American Savior (32 page)

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) B
ATTING 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) B
ATTING 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.”

“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.”

“Vote for him,” Wales said, and, in the hotel room, I leapt to my feet and applauded.

Spritzer smiled, but not in a friendly way. “According to the latest polls—let’s put them up here on the screen, shall we?—what we’re seeing is the opposite, a rapid slippage of support for the candidate who calls himself God.” On the screen, Spritzer showed a chart with three lines on it. The purple line representing support for Jesus was headed south. Bulf
had a pointer in one hand. “After peaking a few weeks ago, as you can see on this chart,” he stabbed the top of the purple line with the pointer, “the number of those who say they plan to vote for Jesus has gone from almost forty percent to near thirty. Meanwhile, the other two candidates have picked up the slack. Care to offer an explanation?”

“The attack ads work, unfortunately,” was the best Wales could come up with, and though he tried to affect confidence, the camera showed the sweat on his forehead, and showed him making a nervous movement with one hand, as if he had been reaching up to smooth his eyebrows but then thought better of it. For the rest of the show he did his best, but Spritzer kept stabbing and stabbing, showing one chart after the next: female voters with children, male voters with incomes over eighty thousand dollars, Democrats, Republicans, Independents—all of them losing faith, or interest, in Jesus for president, which undercut every good thing Wales tried to say. In the end, the impression that remained was of a locomotive that had been speeding along then been shunted onto a dead-end track.

Out number three, I thought, though Wales had at least gotten in some good swings.

I
T WAS NOT
a great week. After this series of interviews, some polls showed us slipping into third place, behind the surging Alowich. In short, we had finally been exposed in all our rampant unprofessionalism. There is a reason, I guess, why they have old pros running big campaigns. It’s hard, nasty, exhausting work, not for amateurs like us. We’d managed to get away with it for a few months, largely on the strength of our candidate’s performances, his strategic brilliance, his name. But during that one week of big media appearances (made bigger, I guess, by the fact that the campaign, and the candidate, had done so few of them), it came crashing down around us. With the possible exception of Anna Songsparrow, we looked like what we were: a bunch of city people trying to cross the Everglades on foot in the dark, no insect repellent, no flashlight, no compass.

It would be a tremendous understatement, then, to assert that we had a lot riding on Jesus’s
Meet the Media
appearance, and though a gloomy
mood had fallen over the group—larger now, since Anna Songsparrow had rejoined us—we still had our long ball hitter coming to the plate, and we tried to cheer each other up as best we could.

5) B
ATTING FIFTH
: Jesus on
Meet the Media.
I was so nervous I went to a bar by myself to watch it.

If one were to judge, solely on his physical appearance, whether or not the Jesus we knew was God, then there is no question in my mind that viewers of the Bobby Biggs show would have given him an enthusiastic thumbs-up. On the day before the show (the press covered this shopping spree), Jesus went out and bought a gorgeous black Armani suit and other clothes, tossing money around Manhattan like a rap star. Shined shoes, off-white shirt open at the collar, the Armani, the great haircut, the cheekbones, the smile. If Jesus didn’t look like God when he sat down opposite Bobby Biggs, nobody did.

Biggs had a reputation for fairness, and he did his part by devoting the first two-thirds of his show to substance, giving Jesus every opportunity to rebut the charges that he was lightweight on the issues of the day. Jesus went into some detail about his past, giving the names of the places in India, Tibet, and Nepal where he’d studied yoga and meditation, the famous spiritual teachers he’d known. Watching it on the TV in a bar near Akron, Ohio, my personal feeling was that Joe Sixpack and Ellen Soccermom cared nothing about some New Delhian yoga master, or the persecuted saints of Ladakh. But Jesus acted as if they
should
care, and, with that and a few facts about his other activities (he had, it turned out, served in the Peace Corps in Guatemala for a year, before deciding to make his eastern pilgrimage; not foreign policy experience, but at least it was
something
), he did sound more forthcoming than he had been earlier in the campaign.

As far as actual proposals went, he offered a couple of new ones, specially aimed at critics who said he was long on compassion and idealism but short on budgetary common sense. He reminded viewers about the Feltonov Group’s Green Investment Initiative, and Pavel Feltonov’s endorsement. He said those plans had the potential to pump billions in
tax revenue into the economy while at the same time adding hundreds of thousands of new manufacturing jobs—and he trotted out the numbers to back that up. There was no reason, he insisted, why our tariffs on foreign imports should not match those placed on our goods in other countries, dollar for dollar—his campaign was about fairness, if nothing else. And then he surprised us all, Biggs included, by saying, “I’d also like to note that each of my opponents, over the course of this campaign, has come up with excellent suggestions. Marjorie’s ideas about protecting our children, the colonel’s education proposals—those are the programs of first-class minds, and ones I would be eager to implement within the first hundred days of my administration.”

Biggs listened respectfully, probing once, twice, as was his style, then going to the next question. As the program went on, he moved gradually away from policy issues and into more personal territory: “Our understanding is that you are a proponent of nonviolence, and I know that I and many Americans admire that. We admired it in Gandhi. We admired it in Dr. Martin Luther King. We admire it in the Dalai Lama, who, we should mention, came out yesterday and gave you his enthusiastic endorsement, something he has never done before.”