Dave is a vendor who services supermarkets, whom I sometimes speak to on my lunch break at about 3 in the morning while he comes in to write his order. I asked him how the remodeling on his house was going and he launched into a tirade:

"Suffice it to say that I am absolutely solid on the Trump candidacy. It's gotten to the point where I just want to live in an English-speaking country. I moved so far out into the fucking country that if I go any farther I'll be living in Philthadelphia and I still can't get away from it. The light fixtures come damaged, so my wife writes a note ascertaining that the damage was on the manufacturer's end and the fucking haji motherfucker who is supposed to do the install cannot understand English well enough to grasp this and he's flipping out thinking that she's trying to get him in trouble.

"I do have a white man I hired to paint the place but he shows up two hours late and leaves two hours early and fucking brings Mexicans with him who can't understand a word I say. So, yesterday, the guy who I contracted with for the blinds has not called me in a week and I'm wondering where him or his people are. I call him and as I'm having the discussion as to why the fuck he can't get someone to install the blinds I reiterate the fact that I want an American to install them, someone I can speak to, who will understand, who gives a shit! And you know what this motherfucker says, he says, 'Find me an American that will work and I'll hire him.' Well, I told him that Americans want to work for a good wage, not what he's paying these people."

As Dave said this he pointed with his head at our Brazilian floor tech, the hardest working guy in the building, so it was time for me to burst his patriotic bubble—which was kind of shitty of me, being that he is the kind of guy that picks up the tab for men in uniform seated near him at a restaurant.

"Dave, that guy makes more money than anyone in the building, overnight, except for you. I used to manage one of these places. I've signed the work orders, have negotiated with contractors and have coached some of these immigrant floor techs. That guy probably costs the owners eighteen-hundred a week and he gets six of that, which is twice what these full-timers get paid and three times what I get paid. The last white American to do floors in Baltimore for a wage was Danny, back in ninety-two. In ninety-two it was a fifteen-an-hour job when union clerks made eleven-forty-an-hour. For a year black guys tried it and they all quit, didn't even stay on as operators because the work is too hard. Now Rick, the guy that worked out how you do floors economically with this equipment, was white—a racist white dude I screwed out of a contract for picking fights with my black janitor—but since ninety-two everyone using his method in Maryland has been an alien. The Eastern Europeans, mostly guys that owned construction and trucking businesses in their home countries in the late eighties, cashed out and moved over here and were doing floors. But they got into construction and trucking as soon as possible and handed it off to Peruvians and Brazilians who primarily run Salvadoran and Mexican workers."

"If the money's good, why won't Americans do floors?" he said with his hands out and his eyes wide and mouth open.

"Look, Dave, it is not any harder than what we do, but is demeaning. Look at the want ads, its all wait staff positions. Americans are too vested in not doing menial work to be a bartender or waiter, even tough those people make good money. The guy that ran USA Boxing in Maryland did it from behind a bar—made three-hundred a night, easy, because he had your drink there for you the way you want it just before you asked. That's how he made his bread. But his masculinity was asserted as an athletic official, a guy checking the tape on a fighter's hands, saving them from going to the hospital by stopping a one-sided beating. That dude was unusual. I had a business professor tell me to drop landscaping and drain digging from my resume because it would portray my character in a negative light. In our culture the man who works, sweats or bleeds is a pariah. Since America is about dollars and nothing else most people look for their identity in their work and they don't want to be the guy pushing the broom because, back in the day, that guy was a slave: property, and most white and black Americans are descended from slaves."

Dave pointed to his own chest and raised his eye brows, "Me, you're trying to tell me that my ancestors that came to this country were fucking slaves?"

"No, Dave, they were Irish so they were not allowed to fuck. Only black slaves could have sex. If your Pennsylvania Irish forefather got caught dipping his wick he'd get seven years tacked on to his indenture. But yes, he was almost certainly a slave."

"Then who the fuck owned him?"

"A liberal, Dave. And if it was in Pennsylvania he was probably owned by a Quaker who was agitating for the freedom of blacks even as he paid Indians to keep the Irish savages on the plantation."

Dave started, and then turned in a huff as he went to his truck, snarking, "I guess not a fucking thing has changed!"

If you would like James to come to your church and give a motivational speech on patriotism and Christian Identity, contact him at jameslafond dot-com at gmail dot-com.

His book, America in Chains is available via the link below: