Idolism (35 page)

“All right,” Bill said. “I’m going to cut you off right there, because I don’t like the way you keep deriding the authors of the Bible like that. These were honest, hardworking people who laid down the foundations of our civilization.”

“And who also happened to not know a thing about physics or chemistry or biology. Again, I don’t want their worldviews imposed on me 2000 years later.”

O’Reilly was beginning to lose his temper. He raised his voice at Julian now. “But you are the one who’s imposing himself and his views on everybody!”

“No, I’m not.”

“Yes, you are! The whole world knows your sissy boy face by now! You’re on billboards and magazine covers, and it’s impossible to turn on the TV without having to listen to your ramblings about everything and anything! You’re a pest!”

“Excuse me,” Julian said calmly, with an ever so subtle smile on his lips. “Did I come knocking on your door, asking you if you had a few minutes to talk about Jesus? Did I ask to come on your show? Your producer
begged
me to come on the show, just like the producers of every single show I’ve been on in the last couple of weeks and the editors of every single magazine that ran a story about me. I am not imposing myself or my views on anyone, but if I’m asked a question, I’ll give you an answer.”

“You have 50 million followers on Twitter!” O’Reilly barked at Julian. “Yesterday you wrote on Twitter, ‘Prayer is bad for you’. How is that not imposing your views on other people?”

Julian chuckled. “Well, first of all, you don’t seem to understand how Twitter works. Those 50 million are called followers because
they
follow
me
, not the other way around. I don’t run after them and try to convert them. They are following me, because they want to hear what I have to say, and if they no longer want to hear it they can hit the unfollow button. If you accuse me of imposing my views on others, I’m going to have to accuse you of the same thing. But I’m not going to do that because it would be ridiculous, because nobody is forced to watch your show. As for my tweet, yes, I think prayer is bad. It’s not only bad for you, it’s bad for us as a species.”

“So now you want to ban people from praying!”

“I don’t want to ban anyone from anything,” Julian said. “I’m not an enforcer, I’m an educator. I just want people to use their brains.”

“Look, prayer is doing a whole lot of good to a whole lot of people. It gives them comfort and a sense of security, it lets them have a personal relationship with the Lord, and it doesn’t harm anyone, and if you’re against that you’re a fascist. A fascist!”

O’Reilly slammed his hand on the table. He was on the verge now. But Julian kept his calm.

“My position on praying has evolved somewhat in the last couple of months. I used to think that it’s not a problem. Most people pray at church or in the privacy of their own home, so why would I care? Here’s why I care: praying is not as harmless as you’d like to think, because it’s the result of a certain mindset, and it reinforces that mindset. If you sit in your room, fold your hands and talk to your imaginary friend, then that obviously doesn’t immediately harm anybody. But what it does is that it impairs your ability to make reasonable decisions. Even that would be harmless if you were on your own. But if we have millions or even billions of people who are constantly talking to an invisible man in the sky because they think he listens to them, he cares about them, and he has the power to make good things happen or to prevent bad things from happening, then we as a species are bound to make decisions that will—in the long run—not only harm us but that might even lead to our ultimate demise. It’s not your prayer itself that is harmful, but it’s your mindset that compels you to pray and believe that praying is beneficial, because that very same mindset will lead to decisions that will jeopardize the wellbeing of future generations and endanger the survival of mankind.”

“That is ridiculous!” O’Reilly shouted.

“That is the truth. It may be an inconvenient truth, but one day you will have to face it, Bill: your favourite virtues, conservatism and religiosity, enslave and kill people. They have always enslaved and killed people. They are still enslaving and killing people today, and they are bound to enslave and kill people that aren’t even born yet. The one thing that has been a constant ever since single-celled life was first conceived in the Earth’s womb is progress. Its vehicle is constant change, and its fuel is reason. Trying to keep things the way they are and the misguided belief that a divine entity will sort it all out for us in the end is holding us all back on our path to a better, happier future. Conservatism and religious superstition are the antagonists of progress and reason, and it’s a disgrace.

“It is you, Bill, and people like you, who are holding us back. You are holding the whole of humanity back from moving forward and building a future that works for all of us. Jesus would be spinning in his grave if he knew that you and people like you, with your total lack of compassion for people who are not like you, and your complete lack of love for thy neighbour no matter how different they may be, are claiming to be Christian. Well, and if Jesus still were in his grave, obviously, which he is not because somebody took him out and hid him somewhere else and made idiots like you believe that he went to heaven. Christianity as a philosophy is built on love, kindness, and compassion. Christianity as a religion is built on a lie.”

It was amazing to see how Julian, who in his very first TV interview on
Inside Momoko
just a few weeks earlier had been such an awkward, timid little creature, had turned into a media pro. How calm he was, how soft his voice and how adamant his smile. Bill O’Reilly, on the other hand, had become more and more aggravated during the interview, and now he was finally ready to lose his marbles. All of them.

“You are a pathetic little punk!” he shouted at Julian, his head turning from red to blue. “Your mother is Satan’s whore! Get out of my studio, you dirty little scumbag! Go out and get hit by a car! I hope you die and rot in hell until the end of time!”

Then he leapt across his desk because Julian was laughing at him, and he tried to punch Julian in the face. That’s when the security people stepped in. They held O’Reilly back, but he kept kicking and screaming and drooling and spewing insults, and there was foam coming out of his mouth. That was the end of the show obviously, but I was later told that police and paramedics were called to the studio. The paramedics sedated Mr O’Reilly, and then the police arrested him. The kicking and screaming Bill O’Reilly was world news the next day, and Fox News announced that
The O’Reilly Factor
had been cancelled and that Bill O’Reilly had agreed to check into a mental institution.

And that was the end of that.

