The Snake Oil Wars

by Parke Godwin

  “There’s the difference,” Speed noted out of a deeper sickness. “I never slept well enough not to hear those numbers tolling in my sleep.”

  “We’re going out too far!” Helm warned. “I can’t think clearly out here. Why oppose me, then? Sum your case – a fair secular case, I admit, What’s Candor to you but an absurdity? Why put him on the stand?”

  “That self-serving son of a bitch makes me want to take a bath.”

  “He’s an American like yourself.”

  “The definition’s paled.”

  “An American for today,” Helm persisted. “Look at your country today. Impoverished in spirit, waking from the illusion of individual sovereignty to that of God. There never was a people since time began who so needed to be in the right or a time when right was so hard to find. Are they not sick to death of moral ambiguity? You speak of numbers; consider these. Over twenty-three million functional illiterates who can’t read a newspaper, let alone the phrase ‘moral ambiguity.’ They see their country torn between crippling secularity and the law of God. Crying for God, why shouldn’t they see the Reconstructionists as right? The Constitution won’t save your country, Speed. Wherein does it sustain them? Only a new order of Christianity can do that. A hard choice, true, but one they’re desperate enough to make.”

  “Checked only by an inconvenient Constitution.”

  “I said a hard choice. Faith in God is not democratic, that’s a given and always has been. What is more blasphemous or absurd than a referendum on God’s will? Look!”

  Helm pointed down to Earth. “You and I can spin here in limbo speaking of irony and dichotomy. For most of them down there, that democracy was only a cruel joke that gave them nothing where faith at least gave hope. Even if Yeshua told the truth, just a confused carpenter drunk with an idea of God, what will you give them for the void left by his absence? Choice? The responsibility of utter freedom? You’ve wrestled with that terror as I have. You said you’d rather be part of the Void.”

  “Why not?” Speed said Firmly. “If it’s a desert, at least no lie can live out here.”

  “Yes, it’s pure,” Helm lashed back. “Pure and chill. One can hear those vast cathedral spaces between the lines of harmony. You’re worse than secular, you’re naive. Humans crave absolutes and will have them, now more than ever. Tell them there are none and what will you offer instead? Adams, Jefferson? Lawyers’ reasons? English reasons by English theoreticians once removed, pursuing their passion for freedom while denying it to others on moral grounds. That won’t work, man. It never has. If you think it will now, you’re a bigger fool than Candor.”

  Josh Speed only laughed, did a tight turn and bank, shooting toward Topside. Helm shouted after him. “If you put him on the stand, I’ll reveal you, I swear it!”

  The answer came back faint with distance. “They were calling me fool back in Pigeon Creek. Come on, it’s already tomorrow.”

  Helm’s energy recharged as they neared Earth. He accelerated and overtook Speed. “Why are you so obstinate against God’s will?”

  “Not against God’s will, but yours, Helm. People like you can never kneel to the Cross without your foot on someone’s neck.”

  “The minute he takes the stand,” Helm promised, “Joshua Speed ends. You’ll be a monument again, not a moment’s precious solitude.”

  For some time there was no sound except the faint rushing of thin atmosphere as they skimmed over Earth toward Topside. Speed spoke at last.

  “You and I should hang out a shingle together. Two bastards back to back. Who could beat us?”

  15

  Now it’s time to play

  “You Bet Your Life”

  In the press box, Nancy Noncommit murmured clipped instructions into her headset. “Camera three, you’re my floater. Letti Candor’s up in Section C, first row. Find her. If they put Candor on the stand, be ready to give me close-ups. Blood, tears and sweat, okay? Everybody stay sharp. Got a lucky feeling today” She gave Cathy Cataton her bland on-camera look. Lucky and mean.

  Aurelius entered. The court and spectators rose, then settled down except for Joshua Speed, who stepped away from the Plaintiff’s table, removing his antiquated spectacles.

  “Please the court, I call Lance Candor to the stand.”

  What Noncommit called lucky feeling, Cathy Cataton knew as a gut instinct for news about to break. “One and two split: Speed and Candor. Three float on my cue.”

