Idolism

by Marcus Herzig

  “I can’t get through!”

  “Here comes your dad now,” Michael said. “I’m signing off. You’re on your own.”

  “Thanks a lot, Michael!”

  Me dad came out of the building, got into the driver’s seat and slammed the door shut.

  “Hey, dad.”

  He jumped in his seat and turned around. “Thomas! For heaven’s sake! What are you doing here?”

  “I was on me way home and I saw your car, so I thought I’d catch a lift.”

  Dad stared at me for a moment. Then his gaze fell on his laptop in the seat next to me.

  “Give me that!”

  I handed him the laptop. He opened it to check if it was switched on. It wasn’t, and he threw it onto the passenger seat.

  “By the way, the Pope is dead,” I said.

  Dad looked at me as if I’d just told him that mum had an affair with Santa Claus. “What the hell are you talking about?”

  “The Pope,” I said. “He died. Just a few hours ago. I’ve seen it on the telly.”

  “Jesus bloody Christ!” His shoulders sank and his head hit the steering wheel.

  “Better not let Mum hear that.”

  “A dead Pope is the bloody last thing I need right now, Thomas.”

  I shrugged me shoulders. “Sorry. But it’s not me fault now, is it?”

  It would have been nice to hear him say, ‘No, Thomas, I know it’s not your fault.’ But of course he didn’t say that. He didn’t say anything. He just started the engine and we took off.

  The First Revelation of Edward Pickle

  To be perfectly honest with you, for MMC—the Maddock Media Corporation—the death of the old Pope was a true godsend, pardon the pun. Now don’t get me wrong on this, if an 85-year-old man falls down the stairs and cracks his skull open, it is of course—despite its undeniable intrinsic comedic value—a terrible human tragedy. But even tragedies, as cruel as that may sound, do have their merits. For MMC as well as for the Roman Catholic Church, two of the biggest and most influential organizations in the world, it was, all things considered, the best thing that ever could have happened. I’m speaking strictly from a business point of view here. At the end of the day it’s all about marketing, and marketing is what I’m all about.

  I first met Robert Maddock back in 1979. I was fresh out of college with degrees in marketing and public relations in my pocket, and I was looking for a job. At a friend’s birthday party one of my former co-students asked me if I was religious.

  “Religious?” I said. “I don’t know. Not really. I mean, I don’t go to church or anything.”

  “But you do believe in God, don’t you?” she asked.

  I shrugged. “I suppose. Why are you asking me this?”

  She made a dismissive gesture with her hand. “Never mind. It’s probably not the kind of job you’re looking for anyway.”

  “No, no,” I said. “Tell me.”

  “Well, there is this young TV preacher down in Alabama. He’s got his own show on cable. It’s pretty popular. My grandma loves him. I’ve seen his show when I visited her last week, and I must say he’s not bad. He does have potential, I think, but he could do with a little help in the PR department.”

  “Is that so?”

  “Yeah, but like I said, never mind. You probably don’t want to go down south and work for a redneck televangelist.”

  I pondered this for a moment, and then I asked, “What’s his name?”

  “Robert Maddock,” she said.

  The following Friday I made my way down to Huntsville. My appointment with Mr Maddock wasn’t until Monday, but I wanted to see the man in action before I met him in person, so I spent my Sunday afternoon in a cockroach-infested motel room and watched his weekly two-hour show The Vox. It took me less than five minutes to realize what my friend had meant when she said he could use a little help in the PR department.

  Robert Maddock was young, around 30 years of age, very attractive, very charismatic, very likable. Until he opened his mouth. His communication skills were a complete and utter disaster. Here was a man who was so much in love with the sound of his own voice that whatever it was that he was trying to say became trifle and irrelevant. His language was a convoluted mess, interspersed with grotesque metaphors and clumsy, awkward humour. Cringe-worthy would be too kind a description. And yet there was something about this man, about his vision, that I found very intriguing. He had potential; a raw diamond that just needed to be cut and polished.

  When I met him the next day, I asked him how many people usually watched his show.

