That got a laugh.
“A lot of these other religions, they have answers. Here, I’m afraid, you just get questions. What can I tell you, we’re Jews.”
Another laugh.
“There are mysteries. I believe. I believe there is God above, somewhere, who made us and watches over us and is telling us what is right and wrong. Yet, I also believe that when people believe in dogma, it leads to violence and death, like the tragedy before us, here, today.”
So, too, did I believe that I was doing the right thing, protecting my family and punishing the wicked, when I kicked the shit out of Tod Timley. But I had, without intent, without thinking of it, sent his fear and anger in a new direction. Yes, I had probably increased it too, driven him from threat into action.
I didn’t need a rabbi to make me realize that. As Tod Timley stepped out of the crowd, in his cheap blue windbreaker, before he raised the gun, I knew and said to myself, my God, what have I done?
The rabbi listed Manny’s achievements, his associations, his contributions, how he did pro bono work, how he raised money for the UJA, Planned Parenthood, and the ACLU. The last two would have gotten him hung at Cathedral of the Third Millennium.
“One day,” the rabbi said, “when Manny was telling me lawyer jokes—they were his favorite—I asked him about the law and about his profession and how he, himself, felt about it. He admitted that the law, like most things in the world today, ends up serving the rich and the powerful. It protects them; it plays tricks for them. Sometimes it does wrong; sometimes it does right.
“But then he said this, and I say, let this be his epitaph. ‘As a Jew, we must hold the law sacred, not merely in the old way, because we claim to be the people of the law, but because we understand that it is the law, and only the law, that stands between us and destruction.’”
19
There was nothing so formal as a receiving line. But the widow stood in the lobby while they loaded the casket into the hearse and organized the cars, and a thicket of black suits surrounded her, saying their condolences. There were red ties and blue and gold. There were shiny leather shoes and the bald spots of serious men, and on their way to the widow, a word or two about an opportunity, a connection, and after they left her, another about a deal, a contribution, support, quid pro quo. There were women with handbags and handkerchiefs, and a lot of dabbing at eyes.
I suddenly found myself next to Jorge Guzman.
He held out his hand and asked, “How are you, Carl?” in a calm, conversational tone. He wore a sober suit. He could have been a cousin in the investment-counseling business. “I’ll miss him.”
“Yeah, me too,” I said.
“I mean personally. Manny was muy hombre, or like his people say, a mensch. The legal thing too, of course.”
“Of course,” I said.
“He was good,” Jorge said, shaking his head ruefully.
“He was my friend,” I said.
“You have no idea how rare that is,” he said. “Not you having friends—I’m sure you have many.” There was always a certain care in the way Jorge spoke, as if he was controlling his accent or making sure he didn’t say anything he wouldn’t want to have played on tape in open court. “I meant good lawyers. Most people don’t know because they only have a lawyer a couple of times in their lives, usually when they close on their house, or maybe when one of their kids gets into a little bit of trouble, so they don’t know how it’s supposed to go. But let me tell you, you do a lot of business with lawyers and you find out how bad most of them are. They file papers late, they don’t read the depositions, they don’t listen, and they don’t know the law. It’s not like on TV, my friend. You know anybody as good as Manny?”
“Not offhand,” I said.
Hobson was staring at us.
“I have got to find somebody. You think of someone really, really good, like him, you let me know.”
“Sure,” I said.
“How about you? Manny was an important client to you. Are you going to be able to make that up?”
“I’ll have to go out and hustle,” I said.
“You ever do business investigations?” he asked.
“Sure,” I said. “Usually I work through lawyers, but sure.”
“Why don’t you give me a call,” he said. He took a card out of his pocket and tucked it into the outside breast pocket of my jacket.
I suddenly got annoyed. Maybe by the intimacy of the gesture, or maybe because I was going to need some new clients and was afraid of what I might slide into working for the front man of the Gulf Cartel. “Look, Jorge, I always need work. But—look, I don’t want to offend anyone—but I remember witnesses disappearing, and juries acting very strange. I’m not a cop anymore, so it’s not my business to do anything about it, but I would have a problem being part of certain things, like if I told you a guy was stealing from one of your companies and then found out something happened to him.”
“I appreciate so much frankness.”
“Oh, you do?”
“Truth is of great value. It’s very efficient. Untruths, even polite untruths, waste a lot of time and energy. If I call you, it won’t be about something that will distress you.” He paused. “I promise,” he said with a smile. “In the meantime, I like to think that a friend of my friend,” referring to Manny with a tone of respect, “is my friend. If there is ever anything I can do for you, call me.”
“What were you talking to that prick about,” Jeremiah asked, intercepting me on the way to the widow.
“He’s looking for a good lawyer,” I said.
Jerry is tall and bland, with the face of a manager, a great test taker and the mind of a Sicilian claims adjuster. He kisses up and kicks down. “Be careful with him,” he said, like he thought he was still sitting above me.
“What are you doing here? I wouldn’t have thought that . . . ”
“That I was friends with your ACLU buddy?”
