On the opposite side of the political spectrum, Harry “Hurry” Linneament had his moments, too. Like an angry bulldog who goes around chewing on every piece of furniture in the house, even Hurry (in a more extreme case, on rare occasions, even Shawn “Not So” Mannily) would occasionally get his teeth into an issue that wasn’t purely a thinly veiled partisan infomercial. Linneament would shake it and growl over it and run around the house with it, and you’d come home to find, I don’t know, pieces of your television remote scattered on the carpet. But at least some of the time he took on the big issues, though he and his carefully screened callers (“I’m such a huge fan, Hurry!”) could seem, to my critical ear, totally lacking in compassion for those less fortunate. Whereas you’d turn on America Free Radio and Wendy Shriller would be cackling about Colonel Alowich’s penny loafers, or helping to spread a rumor that Margie Maplewith had run up a big bill at the Victoria’s Secret store in the Mall of Idaho. Essential things like that.
But here I am again, waxing sarcastic. What it comes from, probably, is my own frustrated ambition. I’m willing to admit that I am envious. Throughout my adult life, all I’d wanted was to be nightly anchor on a big station. Boston. Atlanta. New York. To bring Big News into the homes of millions of people.
So consider this an apology for taking easy jabs at the creature we depend on to tell us how the rest of humanity is behaving. Consider it a prelude to my report on the third from the last week of the campaign, the week in which Jesus’s people took to the airwaves — and got slaughtered.
Here’s the play-by-play:
1) Batting first: Dukey McIntyre on the Lenny Queen Show.
Whatever you think of Queen, he’s been doing what he does for a long time, and he’s a pro. Like Linneament, he wasn’t pleased at being thrown a crumb instead of the frosted cake, but he took what he could get. The Jesus-for-president story was the kind of thing that comes along once in the lifetime of a talk show host, so they ended up making a big fuss, in advance, announcing that Queen had landed an exclusive interview with Jesus’s deputy chief of security and the CEO of Scorched Earth Protective Services, Ronald McIntyre.
Despite this hype, it took Queen himself about half a second to size Dukey up. Loose cannon that he was, Dukey went on the show wearing a camouflage T-shirt under a black leather jacket—the ultimate in tough-guy apparel, as far as he was concerned. For the first twenty minutes, Queen fed him a series of softballs right over the middle of the plate, “So, Mr. McIntyre, tell us, what are the special challenges involved in protecting a candidate like Mr. Christ?”
And Dukey bunted every one of them right into the dugout. “Well, Mr. Queen, the special challenges is that you have your scum everywhere, your loose screws, you know? My boys and I, well, let’s just say we’re not hesitated about using what has to be used?” As he concluded his sentences on the interrogative upturn, the serious grown-up face he’d affected during the first part of his answer would suddenly desert him. Dukey would look up at his famous host from under his rust-colored eyebrows like a second-grader waiting to hear what his dad thought of the two boards he’d nailed together down cellar.
A few minutes from the end of the interview, Queen hitched up his suspenders and made the mistake—at least I thought it was a mistake—of resurrecting the homosexuality issue. He did it in a roundabout, gentle way, alluding to the attacks Justin Dreaf had financed, ads featuring an open closet door behind our man, perhaps the glint of an earring. Dukey had street smarts, if nothing else, and he saw right through this question. “Listen,” he said, and he could not keep himself from jabbing a finger at Queen across the table where they sat. You could see Lenny’s big rectangular head jerk back two inches, the glasses slide even further down his nose. “Listen, this is the most BS thing ever, I’m tellin ya, okay? The next person, I’m tellin ya, who starts calling our man a fa —, who starts calling him a homo, deals with me. Get it?”
Queen got it. His producer and technicians got it, too. The camera left Dukey’s face and never returned. For the last two minutes of the show a visibly shaken Lenny Queen rambled on about “the unusual situation we have here, a first in American politics, of protecting a candidate, already the target of an assassin’s bullet, who claims to be Jesus Christ. Folks, we’ve seen nothing like it.”
He limped to the end of the interview without mentioning Dukey’s name again, and made a phone call to Zelda the second it was over. He let her know that he wasn’t happy, he’d felt threatened, and that he’d give the campaign none, zero, zilch in the way of coverage the rest of the way in.
One out, nobody on.
2) BATTING SECOND: My parents on the Harry Linneament Radio Show, coast to coast.
Linneament, who didn’t often have guests in his studio with him, led off by saying this to my father: “Mr. Thomas, my understanding is that you are a member of the Hebrew faith, and that—”
“I’m a Jew,” my father interrupted him.
“Fine, a Jew, if you will. Tell me, how is it that a Jew comes to be working on the campaign of a man named Jesus Christ?”
“I’ve been straightforward about it from the start,” my dad said. “Ask anybody. To me, this guy is the best guy for the job, that’s all. In this country we’re not supposed to pay so much attention to what color somebody is, what religion he is. To me, this guy is a rabbi, a teacher, and he’s smart as a whip. Gutsy, too. Exactly what we need in the White House for a change.”
