American Savior

by Roland Merullo

  “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.

  IT 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) BATTING 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.”

  “A great holy man,” Jesus said. “I wish he was eligible to vote.”

  Biggs gave an indulgent smile. “But, at the same time, pacifism makes most Americans uneasy. They wonder what you would do about the terrorist threat; if there is any situation in which you would use force; if you’d try to stop weapons production or disarm the military.”

  Jesus paused for a moment in thought. I could feel voters all over the country leaning toward their sets. One of those voters was perched precariously on a stool a short distance down the bar from me. “Nuke the bastards,” he yelled. “Let God sort ‘em out!”

  The bartender threatened to cut him off.

  Jesus offered a more measured answer: “Morally, it is an extremely difficult question,” he said, “and one that people of conscience have wrestled with from the beginning of time.” I was afraid, for a moment, that he was going to try to squeak by with a politician’s nonanswer. But that wasn’t his style. “As I have said before, while it is tempting to believe—especially for those of us with safe, comfortable lives—that there are no truly evil people in the world, that is a moral dereliction of duty. There are evil people.”

  “Bet your sweet brown arse there are,” the drunk yelled.

  “The threat to America is very real, excruciatingly real. You cannot talk to these people. You cannot reason with them. They harbor such hatred in their hearts that they see kindness as weakness.”

  “Yes,” Biggs cut in, “but my question was about your response. Would you use force or not?”

  “I am coming around to that,” Jesus said. “You will notice two things about my campaign, Bob, by the way: first, I never criticize my fellow candidates; second, I never avoid a question. My answer is that, yes, I would use force in certain circumstances, though I would use it only after every—and I mean every—other reasonable possibility had been exhausted. Earlier in the campaign, when I said that I thought the proper response to the terrorist threat was a police action—by which I meant police and special forces—I received a lot of criticism. But I stand by that remark, as long as we do not face a nation-state with a standing army. Our job is to protect ourselves, not convert people from violence to peacefulness by trying to kill as many of them as we can. Forget the moral aspects, let’s talk
practicalities. Armed invasion simply does not work in the long run and there is no—zero—historical record of its working in the modern era in circumstances similar to those we now face. In the case of Hitler, Mussolini, and Hirohito, who had standing armies that numbered in the millions of soldiers and who were determined to conquer the world, killing many of them was unavoidable and necessary—though wiser leaders might—might, I emphasize—have avoided or minimized the conflict had they acted differently in the years leading up to the war. We are not dealing with Hitler or Hirohito or Mussolini here, but with a relatively small number of hateful, dangerous souls. Would I direct members of the armed forces to kill those souls if it meant preventing the deaths of innocent people? Yes, I would. We are not all capable of allowing ourselves to be crucified. Certainly we should not consider it a holy deed to stand by and watch our children be hurt or killed.

  “But there is so much room for subtlety, even in this issue, Bob. The idea of enlightening societies, of ending dictatorships, is a good, noble, even a sacred idea. But you do not accomplish that by invasion, by assassination, by force. Violence is not only morally wrong, it simply does not work, or it works for only a short time. You create peace by peaceful example. Defend ourselves, of course, yes, it is the first responsibility of a president. But take the beam out of your own eye before you try to remove the mote from the other’s. Make us a shining moral example to the world. Good things will then follow.”

  On that note, Biggs went to commercial break. Only five minutes were left in the show, and I was feeling that we might have a chance again. Jesus’s long, thoughtful, direct answer had silenced even my friend down the bar, and I thought it might have brought us back into the game, changed the minds of some of his doubters—though others would always view him as hopelessly naive.

  When the commercials finished, Biggs, rocking forward as he often did, offered this: “I would be remiss if I did not explore one other issue with you. I won’t ask if you are God, I won’t do that. But I will ask this: if you are God, if you are not only Jesus Christ in name, but the Jesus Christ of biblical history, the man some people believe is the son of God, and others believe was at the very least a wise teacher, if you are that person, that creature, whatever word you want to use, and you have decided to come back into the human realm, and if you are elected president, will you act in that office simply as a human being, no doubt a wise, capable human being, or will you—this is difficult to phrase properly—will you have recourse to extraordinary powers in discharging your presidential duties?”

  It was a question, of course, that had been on the minds of everyone in the country since Jesus’s name had first been spoken on the stage in Banfield Plaza in West Zenith. Until now no one, no media figure at least, had had the courage to ask it to Jesus directly.