“Yeah.”
“There’s an old story or joke about some movie star . . . ”
“You’re not usually a guy who tells jokes. How come everyone wants to tell jokes at this funeral?”
“Yeah, well, the punch line, or whatever you call it, was that they went to the funeral to make sure he was dead.”
“Go fuck yourself, Hobson,” I said.
“And while we’re on the subject,” he said, as if I hadn’t said a thing, “let’s make sure the Nazami thing is dead too. Let it go, Carl. Give it a decent burial, and let it go quietly.”
20
Paul Plowright asked me to come see him.
The city is down on the flatlands by the river. To the north, there’s a series of ridges, each higher than the other, until you hit the mountains.
Cathedral of the Third Millennium sits on the first of those heights.
The church itself is a rising wave, optimistic and open. It is anchored to a round office tower to your left as you enter. Like the church, it’s mostly glass, but it has wide stripes of white stone facings that suggest columns.
It’s always lit. You can see it for miles. The beacon in the desert. The shining city on the hill.
The church has a membership of thirty-eight thousand. It employs about twelve hundred. It takes in over $110 million a year. It produces and distributes radio and television programs; it publishes books, pamphlets, and bibles; it has outreach and missionary programs. It has a prison ministry that is now profitable thanks to federal funding for faith-based initiatives. It develops Christian communities that include schools, which it runs. It has a college.
It has its own exit off the interstate, Exit 31, Salvation Boulevard. The average church in America has about two hundred members.
That prompts the question, how did Paul Plowright do it? His answer is that God led him to it. He marks out the story of his younger years as Five Revelations. Though he did not recognize them for what they were as they were happening, until the last of them.
The First Revelation:
His father had an insight of his own. He served in the infantry during World War II and came to believe the most important thing in life was a pair of boots that wouldn’t raise blisters.
Demobilized, he used his back pay and a bank loan to open Plowright’s Better Shoes and Western Boots, with the slogan “We guarantee the fit!” It was downtown, three blocks from the courthouse, until about ten years ago, when real estate skyrocketed and Paul’s brother was able to retire by leasing the space to The Gap.
All the kids went to work in the store starting when they were ten years old. Paul, born in 1948, was the oldest of the four. From the first, he was good with customers and was out front while the other kids were stocking shelves and sweeping up.
When he was twelve, his mother took him to Raab’s Department Store, down the block, to get his first good suit. Chatting with the salesman, he found out that the man got commissions.
Paul told his father he wanted commissions too!
His father said no. They were a family. All for one and one for all.
Paul had never gone up against his parents. This time he did. Something inside him knew that individuals should reap the rewards, and also pay the consequences, of their individual actions. It would make him work harder—he just knew it would. Not only that, if he sold more shoes, the store would do better, and if the store did better, the whole family profited.
It was a twelve-year-old’s intuitive, individual understanding of the difference between free capitalism and collectivism.
There had to be consequences.
The Second Revelation:
His father agreed to give it a try. Paul quickly figured out that it was not enough to just work harder. He couldn’t force customers to buy. He had to work smarter. He had to watch for those moments when they decided to make a purchase, or decided not to.
His father, who had marched across North Africa and Sicily and up the spine of Italy, was obsessed with practicality. Paul saw that selling was about something else. Customers wanted to feel that the shoes made them attractive or special, that they were being ‘taken care of,’ that the salesman was a friend they could trust, that they were getting ‘value for their money’ or a ‘special bargain.’ Whatever that extra thing was, if they weren’t sure they were getting it, they hung back, but the minute they were certain they were getting it, they bought the shoes.
People craved certainty.
The Third Revelation:
Down here, the sixties were still the fifties. The boys had crew cuts and said sir and ma’am. Girls kept their knees together and held out for marriage. When Paul put his hard-earned money into the big adventure of going to an out-of-town college, he was expecting the sort of place where Ronald Reagan was on the football team, wearing a leather helmet and eager to go out and ‘win one for the Gipper.’
The University of Wisconsin in Madison did not turn out to be that way.
“I remember this particularly from my second semester,” he’s said in numerous sermons. “I’d taken Psych 101, and now I was taking a course called ‘Deviant Psychology.’
“Everything that the ‘science of the mind’ had defined as deviant—drug abuse, promiscuity, nymphomania, homosexuality, threesomes, foursomes, and free-sex communes, abortion, women having children out of wedlock and proud of it, defiance of authority, hatred of parents, the public use of foul language, shoplifting, stealing, drug dealing, political unrest, political violence, burning buildings, race mixing, deviant subcultures—was happening right outside the classroom window. Sometimes in the classroom! And it wasn’t being condemned; it was being encouraged, cheered on, celebrated!
“They put up posters of Mao Tse Tung, a Communist, atheist, mass murderer, of Che Guevera, who’d helped enslave the people of Cuba. They made a hero out of Eldridge Cleaver, a rapist, who boasted of practicing on black women before he started attacking white women. His partner, Huey Newton, a convicted killer. Their idols were Jimmy Hendrix and Jim Morrison, self-destructive drug abusers. Like little Jane Fondas, they cheered the Viet Cong for killing Americans in the jungle.