  “A quarter of a million,” he said, gloating like he was Johnny fucking Carson.

  Maddock was living in a bubble, a bubble inhibited by a quarter of a million ultra-conservative, right wing Christians, and because he was at the very center of that bubble, surrounded on all sides by his own kind, he was oblivious of how big a world outside his bubble he was unable to reach. Convincing him to tone down his message, to make it less bat shit radical and more appealing to a wider audience would be a herculean task. But I was up for it.

  “Give me two years,” I said, “and I’ll turn your quarter of a million viewers into two and a half million.”

  My offer was met with roaring laughter as if I’d made a particularly hilarious joke, but when he saw that I wasn’t laughing back, he stopped and said, “Son of a bitch, you really mean it.”

  We shook hands and never looked back.

  To make a long story short, I didn’t meet that target of two and a half million viewers within two years. I exceeded it by more than a million. By 1981 The Vox was available on basic cable in 15 states in the South and Midwest, and we kept growing at an exponential rate. Unfortunately, I have to admit that I was somewhat less successful in fine-tuning the voice that stood behind The Vox. Business strategies, branding, and marketing were one thing, but when it came to his message and the way he chose to convey it, Mr Maddock proved to be, shall we say, resistant to any form of advice. He would listen to me, he would listen to all the advice I gave him about what to say and how to say it, and he would nod emphatically and say, “All right, Ed. You got it.” And then the moment the red light on the camera came on it all went flying out the fucking window and he’d just blurt out his crude, unrefined ramblings about God and the world the same way he’d always done it. It was frustrating.

  By the early to mid 1980s I was seriously considering to chuck it all in, to just pack my things and go back home to Montana, to leave Mr Maddock to it and move on with my life. But then I realized that I didn’t have a life. In the past few years I had been working for Mr Maddock 60, sometimes 70 hours a week. I didn’t have any friends. I didn’t have any social life to speak of. All I had in terms of leisure time were my Saturday nights that I liked to spend listening to symphonies by Brahms and Mahler while emptying bottles of expensive red wine. And I had The Vox. After all the years of hard work that I had invested in it, I think it’s fair to say that The Vox was my child just as much as it was Mr Maddock’s, even if I was just its adoptive parent. Either way, I hated to think what Mr Maddock would do to The Vox if I just left him to it, how he would mess it up and ruin it until it would wither away and die. I wasn’t going to let that happen, and so I decided to stay. I stayed, but I started developing a new business strategy to take us to the next level.

  I wanted to get Mr Maddock out of the spotlight, because if he stayed there, he was bound to do us more harm than good in the long run. Despite his charisma and his stunningly good looks he wasn’t spotlight material, simply because he didn’t know when it was the right time for him to shut up. It was a nasty piece of work, but I eventually managed to convince him that it would be best to remove him from the TV screen. The first step in that direction was our acquisition of WTFU, the TV station from Huntsville that had originally aired The Vox. Like most of the stations we were on, WTFU was a small and reasonably, albeit not extremely, successful broadcaster catering for a small to medium sized ma
rket, and its buying price was relatively cheap. Mr Maddock initially rejected the idea of buying the station, like he initially rejected all ideas that weren’t his own, because he usually failed to see the bigger picture.

  “Just think about it,” I said to him. “Right now you have two hours of airtime per week. You have two hours in a 168-hour week to get your message across, and you have absolutely no control over the remaining 166 hours. How can you compete with 166 hours of cheap and ludicrous programming that actively seeks to appeal to the lowest of human instincts? You’re a beautiful flower, but you’re surrounded by dirt and rocks. You can’t flourish in an environment like that. You can’t flourish in a wasteland. What you need is fertile soil, a mild climate, warm rain, and soft sunbeams. Imagine what you could do with 168 hours of programming every week. Imagine you could mould a whole TV station to fit your narrative.”

  “I’d like that,” he said.

  Of course he would. It was an idea that played directly into his vanity.

