saying the photo is “history, not hate.”
Nonmacher doesn’t express any hatred for Iranians, or even any awareness of who they are. The issue for him isn’t Iran or Iranians. It’s his right to do whatever he wants in the restaurant he owns. And, it turns out, it’s also his protest against the modern world that has taken his little rural crossroads and made it another piece of plastic suburbia.
The National Iranian American Council (NIAC) has launched a campaign to try to induce Nonmacher to part with his poster, seeing it as a sign of intolerance.
Nonmacher, 67, owner of Nonmacher’s Bar-B-Q restaurant in tiny Katy, Texas, will hear nothing of the sort.
He was interviewed at length last week by The Houston Chronicle.
During the interview, the phone rang and a caller asked if he’d taken the poster down yet.
“No,” Nonmacher responded flatly.
“You’re just a useless cause,” the voice spat out anonymously.
“Thank you for your opinion,” Nonmacher said calmly, slowly hanging up the phone and going back to cleaning his glasses.
This is how it’s been ever since a customer’s outrage at the 32-year-old poster drew media attention, several hundred calls voicing both anger and encouragement from all over the country, and dueling protests.
The poster depicts what is supposed to be an Iranian man—albeit wearing an Arab headdress—hanging from a noose, surrounded by armed men in cowboy hats. “Let’s Play Cowboys and Iranians,” reads the caption, a non-very-subtle invitation to lynch Iranians.
Nonmacher says the poster was given to him in 1979, during the hostage crisis. The poster stayed up after the last hostage was freed more than a year later. It stayed up, just to the right of a framed photo of John Wayne, as it yellowed and curled under three decades of dust and barbeque smoke, and gradually became part of a collage of memorabilia, mounted deer heads, rodeo ribbons and faded Polaroids on a peeling wall.
Through the decades, a few customers made comments, Nonmacher told the Chronicle, but nobody made an issue of it until two weeks ago.
Nonmacher says he doesn’t understand the furor. It’s history, he says, not hate. He refuses to take it down, as some demand. He isn’t the kind to adjust to the times, he says. His place is a tiny, seven-table “hole in the wall,” as he calls it, that touts “old school” barbecue. They don’t do chicken, or credit cards, and they close on weekdays at 7:59 p.m., not to be confused with 8.
Lisa Falkenberg, the Chron-icle reporter, didn’t see Non-macher as a hate-filled man, but rather as an old-timer resisting change, including the modern view that good citizens do not make disparaging remarks or jokes about entire races, nationalities or ethnic groups. When Nonmacher grew up, jokes about “Wops” and “Kikes” and “Nips”—Italians, Jews and Japanese, for he uninitiated—were standard fare.
But now such talk is banned in good society. And much else has changed in America—and also in Katy, Texas—since Nonmacher put that poster up.
“That was a soybean field across the street,” he reminisced as he chatted with the Chronicle, not realizing that soybeans are a very modern crop that displaced those the original Texans raised.
“The geese would land over there throughout the day,” he said, pointing to a slab of concrete that now houses a Taco Bell, a Burger King and a shopping center.
“Back then, it was just very, very simple and easy. It was real America back then.”
Back then, Mason Road, which runs in front of his restaurant, was all of two lanes wide. Now it is eight lanes. The small-town feel and familiar faces have gone the way of the rice fields. The onetime hinterland haven is “nearly to the point of being inner city,” Nonmacher said with obvious unhappiness.
Nonmacher says he respects the rights of those offended by the poster to voice their complaints—and also their right to buy their barbecue elsewhere.
He sees the groundswell of support that’s come from as far as Hawaii, Alaska and a soldier in Iraq, as a demonstration of people’s frustration at being told what to say, how to think. They’re feeling stretched, squeezed, used and tread-upon, he says.
As far as Nonmacher is concerned, change may come knocking at the door, but he doesn’t have to let it in.
“It says Nonmacher’s Bar-B-Q,” he says, pointing to the sign above his place. “And I figure, I’m Nonmacher. And I can do things the way I choose.”
But last week, Nonmacher did go for some change. He took down the offending yellow post-er, only to replace it with a fresh new copy, lest somebody try to make off with the original.