My oh My

I landed on that mother fucker big country two weeks after the event - the event being two airplanes piercing the phallic power of America as easily and as painfully as date raping. It was still summer time when I started packing my belongings in Portugal and my portugeek friends from Lisbon kept saying that I looked too dark. 'Estás meio monhé', and then they predicted that my tanned ass would be stopped at Newark airport and I’d be mistaken for some mo fo suicide bomber.

I ended up living in Jersey City for a couple of weeks before I could move to a smooth and yet roller coaster existence on the island of Manhattan. Let me open the door of Jersey City for you and cast some light over the life of its inhabitants: from Jersey City you can see Manhattan on the other side of the river, yeah, silver skyline and all those promises of greatness and joy. But it's the other side of a filthy and icy river – if you’re on the wrong side, aka Jersey Dirty Smelly City, not only you need to commute to get to the heart of civilization but you’re living in the midst of the Arab country. Remember back in 1993, when the bearded soldiers from al qaeda first tried to blow up the towers with some crazy ass plan, bombs in the basement, people smoked out of their desks holding to their frappuccinos as if they were baby seals on the verge of extinction? Well, the mastermind of that bomb plan used to live in Jersey City. To make a long story short: I, the dark skin Portuguese man with a Jewish nose, was living in the zone of racial profiling. Every evening on my way back home from the train station I’d walk by the house where the mastermind terrorist of class of 93 used to live and where he planed the attack on WTC. I was afraid that my complexion (a fried calls me: Argelino exilado em Paris) would provoke the diligent police officers and their patriotic duty to handcuff terrorist skinny wrists.

Before I moved to Manhattan I got to know my next door neighbor – an old black lady, slim, elegant, so graceful and eloquent she made Barak Obama sound like that mad Scandinavian cook from the Muppets. She told me that when she was five or six, riding on the bus from school, she was so tired that she sat on the white-people-only seats. Some fancy pale lady wearing gloves and smelling like too much perfume spat on her face and told her to move to the black area of the bus. ‘I was just a child’, she told me on her doorstep.

Yesterday my boy Obama won it, and I ain’t going to quote the man or raise a flag or tell you how important this black cat might be for the world and shit. I noticed that in front of him there was this bullet proof glass fence – someone might try to extinct the black man from the presidency. I thought of my old neighbor being spat on the face by some southern white bigot in a summer dress. I thought about Thomas Jefferson who wrote ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness’, and yet mister T.J. owned slaves. I thought that the US of A is a strange dude full of fucked up contradictions and yet it throbs and moves forward and inspires us like the racing heart of a world record breaker. Yeah sometimes that country is as queer as a two dollar bill and as medieval as a trailer park orgy. But it keeps striving and changing and improving, and that’s more than most of the resign ass people I know can say. Plus – it’s as entertaining as a couple of hookers and an eight ball.

Look, I don’t think this was mainly about race and that from now on there won’t be more spitting on faces or bullet proof glass fences. Humans are mean mother fuckers most of the times. So it’s not about skin color – it’s about vision. It’s about this (ok I lied, I’m quoting the man because he sways much better than I do): ‘To those who would tear the world down: We will defeat you. To those who seek peace and security: We support you. And to all those who have wondered if America's beacon still burns as bright: Tonight we proved once more that the true strength of our nation comes not from the might of our arms or the scale of our wealth, but from the enduring power of our ideals: democracy, liberty, opportunity and unyielding hope. That's the true genius of America: that America can change. Our union can be perfected. What we've already achieved gives us hope for what we can and must achieve tomorrow’.

How do you like them apples?