonna sit down before I take off,” he said. I smiled vaguely and tried to look busy.
It didn’t work.
The name of this place should have been my first warning
For the next fifteen minutes or so we exchanged occasional polite comments, and I kept my nose in my book. I learned nonetheless that he had hoped to get a dorm bed in the hostel for the night, only to find that none was available. So he had booked one for the next night, and was planning to spend the night in a 24 hour Starbucks, then he would come to the hostel and check in as early as he could. And he would sleep until someone kicked him out. “No-one better disturb me,” he growled, his black baseball cap pulled low over his brow. “Anyone wakes me up, I’ll put a foot in their ass.” Then he started telling me about his haemorrhoids.
It wasn’t long before he was explaining his theory about why America has gone to hell. He was fifty years old, a former factory worker, and unemployed. He had travelled across America and had seen the pollution everywhere. He blamed the British for the terrible state of the country: micro-toxins in the water, emaciated trees where once were virgin forests, the nuclear moonscape that is Nevada. The best of the British had stayed at home, he said; only the worst, the greediest, the cruellest, had come to America. He was Hungarian – 100% Hungarian – and despised the bastard tongue he was forced to speak, when he should have been speaking his mother tongue, or at least German.
100% HungariansBut it wasn’t just the British. It was the Africans, too. The British, of course, were to blame for bringing the Africans over, and starting wars with them. The last time his people, the Hungarians, had fought the Africans, under Attila the Hun in 398, they had beaten them. (Half a century too early for Attila, and his Huns had fought Franks, Gauls, Italians, Burgundians, Goths, Vandals – in fact just about everyone except Africans. I didn’t mention this, of course, as I didn’t want to derail his delicate train of logic.)
Why had America lost its manufacturing base? Simple. The factories had become multi-racial workplaces. (He looked over his shoulder, leaned in close, and explained this part in hushed tones.) People of different colour didn’t get along in the factories. The worker of one colour (i.e. black) complained to the foreman that a better worker of another colour (i.e. white) had called him an offensive name, and the better worker was dismissed. Then the black foreman sabotaged the manufacturing process so that the American-built car went rusty, and the industry was destroyed. He didn’t explain why the black foreman would want to do this, but he did ask me to guess what happened next.
Racial tension
“Hmm,” I said.
“Go on, guess.”
“All right,” I said, “all the manufacturing jobs went overseas.”
“Where?”
“The far east.”
“Exactly.” This is where his logic came to form a beautiful, racist circle. All the people in China look the same, so there is no racial tension on the factory floor between persons of different colour. Quite entranced by this argument, I told him he should write a book about it. He agreed. “People want to hear the truth,” he said.
Racial harmony
The Jews came in for a hard time, too, of course; no semi-coherent rant about why any particular country is fucked up is complete without a mention of the Jews. I can’t recall exactly what they had done. It wasn’t good though. (Earlier in the conversation he had shown me his current reading material – Albert Einstein on the theory of relativity – in order to demonstrate his intelligence. In fact he tore out the back page to give me his email address.)
He had a simple ten-year plan to fix America. First, stop all of America’s wars and bring the troops home – not just from Iraq and Afghanistan, but from Europe, Japan, anywhere else. This sounded quite reasonable, I thought, but then he said that America should also build a huge wall along the Mexican border, and plant mines along it, and I knew we were back in Crazyland. Then America should invest in manufacturing, and build up the military (this seemed a bit contradictory with stopping America’s wars, but never mind).
That was pretty much it. “Give it ten years, and we’ll see where we are.” This was important, for within ten years, he believed, China was planning to occupy Taiwan and provoke a nuclear war with America. He had obtained this information from a retired colonel in military intelligence whom he had met once hitch-hiking, and whose name he could not recall.
At about this point he decided he needed to go to Starbucks and sleep. He rose and shook my hand and wished me well, and left.
Setting the world to rights is a tiring business, that’s for sure.