  The cameras focused on Lance Candor renewed their love affair with that marvelously photogenic young face, the boyish forelock nervously pushed back only to flop forward again, the open American expression as incapable of guile as Lance was of spelling the word.

  Now the hero shared screen with Speed as he beamed at the witness, homely as a bucket. The freshet of applause grew steadily into a torrent as Letti bounced up in Section C.

  “You tell’em, honey!”

  Joshua Speed waited obligingly through the applause and whistling. When he spoke to Lance, his manner was courteous and friendly. “I admit myself at some disadvantage when my witness comes to the stand as honored in death as he was in life. You’re from Kansas?’

  “Neosho Falls,” Lance stated proudly. “The heart of America.”

  An obligatory spattering of cheers from the Kansas contingent. The Senator from Wisconsin appeared at Helm’s elbow. “Okay, he did it. You want to pull the plug on Speed?”

  “Yes,” said Helm. “Advise the lady of his alias and present location.” He kept his eyes on Lance and the affable, clumsy lawyer, who would have looked more at home behind a plow. One of them was a dangerous idiot, but it wasn’t Speed. The man was calling his threat with no thought of the consequence. Not without finer instincts of his own, Helm knew Speed was as committed as himself, but not the why of it. How could the man be so intractable in the face of Divine will? I could have hanged or imprisoned him in Geneva. Helm sorely missed the Swiss efficiency and damned the inconvenience of democracy.

  “An honorable life,” Speed repeated for the jury. “An eagle scout, active in your church and community. Not to mention the heroism that led you to sacrifice your life for the President’s. No greater honor could redound to an American.”

  Lance stood straighter in the box. “As an American I would ask for none.”

  “As an American. How old were you at the time of your death?”

  “Thirty-one.”

  “Honorable and brief. Married?”

  “Letti and I got married right after high school.”

  Speed’s lopsided grin warmed with nostalgia. “They did that in my time too. Nice to know some folks hang on to the old ways. You died in Washington; would you refresh me on the business that took you there?”

  “A religious mission. A delegation of Christian Reconstructionists.”

  “Reconstructionists.” Speed tasted the word. “That would imply rebuilding something.”

  “Rebuilding America,” Lance replied vigorously. “From the heart out. You see, we believe —”

  At the Defense table, Helm lowered his eyes in disgust.

  “— in the absolute authority of God and Scripture.”

  “Indeed? Over what?”

  “Over everything.”

  “Including civil law?”

  “Everything.”

  “Well, that’s a lot of ground to plow.” Speed pulled at his ear. “I only regret God can’t be called as a material witness to that mandate. What was your specific aim on this mission?”

  “We went there to plead for God in government. To put God back into our laws and schools.”

  Speed whistled softly. “You folks don’t do anything small, do you? I take it from that statement you don’t believe in separation of church and state.”

  There could be no separation, Lance insisted. There were only two states of meaning or value, that of Grace and that without it.

  But was he not mindful of the Constitution?

  “What Constitution?” Lance quipped.
“Where have you been, Mr. Speed? It’s been said again and again, the Constitution won’t save America.”

  “I’ve heard the sentiment.” Speed paced away from the witness box. He turned back, hands clasped behind him, knees slightly bent, head raised like a farmer sniffing for rain on the wind. Most observers were concentrated on Lance. Few noticed the new tone in Speed’s line of questioning; just a little sharper. “I own to some confusion. Do you mean that ultimately democracy cannot save the United States?”

  “Law is clear,” said Lance. “And sometimes truth is hard. You can’t vote on God. There are the saved and the unsaved. We knew that when we went to Washington.”

  “Excuse me, sir. By ‘saved’ you refer to a state of Grace?”

  “I do.”

  “In which happy state I trust you shined of the mortal coil.”

  For a moment the wry allusion was lost on Lance. “Yes. I hope you did too.”

  Speed shrugged. “Can’t say. I was murdered. As my favorite author put it, sent to my atonement my crimes as gush a May.”

  “Sorry to hear that, sir.”