  He took the bait. We bought WTFU for a handful of dollars, repackaged it, rebranded it to T-Vox, and the rest is history. A year later Mr Maddock made his last appearance as a TV preacher before he started concentrating on his new job as CEO of the newly formed Maddock Media Corporation.

  Today MMC is present in media markets in over 120 countries. We own and operate hundreds of TV and radio stations and newspapers, and in recent years we’ve been increasingly active in the new media with our acquisitions of cellphone and Internet service providers. Our flagship brands are T-Vox for general programming, and our around-the-clock news channel MMC News24. We are often accused of pursuing an extremely ultra-conservative, right wing agenda. I won’t even deny that. What I will deny, however, is the notion that this is a bad thing per se. We are catering for a market that has existed long before us and that will always exist, and that market is huge.

  There are very many people out there who, when they turn on the news, don’t want the world explained to them in a fair and balanced way. They want their existing worldview mollycoddled and comforted. They want their beliefs validated and vindicated. They want to hear what they think they already know.

  The world can be a terribly terrifying place, and throughout history people have done horrendous things to other people at any given time. I can perfectly understand if some people would rather not hear about it. The average human mind is not equipped to deal with all the atrocities, the suffering, the injustice, and all the horrors that have been a part of our history from the very first day. It takes superhuman mental strength to look at the unvarnished truth about life, the universe, and everything without going insane. Most people simply do not possess that kind of strength, so how do you expect them to cope with reality?

  Everyone has the right to view the world through a filter, a shield that protects them from having to deal with what they’re incapable of dealing with. Everyone has the right to protect whatever little amount of sanity they have left. Thomas Huxley once said that the greatest tragedy of science was the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact. That doesn’t just apply to science and scientists; it applies to everyone. We all have our own hypotheses of how the world works, and those of us who are not scientists and who do not actively seek the validation of their hypotheses will perceive any facts that question their faith and contradict their beliefs as an unwelcome challenge to their way of life and a significant threat to their mental wellbeing. Everyone has the right to distract themselves from the harsh realities of life by means of light entertainment and a belief system that favours (at least on the surface) hope over fear and comfort over truth. People have a right to comfort. And that is all that MMC provides. We provide comfort to all those poor souls who find too much knowledge of the truth too heavy a burden to bear.

  It had been only thanks to Mr Maddock’s religious passion—some may want to call it fanaticism—that the church had returned to the center of public attention in recent years. By following the Pope on every single one of his trips around the world and covering everything he said, everything he did down to his last fart, on our national and international TV channels and on our radio stations and in our newspapers and on our websites, we had turned him into a pop star, the kind of pop star the popes had been in the olden days before all those beautiful, young and modern pop stars, all those Justins and Brittneys and Gagas had shown us how it’s done.

  Remember John Paul II? He used to be a pop star. He was a pop star in the sense that he was extremely popular, eloquent, and relatively modern for his time, i.e. the late 1970s and early 80s. But John Paul’s problem was that he overstayed his welcome by a good 20 years. His fan base aged with him, and he failed to significantly tap into the coveted younger demographic, people who weren’t even born yet when he was elected Pope. The world has changed a lot since the 1970s. Society, technology, the media, they have all made quantum leaps into the 21st century in the last two decades, but a millennia-old organization like the Roman Catholic Church was struggling to keep up and adapt to conditions that not only kept changing but that were changing at a faster rate than any time before in human history.

