Some chronology for John Joseph Ray


My Crepe Myrtles in blossom

1975

An experience of California

Before I married Joy, we went to California together.

It impressed me enormously as it was at that time. I particularly liked the efficiency and cheapness of the place. The food was good too: Incontestably the best sandwiches in the world -- and I love sandwiches! Reuben sandwiches, Denver sandwiches, Club sandwiches, Roast beef sandwiches.

I particularly liked the Denny's restaurants and the Arby's roast beef (R.B. -- get it?) sandwiches. And I ”adored" Coors beer.

CA is actually very much like Australia -- but both more grotty and more efficient.

The blacks are a pain, though: Often very aggressive and often amazingly dumb. For about a month I lived just down the road from Watts, the black ghetto, so I know. I also did a later trip in 1979 (to carry out a social survey) when I again lived for 5 weeks in a motel near to Watts. The reason I lived there was that it was cheap. Nobody else wanted to live there!

And when I drove up to the motel in my hired Ford Pinto of an evening, there would always be a woman appoaching me with an offer of intimate services, often at a rather low price. I always politely declined

I went to America open to persuasion either way as far as discussions about blacks were concerned but it was no contest what I concluded. Any honest person would conclude the same. Africans in general are usually just not compatible with white civilization and greatly degrade the quality of life wherever they are.

One of the motels I stayed in had a black as day manager. He was tall, polite, friendly and well-presented. He was one of the too rare "good" blacks.

The room I was to move into had a bathroom in need of tiling repairs. He himself did the repairs. After he had stuck the tiles back on, he of course re-grouted around the tiles. Grout is a form of white cement that is very easy to clean up while wet. A sponge and water wipes away any grout not actually between the tiles.

This black, however, did not wipe off and left the surplus grout on to dry, when it could only be chipped off! And he was one of the good ones! I have never seen the like of it and I cannot imagine any white doing similarly.

There was also a wardrobe with a catch that did not work. To fix that he hammered in a couple of nails (one in the door and one in the wardrobe body) and connected them with a bit of bent wire. Is it any wonder Africa is like it is? At least he tried, I suppose. He really was quite a nice, cheerful man. Not like the sullen louts or glazed-eyed druggies that I more commonly met among blacks.

My mother used to say "There is good and bad in the lot", referring to other groups, and I am sure there are many nice, smart, civilized blacks somewhere but where I was living I encountered none.

It's a pity we have to talk in terms of races at all but that is hard to avoid when such differences strike you between the eyes

Black lives are certainly difficult. There is a site called medium.com that allows people to put up their personal histories, including dating histories. I read it for a while at one stage. And on it you can find the most seething denunciations of black men -- attacks worse than what the KuKlux Klan ever said. And who was it saying those things? Black women! Black men sure seem to give them a hard time. And the thing that really infuriates the black women concerned is that they see black men treating white women far better!

So it's clear that both male and female blacks see race as mattering a lot

It's a sad situation and almost certainly beyond remedy. The only partial remedy for the unfortunate women that I can see would be if more white men took black mistresses. That way the women would get at least some taste of courteous treatment. There are of course some black/white marriages but most of them seem to be of low status white women marrying rich black men.

Joy and I went to quite a few meetings of Los Angeles Mensa and I met a few women there who might have been rather interesting if I had been single.

Generally, however, I find both American and German women hard to get on with. Australian and British women are the ones I understand best and hence like best.

My contact with American law enforcement is very minor but I do think my contact with the California Highway Patrol -- not exactly a much praised body of men -- is instructive. My contact occurred when Jimmy Carter's reviled 55 mph speed limit still applied on American highways. I was bowling along a Los Angeles freeway in my hired Ford Pinto at about the speed I would have used in Australia -- 65 mph. And I had with me my then-wife, "Joy"

A CHP patrol detected me and pulled me over. The trooper approached me very cautiously, sticking close to the side of the Pinto and standing behind me instead of beside me. He was obviously very tense. But when he found that I was unaggressive and perfectly civil to him, he untensed rapidly. The fact that I speak with an accent that Americans usually perceive as British may also have helped. It helped explain my unawareness of California rules. (For the phoneticans, my accent is Educated Australian). We had a perfectly genial conversation at the end of which he waved me on my way without even giving me a ticket.



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E.&O.E.

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