Christian Nation

by Frederic C. Rich

  It was not a great speech. I wrote it without having slept for two nights, and the governor, who was also exhausted, extemporized freely. But it worked. The violence in the outer boroughs subsided, and the world watched and waited to see what Jordan would do next.

  Later that day, when families around the country rose from their Thanksgiving meals, President Jordan addressed the nation. I watched the address from a conference room and could barely contain my anger upon seeing his carefully coifed contentment, that slick telegenic face masking a lurid cruelty. Behind him, the triumphant image of the cross in the White House, now on a par with the American flag, reminding us what they had really meant when they said this was a Christian Nation.

  My fellow Americans. Almost one year ago I promised you that by Christmas this year our nation would again be whole and free. It is thus appropriate that on this Thanksgiving Day, the day when the whole nation thanks God, its patron and protector, for all His many Blessings, I can ask you to join me in thanking the Lord and His son Jesus Christ, who have once again shown their divine favor by granting us victory in the Holy War we waged in their name. All fifty states are once again together in this sacred Union. All the state capitals are free. Senators and representatives from all the states once again work together in Congress for the people. By any measure, the battle should not have been so easy. With God’s grace and favor, with His miraculous intervention on more than one occasion, our brave Joshua Brigades—consisting of our finest federal men and women in uniform—retook the rebellious states with a minimum of bloodshed. We thank each of those men and women for their service. And even today, in their finest hour, our troops proceeded to the very shore of Manhattan Island, awaiting only my order to take the last bit of American soil under the control of the rebels.

  My fellow Americans, like you, when I face a tough decision, I turn to the only advisor a man needs, to our Lord Jesus Christ, and to the good book he gave us. And lo and behold, my Bible opened right to Deuteronomy 20, and this is what I read:

  10. When thou comest nigh unto a city to fight against it, then proclaim peace unto it. 11. And it shall be, if it make thee answer of peace, and open unto thee, then it shall

  be, that all the people that is found therein shall be tributaries unto thee, and they shall serve thee. 12. And if it will make no peace with thee, but will make war against thee, then thou shalt besiege it.

  My fellow Americans, I am no longer surprised, but always grateful, when the Bible has a direct answer for every question.

  And so tonight, on this day of Thanksgiving to the Lord, I do what I have done my entire life and career, and seek humbly to follow the will of God. For the last year, I have said over and over to Governor Bloomberg and each resident of Manhattan, peace be unto you. I have come at the behest of the Lord to fight you, but I have offered you peace as the Lord instructed. If you had responded in peace, and offered us peace, then you would have been returned to the bosom of your country in the peace of the Lord. It’s not too late. But you have not made peace with us. You have made war. So the Bible is clear. We shall besiege your island. Effective immediately, I announce to the people of America and the nations of the world that the island of Manhattan is quarantined. Its waters have been blockaded by our navy. Every connection between the island and the outside world is under the control of US forces. No one may enter and no one may leave. No food or other goods shall be allowed in or out. Manhattan is surrounded, just like Jericho was when under siege by Joshua and the armies of God. The prophets, thanks be to God, were right, and it all ends now with a siege against the godless and disobedient. I don’t know whether it will take seven days, like Jericho, or seven months, but I tell you this. Just as the indestructible walls of Jericho tumbled to the ground, everything yields eventually to the power of God’s intervention and God’s favor. Good night, and may God bless America.

  In remarks to the people of Manhattan the next morning, the governor, who had a good sleep and a shave, was in high spirits:

  My fellow New Yorkers. Well, now we know. We know their limits. For the moment, they will not destroy Manhattan. I don’t know whether they are planning on having the arc of the covenant and trumpeters march around Manhattan for six days. I don’t know what their endgame is. But we will prepare and we will resist and we will not surrender. New Yorkers are the toughest people in the world. We will learn how to live in isolation, how to survive—how to be the seed from which this great country will be reborn. It is possible that a friendly nation will come to our rescue. It is possible that America will rise up and defeat Jordan and the theocrats, or dispatch them at the next election. Time is on our side. The president cited the Bible. But, you know, the Old Testament is the territory of my people, the Jews—and I know my Old Testament. What Jordan didn’t tell you is what comes next in Deuteronomy. When the siege is ended, what does the Bible tell them to do? It says,

  And when the Lord thy God hath delivered it into thine hands, thou shalt smite every male thereof with the edge of the sword; But the women, and the little ones, and the cattle, and all that is in the city, even all the spoil thereof, shalt thou take unto thyself.

  And don’t believe that they will do anything else. I have no doubt that every male New Yorker will be smitten. Or that they will take the women and the little ones unto themselves. This is exactly what they will do. So, my friends, it’s clear that we fight not only for our country and our Constitution, but for our lives and for our families.

