We take off from Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport and fly over the Pentagon. Later, we land in North Carolina. In the evening, I eat something that warms my soul. I dip the white, greasy pastry into the okra soup. If I leave the dough in the liquid for too long, I lose it on the way to my mouth. My Dolce & Gabbana shirt already has several stains. The friendly waiter recommends what his mother always made for him when he was sad, and I could use cheering up. He brings me salmon cake, green beans, and cornmeal porridge. I drink the local IPA with it. It runs ice-cold down my esophagus, but stays warm in my stomach. People are laughing in the restaurant, but there's hardly anyone on the street outside. There are no seats available.
The next morning, we're back in the Uber. Our driver is nice. He feels like chatting. We have an hour and a half ahead of us, and there's a traffic jam on the freeway. Like us, our conversation has stalled after our driver tells us that he has a gun in the passenger door in case there is trouble, as he says, and a shotgun in the trunk because he had to go into town and Charlotte is governed by the Democrats. So we try to avoid trouble and have now left the city.
Yes, I prefer the countryside, says our driver after we haven't said anything for a while. But why do we want to go to Davidson College of all places, he asks? It's nice, he admits, but liberal. We want to know what exactly he means by that. His explanations are hard to bear. Between sentences like “They manipulate food so that no one wants to be a man anymore” and “Medication causes trans people to go on rampages” or “My best friend is in the Ku Klux Klan and he has nothing against anyone,” he repeatedly interjects, “But that's just my opinion!” Nevertheless, his worldview does not tolerate contradiction, knows only one truth, and is immune to facts. Free speech is most important to him, he says, and that we in Europe have not learned that at all. When Sonali questions the reliability of one of his sources, he blushes. We can accuse him of anything, he says, and call him whatever we want, but there's one thing we'd better not say, and that is that he is uninformed. As the red slowly disappears from his face, I think about the contradictions between a shotgun and free speech.