“So the religious differences don’t bother you? The fact that your people consider Jesus to have been merely—”
“He’s a great rabbi,” my father said. “I stick by that.”
“And, Mrs. Thomas, tell us, how is it, exactly, that you came to serve as a key advisor on this campaign? You have a degree in political science, I understand?”
“I’m a mother,” my mother said. “I don’t have degrees in anything. My son got involved. Like any good mother, when he asked for my help, I went forward with my arms wide open. I’m a Catholic, by the way, and I raised my children in that faith.”
“But it’s preposterous, isn’t it? I mean, with all due respect to you two—you seem like friendly, intelligent, good people … and they’re big fans of mine, besides, folks, so I guess the intelligent part is obvious, heh, heh.… But, number one, how could you really believe that this man is the Jesus Christ? Number two, that he’s come back to earth. Number three that he’s come back to earth to run for president of the United States, of all things!”
“It’s a matter of faith,” my mother said. “You’re the one who’s always talking about God and the Bible. Well, put your money where your mouth is.”
“I’d like to say I don’t believe he is God,” my father had to put in. “For the record.”
“But, and forgive me, ma’am, I direct this question to you: In a time of grave crisis, you are asking us to trust our lives to someone who seems to have almost no past, who certainly has no political experience that we can find a record of. The country is unraveling from within, and being threatened with destruction from without … and you are asking us to elect a young, unmarried, unknown?”
“It’s a matter of faith,” my mother repeated, using the tactic she had used with my father for forty-two years. It had always worked with him, and she saw no reason why it wouldn’t work with Hurry Linneament. She would simply say the same thing over and over until she wore him down. “Plus,” she added, “unmarried isn’t such a bad thing. A lot of marriages don’t work out these days. Plus, it’s a matter of faith.”
“But faith in what?” Hurry blustered. His rich voice was going squeaky. Plus, he’d been married five times.
“Faith in God,” my mother said.
“Or in a good man,” my dad put in. “A teacher.”
Things went along this way for much of the hour, a stalemate, it seemed to me. I was lying in bed listening on the hotel radio, eyes closed, right hand wrapped tightly around my lucky hole-in-one golf ball. Linneament would shoot an arro
w; it would bounce off my mother’s shield. Another arrow, a bounce off dad’s hard surface. I wasn’t displeased. But then the show was opened up to callers, and one after the next we got things like this: “I’m a good Catholic, Mrs. Thomas,” Jane from Maryland said. “A real Catholic. I think you should take note of the fact that the cardinals have not acknowledged this so-called Jesus. You never mention that. If the cardinals and bishops don’t say he’s God, how can he be God?”
And Robert from upstate New York: “Hi, Hurry, I’ve been a fan of yours since you started, way back when. I thank God every day that we have a voice of truth in this troubled land, but I have to say that I’m surprised you’d have these liberal screwballs on your show.”
And Eddie from Wyoming: “We don’t suffer fools gladly out here, Hurry, as you know. In the next election, I’m thinking of claiming to be Buddha or something, and I’m running for Senate. Can I give you a Web site where your listeners can send donations?”
Hurry gave this comment a big belly laugh. By the end of the show, according to my dad, my mother was in tears; my father felt personally insulted, tricked even. “I would have punched him in the mouth with my good hand, if I thought it wouldn’t have hurt the campaign,” he said to me.
For days afterward, Harry Linneament got a lot of mileage out of repeating the words “on faith,” in mocking tones, whenever the subject of the Divinity Party, climate change, dark-skinned people living in poverty, or the New York Times came up.
Two outs.
3) BATTING THIRD: Mother of God.
Roger Popopoffolous, I have to say, treated Anna Songsparrow with a good deal of respect. With the exception of Anne Canter (sitting in for Corker Lobbits, who I thought was the prettiest mature woman on television and who’d switched over from public radio years before because the money was better and she was no fool), Roger and his colleagues asked her straightforward, substantive questions—about her ideas on universal health coverage, inner city crime, the drug problem, the state of the public education system, terrorism, Native American living conditions—and she gave answers that were long on sincerity if a bit short on detail, often making reference to the way things had been done in Navajo society many generations ago. The third or fourth time she mentioned her grandfather, the famous wise man and chief, Ms. Canter (who’d written a nasty best seller, and who cultivated a reputation for meanness) could no longer take it. In fact, every time Songsparrow mentioned tribal values, Canter swung her long blonde hair this way or that, rolled her eyes, and winced painfully, as if someone in the room had opened the door of a refrigerator in which an uncovered dish of baba ghanoush had been rotting for weeks. At last, she could not remain silent, “Ms. Endish—or perhaps we should call you Mrs. Christ?”
Anna looked at her a moment, and then said, “We Navajos trace our lineage through the mother.”
“Ms. Endish then, I’m going to say something to you I haven’t said to anyone in twenty years of reporting. And in those years, I have been in the company of some unsavory characters. I think you are a phony. A fake. I think your son is a fake. And I think this charade has gone on long enough. My feeling is, Roger, that, come Election Day, the American people are going to realize they’ve been taken in, and they are not going to entrust the fate of their country, their family, and their children, to the hands of a charlatan.”