  It wasn’t for a lack of trying, though. Benedict XVI was the first pope to use Twitter, except he never actually used it himself which—quite frankly—was a huge mistake. In terms of public relations it was an unforgivable mistake. One of the greatest appeals of Twitter is that it gives regular, normal people like you and me direct access to celebrities by effectively eliminating the middleman. It is no coincidence that the Latin word medium literally means middle. The traditional media—newspapers, radio, and television—used to be the middlemen between celebrities such as singers, actors, artists, politicians and so on, and the common people. If you were a celebrity you talked to the media, and the media would relay your message—more or less accurately—to the rank and file. I’m asking you, why on earth would you use a service like Twitter, whose most interesting feature is the absence of a middleman, and then install another middleman yourself? It doesn’t make any sense. If you want to be on Twitter, you better do your own tweeting instead of having some halfwit intern do it for you. If you’re standing in St Peter’s Square with your hands raised in blessing the masses, and thousands of people in front of you have their iPhones lighting up with a tweet from you when you obviously haven’t been tweeting, then you’re effectively wasting all the great potential of social media. This is not the Middle Ages anymore where people would have been stupid enough to believe that as Pope you were probably powerful enough to send out a tweet without using your hands. Nowadays most people are still pretty stupid, but they’re not that stupid. And believe me when I tell you that the average stupid person does not appreciate the notion that you might think they’re stupid.

  I know that Christians are big on forgiveness and mercy and all these noble concepts, so some of them will say, ‘Oh, the Pope is a busy man, of course he has people who do these petty things for him.’ Others might say, ‘Oh, the Pope is an old man, of course he doesn’t know how to use Twitter.’ But trust me, even as the Pope you don’t want to constantly rely on forgiveness and mercy for all your fuck-ups. You’re the leader of 1.2 billion Catholics in the world, so lead, for Christ’s sake! Stand in front of St Peter’s with an iPad in your hands and send out a tweet to all your followers in the square and all your followers around the world who are watching you live on MMC News24 in over 120 countries. You have no idea what this will do to people’s perception of you. It will make you appear modern, tech-savvy, and cool. It will make you look like a pop star, and people will love and admire you for it. Especially the people you need like no other if you want to make an impact not only on today’s world, but on the world of tomorrow: the people in the 14 to 29 demographic.

  Mr Maddock was a big fan of Twitter, which is not to say he completely understood how it worked. He was well aware of its enormous potential, but not so much of its dangers and pitfalls.

  One day he came to me and said, �
�Pickle, I want to be on Twitter. Go put me a team together.”

  It took me three weeks and a whole lot of persuading to talk him out of it. As Mr Maddock’s head of PR and marketing, my biggest priority was to keep both MMC as well as Mr Maddock himself out of harm’s way in terms of public image and perception. Mr Maddock didn’t always like the decisions I had to make on his behalf, but I couldn’t afford to take his personal sensibilities into consideration when it came to making crucial business decisions. I was being paid to do a job, and if I do a job I do it right because that is an integral part of my own professional image. If you work in public relations and your own public image is not 100% pristine and flawless, then what does that say about your professional skills?

  If I had allowed Mr Maddock to be on Twitter, it would have not only put his own public image in jeopardy, it also would have tarnished my reputation as one of the best PR consultants in the world. I managed to talk him out of employing a team to impersonate him on Twitter, but then he wanted to do it himself. As far as Twitter was concerned, it was evident to me that Mr Maddock was like a little boy who had seen everyone in the playground play with this shiny, brand new toy, and so he wanted it too. Not because he was particularly interested in the toy itself, but because he didn’t want to feel left out. He only wanted people to see that he was just and cool and hip as everyone else. Now if you’re dealing with an actual little kid, it is quite okay to give him the benefit of the doubt and let him have his toy. In fact, it’s even advisable because kids need to try out different things. You can never know which will spark his interest, capture their imagination, and keep the fire of their passion burning for the rest of their lives. However, I wasn’t dealing with an actual ten-year-old; I was dealing with a 62-year-old who happened to be the most powerful media tycoon in the world. I had been working for Mr Maddock for over 30 years at that point, and there was not a shred of doubt in my mind that letting him anywhere near Twitter—and thus giving him direct, unfiltered access to a worldwide audience—was a terrible idea. It would have been the equivalent of making a kid who’s suffering from Tourette syndrome high school valedictorian. He would blurt out his half-baked, ludicrous ideas in bizarrely convoluted language with a couple of obscenities and expletives thrown in for good measure, and halfway through his speech he would lose interest, say, ‘I’m done with this shit,’ and go home. I knew that because I knew Mr Maddock.