  “Don’t see why.” Speed’s razor neatly decapitated the sentiment. “The murderer viewed me as you viewed Coyul, incarnate evil to be removed by violence. The same fanatical con tempt for the law.”

  “Objection!” Helm rose. “Is Counsel questioning the witness or giving a sermon?”

  “Sustained. Counsel will frame questions the witness car answer.”

  “Allowing that you’re not an expert witness” — Speed’s eye flicked back to Helm as he thought to head off further objection — “how does this state of Grace work? How does one know if he’s in this blessed condition?”

  “Well, by communion with the church and through Christ. By visible signs in life.”

  “What signs?”

  “Well, God favors with true communion and prosperity those he has chosen as his Elect in Heaven.”

  “Through Christ,” Speed mused. “You were present yesterday when Yeshua of Nazareth testified. How did you regard that testimony?”

  Helm was on his feet again. “Object. No matter how cunningly Counsel phrases the question, witness is called to render opinion on a point that would confound a qualified theologian.”

  “Sustained.”

  “As a layman,” Speed qualified, “you said that prosperity on Earth is one of the visible signs of God’s favor. Then the dirt-poor don’t have much show at all, do they?”

  “Well, I’m not an expert,” Lance said, “but you have to be saved.”

  Speed’s features wrinkled with incomprehension. “Have to be chosen and saved. No matter how virtuous or selfless: Mother Teresa in India, Father Damien the leper, Father Ritter saving kids from the streets in New York, thousands of all faiths and convictions, who lived and died with no credentials save faith translated to serving others? No chance at all unless they’re saved? Mr. Candor, this is the old argument of Grace against good works.”

  “Sir?”

  “Look it up. His Honor might refresh you.”

  “Yes, Augustine,” Aurelius nodded. “After my time, but adamant on the point.”

  “I won’t ask you to testify as an expert, Mr. Candor, only if you sincerely believe in this severe definition of salvation.”

  “Yes, sir,” Lance answered stoutly. “I have believed it all my life. And I’ll go further. I’ll say this —”

  Helm sued silently to a just God for patience, hoping for another legitimate objection before this incredible ass hanged himself with no help from Speed.

  “I’ll tell you this; whatever I’ve done, I don’t interpret God’s law, only follow it. To see that law reign supreme in America or here, I’d rewrite any damned constitution you can name!”

  A classic moment for the cameras. Lance was media manna, valiant amid a torrent of cheers and applause from the audience. Speed waited it out. “Would you, sir?” he countered mildly. “All for God’s will?”

  “I would.”

  “A will that regulates a predestined judgment?”

  “Well, that’s the heart of it,” Lance asserted. “It is predestined.”

  “Sheep and goats already culled? No freedom of choice?”

  “God’s will has never changed. I’ve only followed it.”

  “Which implies an exercise of choice,” Speed observed.

  “To use the sense God gave me,” Lance riposted with the look of a tennis champion returning a wicked serve low over the net.

  Speed smiled affably. “Let’s assume you’re right. God’s will has never changed.”

  “That’s not assumption but truth, sir.”

  “Well, I’m a little confused.” On monitor screens the lanky lawyer looked anything but confused. “If you had followed God’s will in the fourteenth century, you would have howled for Wyclif’s blood because Latin was the holy language and he had the audacity to translate Scripture into English. Following that will in the sixteenth, you would have either burned Protestants for their heresy or Catholics for their obstinate orthodoxy. Or cited that same orthodoxy to oppose Martin Luther when he stood on individual conscience. In the eighteenth you’d have opposed those very safeguards that allowed you freedom of conviction. In short, every enlightened advance since the Dark Ages. Human rights. The right to say no. Not interpreting, Mr. Candor? With a smug assumption of God’s will you descended on Washington to supplant the very document that gave you the right to hold such conviction.”

  “Object!”

  “You were free-translating the hell out of God’s will when you threw that bomb at Coyul.”

  “Your Honor. Defense objects!”

  “Then how will it be in your reconstructed God-fearing America or Topside when someone turns you down flat and says no? ‘No, I’ll follow my conscience, not yours.’”