“It was worse than wrong. It was tragic. It was a betrayal.”
He’d always known that America had enemies. His father had gone off to fight the Nazis. We were locked in a death struggle with the Soviet empire. He was certain of the valor of the American fighting man. He knew we could never be defeated on the battlefield.
But these new things did trouble him.
The third revelation was that the thing we had to fear was the enemy within.
The Fourth Revelation:
After a year back home, working, he decided that he was not going to let the radicals and hippies, the atheists and Communists, the drug addicts and sexual deviants stop him from making something of himself. He went back to college. This time to USW. He majored in business. He liked it because it was about responsibility, rewards, and consequences. He minored in psychology but felt there was something wrong with the whole field.
Then he went to the University of Chicago to get an MBA in marketing.
At the university’s world-famous school of economics, founded by John D. Rockefeller, they were reviving classical free market economics. It was a time of intense intellectual excitement, so much so that it was visceral, even missionary.
By contrast, there was an experiment in neosocialism right across the street from the university—vast public-housing projects where anyone could see firsthand the tragic results of the welfare state.
The inhabitants hadn’t worked for their apartments and had no stake in them. So they broke the elevators and the windows, urinated and defecated in the hallways.
The young men joined youth gangs and dealt drugs. The young girls freely gave their virtue away. There were no consequences. They could get an abortion or get welfare money.
Families just disappeared. Nobody worked.
As Plowright saw it, under the guise of “helping the poor Negroes,” the liberals destroyed them.
What he had understood in an individual way as a boy shoe salesman, he now understood as a social issue. The lesson was clear. If there are no consequences, responsibility disappears.
When responsibility disappears, civilization collapses.
The Fifth Revelation:
It was graduation day.
As he sat and waited to go up and receive his diploma, he suddenly saw that it was God who connected it all.
God had selected this new land, and He had given it freedom and democracy so that mankind would have an opportunity to make a fresh start.
Satan was determined to fight back. He was subtle, subtle as a serpent. He invented things like welfare that looked like they were helping poor people but actually destroyed them. He worked through so-called great thinkers, like Freud, who said morality was just repression, so adultery and homosexuality and even children having sex was downright healthy! Paul realized in a flash that “psychology” didn’t work to really explain people because it didn’t have God in it.
Then, the student sitting beside him nudged him. It was time for Paul to get up.
As he was walking toward the stage, he heard a voice.
It asked, “What are you going to do with this fine education? Will you serve something greater?”
He said, “I will serve you, Lord.”
The room became radiant. Paul felt His power and His love.
He kept going forward, unaware that he was doing so, not knowing how, his legs on puppet strings, until he found himself at the podium, the dean of the business school saying his name—he saw the man’s lips move but couldn’t hear him—and holding out the rolled parchment with the ribbon around it. And he was moved by that same master who had guided him there, not just his feet in those few minutes, but unseen through all the steps of his life, to brush past the dean and up to the microphone.
Then and there, impromptu and uninvited—very much uninvited—he gave his first sermon.
“The Lord is calling us to serve
America,” he said, “against godless communism and the insidious destruction of morality and strength by the welfare state. Let us keep this country strong and great. Let us serve the Lord. For whatever we give to him, he will give back to us tenfold by His power and His bounty!”
21
SOUTHWEST MAGAZINE YOUR BEST GUIDE TO AMERICA’S BEST REGION
Path to Power: The Bible-Guided
Rise of Paul Plowright
Like movie stars and rock stars, each of the leading televangelists has a distinct style. Joel Osteen is a high-powered motivational speaker in a slick, silk suit. Pat Robertson is God’s own senator. Jimmy Swaggart preaches the way his cousin Jerry Lee Lewis plays rock ’n’ roll.
Paul Plowright, in person and in the pulpit, projects the presence of a CEO of a major corporation—the type of businessman who gets tapped by a president to be secretary of defense.
What he offers his congregation, above all, is certainty.
His picture was on the cover.
His blue eyes looked straight out from his round face. Age had put a lot of white in his blonde hair, making it the color of a palomino’s mane, and he wore it just a little bit long, his one physical vanity.
He explained to the reporter that as an assistant pastor to inner-city churches in Detroit and Baltimore, and then in suburban Houston, he watched the country’s geography change. “Real Americans were driven from the cities. By real Americans, I mean the people who believe in God and the flag, who make a commitment to their families, who take responsibility for themselves.” And, the magazine reported proudly, they moved especially to the Southwest. Which is why he came home to start his own church. He brought modern business methods and technology to his ministry, did market research, and developed a diversified product line and multiple revenue streams.
The occasion for the story was the last major election cycle. The governor’s mansion, a senate seat, and both houses of the legislature were all up for grabs. The races were intense, bitter, and sometimes vicious. Campaign spending reached new highs. Negative campaigning reached new lows.
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