The Gospel According to Michael – 16

The pale blue light of the TV woke me up at around 4:30 in the morning. That was odd because it hadn’t been running when I went to bed. MINDY had turned it on for me. Disoriented and drunk with sleep, I didn’t immediately realize what was going on or what MINDY was trying to tell me. The channel was MMC News24, but there was no audio commentary, just a shot of a coach that had slid off the M1 just north of Milton Keynes and tumbled down a ravine. The news ticker at the bottom of the screen read:
M1 coach crash – several fatalities reported – rescue workers and police on scene – cause of crash yet unknown – coach was en route from Liverpool to London.

I had a very bad feeling about this. A road accident with fatalities was a terrible tragedy all right, but that kind of thing was not what MINDY was supposed to wake me up for in the middle of the night, not unless it was significant to my own life in one way or another. I grabbed my laptop from the nightstand and fired it up.

“MINDY, what’s going on? Why are you showing me this?”

“Because you need to know, Michael.”

“Know what?”

MINDY didn’t reply. Instead, my screen exploded with a series of windows that MINDY opened in rapid succession and that I had to click my way through. The first was an article from the
Guardian
about several cases of industrial action that were currently going on in the U.K. in protest of all the new policies that the government had been trying to push through parliament in recent weeks. What most of these policies had in common was that they were severely opposed by most voters but backed by banks and businesses. Air traffic controllers and airport security personnel were on strike to protest pay cuts as the country was running out of money to pay for the war on terror. Doctors and nurses were on strike, because a new law would make them liable to million pound fines and prison sentences for botched medical treatments and procedures. Cleaners, waiters, and other service personnel were on strike because of a proposed reduction of the minimum wage by a quarter to make British workers more competitive against cheap labour from Africa and Asia. The bloody Premiere League was on strike! That wasn’t entirely the government’s fault, though. MMC controlled media had made proposals to make British football more competitive by implementing a new payment structure for players: a base salary not much higher than that of an average worker, with added bonuses only for games that they a) actually played in, and b) won. The
Guardian
calculated that this new payment structure wouldn’t make much of a difference for a handful of big players at Manchester United or Arsenal or Chelsea, while for the vast majority of professional footballers in the UK it would mean an effective pay cut by roughly 80%. So yeah, footballers were on strike, which was just as well, because the majority of fans weren’t able to get to the games anyway, because most public transport workers were on strike too, and roads were basically gridlocked up and down the country by people who were still lucky enough to be able to afford the new fuel duty that had increased the price of a litre of unleaded petrol to £2.50, and by those who weren’t directly affected by any of the pay cuts or price hikes but who took to the streets anyway to show their solidarity. The only industries left thriving in Britain were manufacturers of breathing masks and rat poison because, well, the bin men were still on strike, too, and four weeks’ worth of uncollected garbage was piling up in every street in the country.

“All right, I get it,” I said. “Britain is on strike. What next?”

Next was a press release from British Airways, notifying the public that all their domestic flights as well as all international flights departing from the UK had to be cancelled because of the strikes, and that their international long haul flights from Africa, Australia, Asia and the Americas that were destined for Britain were being diverted to Dublin, Paris, Amsterdam, Hamburg, and Stockholm. BA staff at these destinations were prepared to help passengers who were arriving from overseas make travel arrangements to continue their trips to the British Isles.

I was slowly beginning to get an idea what MINDY was trying to tell me, and it turned out that I was right. Next MINDY showed me a PDF file. It was the passenger list of BA flight 282 that had left Los Angeles for London but had to be diverted to Dublin instead, where it had landed at 12:10 p.m. yesterday. It listed two passengers by the names of Tholen, Peter, and Monk, Julian, booked on seats 1A and 1K in first class.

Pretentious bastards
, I thought.

MINDY had documented Julian’s trip seamlessly. CCTV footage showed him disembarking his flight in Dublin with Tholen at 12:25 p.m. Another camera caught them getting in a taxi cab outside the airport. Traffic cameras followed them to the harbour. According to Tholen’s credit card statement, they took the ferry from Dublin to Liverpool. Eight hours later a security camera recorded Tholen running amok at a Hertz rent-a-car desk in Liverpool. Because of the breakdown of almost all public transport, they had run out of cars, so Tholen and Julian were forced to book two seats on an overnight coach down to London. The last screen that MINDY showed me came from a traffic camera on the M1 north of Milton Keynes. From half a mile away it had caught the coach veering off the road and tumbling down the ravine, out of sight of the camera.

A few seconds later, a huge plume of fire rose from the crash site as the bus exploded.

I kept replying that last video over and over, while at the same time trying to come up with any kind of scenario that would allow for Julian not having been on that bus when it crashed. I had MINDY check CCTV footage from every single service station along the M1 to see if maybe they got off the bus at some point and checked into a hotel or something. But they had made only one quick stop at a service station south of Stafford to refuel, and none of the passengers had gotten off the bus. As much as I tried, I could find no reasonable explanation why Julian and Tholen would not have been on that bus at the time of the accident.

I checked the TV screen again.

Fatal coach crash near Milton Keynes – rescue workers on scene.

Still no further details. I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t know what to think. I didn’t even want to think, because all my thoughts kept coming back down to one terrifying conclusion: Julian was either seriously injured, or dead.

I jumped out of my bed, paced up and down my room, took a deep breath and sat down on my bed again. “Come on, Michael,” I said to myself, “calm down and think.”

Now the TV showed new ambulances arriving as others sped away with flickering blue lights and blaring horns. They wouldn’t do that if they had dead bodies on board, so there had to be survivors. That’s all I could tell from my limited vantage point in front of the telly. I picked up my phone and speed-dialled Tummy’s number. He answered after the fifth ring.