  “OBJECT!” Helm shot out of his chair. “Counsel is baiting the witness, who never said he was an expert on theology or the inconsistencies of American history.”

  “Denied. Question is inference from direct testimony,” Aurelius quashed him. “Defendant’s actions are assumed to stem from his convictions.”

  “They do,” Lance yelped. “I’m not a liar. What has the Constitution allowed but confusion and injustice? America is falling apart while they argue the Constitution —”

  “Interpreting again.”

  “There’s got to be one authority nobody can question!” Lance shouted. “What else could that be but God and the Bible?”

  “Witness will restrain himself,” Aurelius cautioned sternly. “And Counsel will frame answerable questions, as I have reminded him earlier.”

  “I will, Your Honor,” Speed promised. “Let’s take a look at this proposed new order of things,” he began on a new, easier tack. “No doubt to be swept into power on a tide of enthusiasm, a power based solely on God’s will with Scripture as the inerrant writ of that will for those people you call the saved. Life is not gonna be a hayride for them. Since it replaces Constitutional law, this Divine Will would have to cover every facet of everyday life. Is that correct?”

  “Yes,” Lance agreed. “Yes it would. It does.”

  “Even to a man’s business, his dealings in the marketplace?”

  “Of course.” Lance felt more confident on firmer ground. “The Bible deals with fair weights and measures, even authorizes gold as a standard of value.”

  “I see.” Speed paused, jingling change in his pocket. “Then I take it that my house and life would be exposed to this inerrant writ.”

  “Especially your house, Mr. Speed.”

  More appreciative laughter from the house.

  “Which means you extinguish the right to privacy, making legal judgment on the most personal matters. A grave responsibility.” Speed produced an old-fashioned pocket watch and wound it reflectively as he moved toward the bench. “Please the court, and to spare my colleague further objection to sermonizing, I would like to place on record certain historical results of such a theocr
acy; then, on that basis, pose simple and quite answerable questions to the witness.”

  “Court has no objection provided there is substantiation. Defense?”

  Helm sighed. “No objection with that proviso. I would be glad to see my learned colleague surrender the pulpit for the law at last.”

  “My intention, sir.” Through the patter of laughter, Speed managed to look chastened and modest. “I submit that what Mr. Candor suggests and represents is exactly what such a theocracy accomplished in Massachusetts with stocks for the smallest infraction and gallows for alleged witches. This is fact. This is precisely what some followers of Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh did in Oregon less than a decade ago with as ruinous result. This is fact. Even more recently, Oral Roberts solicited millions from his flock on the alarming assertion that God was going to cancel Roberts’ lease on life and call him to premature Glory unless the faithful forked over a given amount by a certain date.”

  Speed squeezed the bridge of his nose between thumb and forefinger. “Not the absurdity or even the bald audacity that makes one gasp, but the millions that were straightway sent in response. Apparently God relented; Mr. Roberts is still with us, but perhaps my colleague is right and I should take up the cloth. You can’t argue with the salary, and you don’t have to convince a sensible jury of your motives. In my time, Your Honor, men like that sold snake oil remedies from a wagon.”

  “And in mine,” Aurelius recalled drily. “If man’s first gift was fire, the second was fraud.”

  “I put it to you, Mr. Candor, that this is spiritual fascism. The more total the trust, the more dishonorable the fraud. Is this what you support?”

  “Well.” Lance swallowed, running nervous fingers through his hair. “I don’t know about that Bag-somebody or Massachusetts or whatever, but what are you asking of me? I said truth is hard. Very hard, even... even for me sometimes. But if God’s will is absolute, someone’s got to speak for it.”

  “And again I cite another precedent for your case. In the 1960s, there was a case of an American husband and wife charged with sodomy in their own bedroom, accused by their own daughter – one puzzles over the method of detection – and prosecuted under an existing law of the state of Illinois. In the twentieth century, that legal instrument was still on the books. Do you stand for a law that can breach your privacy and hang your personal life on the public washline?” Speed turned away. His hands described incomprehension in the air. “Is this what you believe?”