“You’re welcome to your opinion,” Anna said evenly.
“That’s it?” Canter snarled. “That’s your reply? I’m welcome to my opinion?”
“I wonder if we could talk about the issues,” Songsparrow said quietly, “instead of starting fights with each other.”
Popopoffolous tried to say something, but Canter was flustered and upset, and she liked starting fights: “This is the issue, I would argue. The central issue is the authenticity and experience of your son, your running mate, whatever we should call him. Excuse me, but we’re not talking here about a race for reservation dogcatcher, for chief of the casino. We’re talking leader of the free world.”
It was a big slip, even for Anne Canter. So big that Popopoffolous reached out and put a hand on her forearm, something no one had ever seen him do. Canter reacted to that in something like the way the president of Germany had reacted to a former American president’s impromptu neck massage.
The camera went to Anna Songsparrow, who was not blinking. “I would suggest,” she said steadily. “I would suggest, and with more respect than you’ve shown, that a tribal chief embodies many qualities that would be invaluable in a president. Foremost among them is the responsibility of protecting his people—not only physically but spiritually … to use a word you will perhaps dislike. He is additionally responsible for fostering a spirit of unity among what can be diverse personalities. Of seeing to it that the aged are respected and cared for. That the earth is respected and cared for. That some sense of history, of the value of tradition and ritual, is passed on to the younger generations. My grandfather, for instance, had the experience of being surrounded by a hostile force that wanted nothing more than his people’s extermination. Clearly, in these times, that kind of experience and those qualities are not only desirable in a president, they are essential. My son understands this, not only as someone who is part Navajo, but as a man of mixed heritage, in a nation of mixed heritage, and as someone who decided to run for this office, not for personal gain, nor for egotistical reasons, but as a gesture of ultimate self-sacrifice.”
The table of talkers sat in stunned silence, partly at what Anna Song-sparrow had just said, and partly at the way she had said it, without a tremor of recrimination, calmly, surely. All Anne Canter could do was press her lips together in derision, look away, and brush her long blonde hair out of her eyes with two fingers. There were a few awkward seconds of silence, something no TV or radio host likes. At last, Popopoffolous broke in and said, “George, a final word?”
Tapping his pencil on the desk, George Bill hesitated, then shocked his host, his guest, me, and I suspect, about forty million American conservatives by ending the program with this remark: “I’m going to do something I’ve never done either, Anne. I’m going to quote John the Baptist: In the Gospel of John, chapter 1, he is reputed to have said this: ‘I confess I did not recognize him.… Now I have seen for myself.… This is God’s chosen one.’”
Songsparrow triples to right.
4) BATTING CLEANUP: Patterson Wales on the Bulf Spritzer Hour.
I think Bulf is a decent guy, but he can never quite convince the viewer that he isn’t ecstatic about being in the limelight. People probably said the same thing about me, and no doubt with good reason. Like me, Spritzer is a professional, and in Wales, at least, he had someone who wasn’t going to jab a finger at his chest, someone who, if he couldn’t swim very well, at least understood that the political waters are deep and filled with sharks.
“What’s the real story here?” Spritzer started off, bluntly.
“The real story,” Wales replied, “is that the American people are seeing the candidate of their dreams. A guy who’s smart. Guy who’s compassionate. Guy who’s unfettered by special interests. A man whose campaign has been financed by people who believe he can save America. The real story is you have a unifier on your hands. People are so used to fighting that some of them don’t know what to do with that.”
“Fair enough. That’s spin, that’s what we’d expect you to say.”
“It’s the—”
“But isn’t it true that we would prefer to have the same qualities in a candidate with a less … inflammatory … name, and one with more governing experience?”
“Sure,” Wales admitted, “because that’s what we’re used to. That’s the best we think we can do when it comes to political figures. But he is who he is. He’s not going to change his name or what he believes. He’s not made that way.”
“But is he claiming to be God?”
“Ask him.”
“I would, if I could get him on the show.”
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��Well, other people have asked him.”
“And what does he say? This, it seems to me, is the central issue of his campaign, is it not?”
“The central issue of his campaign is unity, kindness, compassion—not for some people but for all people.”
“Three issues there,” Spritzer noted. “And you didn’t answer the question.”
“Which was?”
“Which was, Mr. Wales, is he God or not?”
“He calls himself the Son of Man.”
“A classic cop-out. Is he God or not? The nation wants an answer.”
“I think you want the answer, Bulf.”
Wales said this with a smile, but when the camera turned to Spritzer’s face you could see the hairs of his beard jumping, he was so pissed. “God or not?” he repeated, with an edge in his voice that could have sliced through a block of New Hampshire granite.
“President or not is what I’m interested in,” Wales said.
“God or not?”
Bulf has been taking lessons from my mother, I thought.
Wales had started to perspire. Spritzer had him pinned in a corner and was not going to let him out. “I’d say God, yes,” Wales admitted after a moment.
“Thank you,” Spritzer said. “At last. So there we have it. God is running for president. Or a man who calls himself God, who believes he’s God, who claims to be God. What is the average thinking person going to do with that, I ask you.”
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