  The governor set us two priorities. First, survive. Do everything necessary to permit the besieged island to feed itself and carry on through the coming winter and beyond. Second, prepare for the inevitable. The Holies might be hoping for a miracle like the falling of the walls of Jericho, but we knew that if the Jordan administration survived eventually they would need to retake Manhattan in a more conventional way, probably an amphibious attack and street-by-street urban battle. The governor asked Annie Novak, who had led our urban agriculture preparations, to lead the team dealing with food, and I was in the unlikely position of supervising, with a retired Marine Corps colonel, our attempt to prepare an island of office workers to be combatants in an urban war.

  I studied some of the great conflicts of the twentieth century that had played out in the crowded streets of European cities, not unlike the canyons of Manhattan. Most intriguing to me was the Battle of Madrid during the Spanish Civil War because of its many parallels to our situation. The Spanish Republicans entrenched in Madrid saw it as a battle for civilization and promised that Madrid would be the “graveyard of fascism.” On the other side, Franco’s troops were heavily supplemented with criminals and thugs from all corners of the continent. With rich irony, the key battles played out around the faculty buildings at Madrid’s University City. The improbable battle cry of the fascists: “Down with Intelligence.” This wasn’t the Christian Nation slogan, but it might have been had they been more honest. After his victory, Franco controlled Spain for nearly the next forty years. Franco called himself Caudillo de España, por la gracia de Dios, claiming the mantle of divine authority to justify over a hundred thousand summary executions of intelligentsia, atheists, and republicans, by the grace of God. This is what we could be facing, and the end result could very well be the same.

  The long-standing urban agriculture movement in New York gave us the experience and knowledge necessary to grow food for 1.7 million New Yorkers on our small island largely covered by concrete. The day after the siege began, city parks department workers started plowing up all the lawns in Manhattan parks and covered that ground with metal hoop houses—curved pipe covered with clear plastic—creating large shelters for the growing of winter vegetables. The stockpiled soil supplies were hauled to the roofs of larger buildings and also covered with various types of ad hoc cold frames. Every day Annie Novak was on television and radio, as well as present all around the island, coaching tens of thousands of urbanites in the art of sowing and growing food crops. She was assisted by Manhat
tan’s many community gardeners, men and women who for years had coaxed vegetables and flowers out of abandoned and vacant lots in Harlem, Spanish Harlem, and the Lower East Side, now retooled as civil servants, teaching nurses, lawyers, and architects how to grow food for their own survival.

  The city’s food stockpiles, available with the ration coupons that we had printed and distributed nearly six months before, were supposed to be just enough to keep us going through the coldest months of winter. But we were counting on these stockpiles to be supplemented with fresh winter vegetables, including turnips, radishes, cabbage, spinach and other winter greens, short carrots, sunchokes, kale, leeks, and whatever else could grow under the hoops in New York’s cold winter weather. Henhouses became a feature in every schoolyard, park, and green space, and schoolchildren delighted in their daily assignment of collecting the eggs. When late March arrived, every inch of ground—the median of Park Avenue, the bases of street trees, the edges of every playground and dog run—all were topped with supplemental soil and densely planted by brigades of local farmers. Each community board was responsible for coordinating the planting and harvesting in its area, and these famously fractious civic institutions became models of cooperation in allocating public land, assigning farmers, and ensuring an equitable distribution of the resulting produce.

  One day in late April, I walked with Sanjay down Broadway to Bowling Green. It was a warm spring day; the city had persevered through three long months of winter, and we were both in a good mood.

  “Have you noticed,” I asked, “how quickly you adjust to the new look of the city? I mean, it’s been only four months without cars or taxis or buses, and yet I find it hard to conjure up the look of the streets without people on them. I know that Bowling Green used to have a lawn, but now the rows of vegetables look, well, just right.”

  “Yes,” said Sanjay, “and of course there is a certain temporal echo, or historical symmetry, that is pleasing.” Sanjay had learned to speak plainly and simply when addressing the public and the media in his role as spokesman for TW. But with me, he reverted to the more complex locutions that were natural to him. “New Amsterdam was a fort, walled off to the north against the sometimes hostile native peoples. Is it not ironic that this part of the city was originally designed for siege? For self-sufficiency? I cannot remember exactly, but I think that long before it was a place of recreation, Bowling Green was the site of the public well and a food market. And now, after three hundred years, it again serves the same purpose. You know, G, anything that suggests that time is not completely linear has a lot of deep resonance with us Indians.”

  Suddenly it occurred to me to ask him a question I had never asked before. “San, are you saying you believe in reincarnation?”

  Sanjay smiled. “I am glad you are not a reporter.”

  “Well?”

  “‘No’ is the simple answer. But there is a great deal of wisdom in the idea. You know how physicists now think that space consists of ten or eleven tightly rolled up spatial dimensions? It would not surprise me to find that time is also not completely linear. I’ve always thought of time as a bit loopy, in the sense of patterns repeating themselves, the future influencing the past, and other connections between events that defy linear time.”

  “So when we are dead we are dead?” I asked.

