Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes: Revised and Complete Edition by Tony Kushner Page B

hits the fan you find out how much tolerance is worth. Nothing. And underneath all the tolerance is intense, passionate hatred.
    BELIZE : Uh-huh.
    LOUIS : Well don’t you think that’s true?
    BELIZE : Uh-huh. It is.
    LOUIS : Power is the object, not being tolerated. Fuck assimilation. But I mean in spite of all this the thing about America, I think, is that ultimately we’re different from every other nation on earth, in that, with people here of every race, we can’t— Ultimately what defines us isn’t race, but politics. Not like any European country where there’s an insurmountable fact of a kind of racial, or ethnic, monopoly, or monolith, like all Dutchmen, I mean Dutch people, are well, Dutch, and the Jews of Europewere never Europeans, just a small problem. Facing the monolith. But here there are so many small problems, it’s really just a collection of small problems, the monolith is missing. Oh, I mean, of course I suppose there’s the monolith of White America. White Straight Male America.
    BELIZE : Which is not unimpressive, even among monoliths.
    LOUIS : Well, no, but when the race thing gets taken care of—and I don’t mean to minimalize how major it is, I mean I know it is, this is a really, really incredibly racist country but it’s like, well, the British. I mean, all these blue-eyed pink people. And it’s just weird, you know, I mean I’m not all that Jewish-looking, or . . . well, maybe I am but, you know, in New York, everyone is . . . well, not everyone, but so many are but so but in England, in London I walk into bars and I feel like Sid the Yid, you know I mean like Woody Allen in Annie Hall , with the payess and the gabardine coat, like never, never anywhere so much—I mean, not actively despised, not like they’re Germans, who I think are still terribly anti-Semitic, and racist too, I mean black-racist, they pretend otherwise but, anyway, in London, there’s just— And at one point I met this black gay guy from Jamaica who talked with a lilt but he said his family’d been living in London since before the Civil War—the American one—and how the English never let him forget for a minute that he wasn’t blue-eyed and pink and I said yeah, me too, these people are anti-Semites and he said yeah but the British Jews have the clothing business all sewed up and blacks there can’t get a foothold. And it was an incredibly awkward moment of just . . . I mean here we were, in this bar that was gay but it was a pub , you know, the beams and the plaster and those horrible little, like, two-day-old fish-and-eggsandwiches—and just so British, so old , and I felt, well, there’s no way out of this because both of us are, right now, too much immersed in this history, hope is dissolved in the sheer age of this place, where race is what counts and there’s no real hope of change. It’s the racial destiny of the Brits that matters to them, not their political destiny, whereas in America—
    BELIZE : Here in America race doesn’t count.
    LOUIS : No, no, that’s not—I mean you can’t be hearing that.
    BELIZE : I—
    LOUIS : It’s— Look, race, yes, but ultimately race here is a political question, right? Racists just try to use race here as a tool in a political struggle. It’s not really about race. Like the spiritualists try to use that stuff, are you enlightened, are you centered, channeled, whatever, this reaching out for a spiritual past in a country where no indigenous spirits exist—only the Indians, I mean Native American spirits and we killed them off so now, there are no gods here, no ghosts and spirits in America, there are no angels in America, no spiritual past, no racial past, there’s only the political, and the decoys and the ploys to maneuver around the inescapable battle of politics, the shifting downwards and outwards of political power to the people—
    BELIZE : POWER to the People! AMEN! (Looking at his watch) OH MY GOODNESS! Will you look at the time, I