In The Future, Everyone Will Be A Nazi For 15 Minutes
Amazon’s new series ‘Hunters’ doesn’t take its villains very seriously
I lived in Astoria, Queens for many years. It’s a tight-knit immigrant community that sits underneath the Hells Gate Bridge which carries trains over the East River and into Long Island. The neighborhood, at least when I got there in the late ’90s, was mostly Greek, with some Italians, Turks, and assorted Eastern Europeans mixed in. The neighborhood was a true ‘melting pot.’
When I moved there I was the first Texan many of my neighbors had ever met. Slowly, over the next ten years Bangladeshis, Moroccans, Mexicans, and more people like me would show up — educated runaways from America’s red states.
I became a productive member of the community: I bought daily bread from the local bakery, fresh feta from one of the Greek supermarkets, and I would get blindingly drunk at a local dive bar staffed by off-the-boat Irish women.
Then, one day in 2007, I woke up hungover and on my way out to find something greasy to eat I saw that a swastika and the word ‘asshole’ had been written in permanent marker on my mailbox, and only my mailbox. I am not Jewish even though I like to think I’d be a sexy young Tevye in a production of Fiddler on the Roof.