  “Are you not content with the wonderful gift of a single life? Yes, our bodies and our minds are dead, but our actions and words bounce around time for eternity. That is something. It is enough for me.”

  We paused to look at the teardrop-shaped park, the hoop houses now gone, revealing neat berms of soil behind the famous Wall Street bull. A few young women were sowing seeds by hand. The atmosphere—without the usual city sounds of traffic—was almost pastoral despite the looming stone-clad office buildings on all sides. Bowling Green was nestled into a notch of large buildings that hid the rolls of barbed wire at the water’s edge and the long line of tanks and guns pointed at us from the other side of the river. It was one of those places in Manhattan where, for an hour, New Yorkers could forget the reality that was just out of view.

  San seemed to be thinking a lot about history. “All citizens of New Amsterdam,” he said, “grew food. Although it is true that the rise of cities required advances in agriculture and transportation, the idea of city as consumer and countryside as producer was a false dichotomy. I wonder whether what we have accomplished here will be noticed and studied. Whether it will change the way other cities feed their people. I wonder, G, if that will be part of our legacy.”

  I had noticed a melancholic streak in San as we emerged from the winter. His mind seemed to be someplace far in the future, looking back. I couldn’t tell whether it was a future where we had won or lost. In any case, Sanjay’s mood probably resulted in part from the fact that there remained little for him to do at TW, and he was constantly looking for outlets for his prodigious energy.

  I remember the day in early December that Sanjay arrived at an office the governor sometimes used in City Hall accompanied by a rather disheveled unshaven man with long blond hair and wearing high-top sneakers, dirty cargo pants, and a black T-shirt. The man stared at the large Joseph Chambers painting of New York harbor that hung in the conference room, and ignored the governor.

  “Governor,” said Sanjay, “please permit me to introduce you to Steve Duncan.”

  Duncan looked up and the governor looked skeptical.

  “Steve Duncan, PhD,” Sanjay added. “From Columbia. PhD in urban history. He specializes in, I suppose you would say, things under the city. Tunnels, for example.”

  “What can I do for you, Mr. Duncan?” the governor asked.

  “I think it’s what I can do for you, Governor.”

  “OK. What’s that?” the governor answered patiently.

  “Well, sir. We have a problem. Yes. Yes. I suppose you know that. I mean not just the siege, but the problem of how to smuggle things into Manhattan. I assume there are people who would send us medicines, parts, food, other things, if they could.”

  “Absolutely.”

  “Yes, well, I know a great deal that the Holies do not. This is a city of tunnels, Governor. We’ve been digging them, using them, abandoning them, losing them, and forgetting about them for a few hundred years. But I’ve been poking around in them—sometimes illegally, I have to say—for all my life. It’s not just urban legend. We live on top of a maze. Beautiful double-barreled brick sewer tunnels; abandoned subway lines; pedestrian tunnels between buildings; half-built railway tunnels; old pneumatic tunnels; ventilation tunnels; water, electric, and steam tunnels—and off to the side of many of them, forgotten access and service tunnels. But you know who didn’t forget about these? The Underground Railroad before the Civil War. Confederate sympathizers during the Civil War. Bootleggers during Prohibition. Smugglers and drug runners. And the mole people. Yes, sir, they’re real. Not an urban legend. And I’m the only one they trust.”

  Sanjay noticed that the governor looked distracted.

  “Governor,” Sanjay said, “we need to think like bootleggers. How do we smuggle product onto the island? We can’t do it by boat. We’ve established that. The navy patrols are continuous, and they have radar, video, and sonar covering every inch of water around Manhattan. But Steve tells me there are thirteen tunnels under the East River alone. And as far as I can tell, the feds don’t know about three of them. Dr. Duncan here has volunteered to coordinate a major operation to bring supplies in through these abandoned tunnels. Our idea is to signal our friends on the outside every night with a different location. There are enough connected access points in Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx, and New Jersey that we can use a different one every night.”

  “And the best part,” Duncan added, “is the mole people. They not only know underground New York better than anyone else, they’re pros at evasion. The police have been after them for years. From spending most of their time underground, they’ve developed a sixth sense. They can tell when someone
else enters a tunnel blocks away.”

  “You’re kidding me, right?” said Bloomberg. “You’re telling me there are people in Manhattan who actually live underground?”

  “Absolutely. I know dozens of them. They’ve been my guides and mentors in my work on underground New York. And they’re on board for this project. If you want to meet one of them, I can arrange it.”

  “And there is even better news,” interrupted Sanjay. “Do you remember, Governor, the repair of the Rondout–West Branch tunnel—the diving crew that lived for a month in a pressurized tube to get at the valve?”

  “Of course. One repair cost the city $500 million, with a 100 percent overrun. It was a nightmare.”

  “Yes. But do you remember what part of that $500 million bought us? Diving bells and so-called pigs—pressurized vessels capable of passing through the water tunnels.”