  Jesus flashed him the tremendous smile. “I will use the office to do good, Bob. That, after all, is the whole point of my coming back to earth, and the whole point of coming back, not as a teacher this time, but as a politician, if you will. I will do good. I promise the American people that. My whole point and purpose here is not to perform miracles. Had I wanted to, I could have done nothing but miracles from day one, and perhaps my poll numbers would be better.” They both chuckled at this. “My purpose is to demonstrate to human men and women that you do not have to settle for what you have settled for to this point in your spiritual and political history. Wars, greed, corruption, nastiness of all kinds—America does not have to settle for this, and each of you, as individuals, does not have to settle for this. We can aim our sights higher. If elected president, I will not just talk about such things, I will demonstrate them in every aspect of my leadership. Exactly as I have tried to do in this campaign.”

  Biggs seemed relieved. He leaned forward again in what was almost a gesture of reverence, almost a bow, and thanked Jesus for coming on the show. Jesus thanked him in return. Biggs mentioned an upcoming guest. A commercial for an investment firm came on. My fellow American at the end of the bar said, “The guy’s all right.”

  The bartender nodded.

  And we were back in the game.

  THIRTY-SEVEN

  With only fifteen days remaining before voters went to the polls, the other two candidates participated in a televised debate, the last in a series of three. Jesus had not been invited to the first, which took place before he announced he was running. He might have been included in the second, if we’d pushed for it, but we were too focused then on getting his name on the ballot in all fifty states and in struggling to get our logistical act, such as it was, together. By the third debate he was such an important player in the whole drama that not inviting him would have undermined the debate’s legitimacy. So the League of Women Voters contacted Wales and extended a formal invitation. Wales and Zel and I went into a meeting with Jesus and told him about it. And it took him all of three seconds to decide not to participate. He stuck to the decision, too, even as the numbers slipped and the pressure mounted during our bad media week. I was surprised at that. I worried, as did Wales and Zelda, that his refusal to participate would be seen as cowardly and un-American, motivated by nothing more than fear of getting into it with his opponents face-to-face.

  To some extent, that is what happened. Especially after the good performance on Biggs’s show, a performance that kicked us back into the lead in at least one poll, Maplewith and Alowich started hitting us hard on the debate issue. Alowich, who had dropped back again into third place, but not by a very large margin, resurrected the run vs. fight ad. Maplewith attacked Jesus at every stop, using surrogates for the really dirty punches. And it seemed like every call-in radio show had people questioning Jesus’s backbone, wondering if he really cared about winning, or if it was only a game for him, speculating on what it was he must be afraid of, some big dark secret—underworld connections, one commentator suggested—and so on.

  The League of Women Voters and CNN both knew it would be a better debate with Jesus on the stage, so they kept extending the deadline, giving us more and more time to say a final yes or no. They extended it right up to forty-eight hours beforehand. Jesus declined.

  “I refuse to be another clown in the ‘gotcha’ circus,” he said, when we had our final meeting on the subject, in yet another hotel suite, this one in central Ohio. We’d been getting huge crowds there; the poll numbers were improving slightly; Jesus said he saw no reason to mess with success.

  “They’re going to do a number on you without you there to defend yourself,” Wales suggested, looking down at his notes. I knew my boss well enough to see the strain in his face. He’d been working night and day for the past four and a half months. The ambush publicity and the errors of the previous week had put a large dent in the optimism he’d shown on the beach in California.

  “Let them do what they do,” Jesus told him. “We didn’t send my mother to the vice presidential debate, and both Clarence and Maileah essentially ignored her.”

  “With all due respect,” Wales went on, still not raising his eyes, “she’s not you. Alowich’s run vs. fight ad is getting traction in the South and West. Some broadcasts have started showing the video clip from the Montana church all over again.”

  “We did nothing wrong at the Montana church.”

  “I know that. But they took a fourteen-second clip out of it. Clip makes us look like we’re running away from something.”

  “We were.”

  “And now they’re going to say we’re running away from the debate.”

  Jesus considered this point for a moment, fiddling with the band of the expensive watch he sometimes wore (I noticed that the hands never moved). In these situations, I had the feeling that he was only pretending to give our suggestions thought. His mind was already made up, it seemed to me, and he was just being polite about it, making us think we actually had a say in what he did. For example, since the assassination attempt, I’d been after him constantly about choosing venues that were easier to secure—indoors, where we
could get people to pass through metal detectors, and where we didn’t have to worry about rifle-wielding lunatics on rooftops. He pretended to give this some consideration, then told me he hated metal detectors and liked to be outdoors whenever he could. Basically, then, he was offering himself up, event after event, to any nut who happened to hate him enough to kill him. It kept me awake at night, I can tell you.

  “Annie Ciappellino has endorsed us, hasn’t she?” Jesus asked, as if he’d just thought of it.

  Annie Ciappellino was a Jersey girl who’d won the silver medal in the marathon in the previous Olympic games. It was a huge upset. Predicted to finish no better than twentieth, she’d nosed out the Russian favorite in the stadium lap and come within twenty-five feet of catching the Kenyan winner. Her dad, who had coached her from the time she was in grade school, had died of a heart attack three days earlier, having flown halfway across the world to see his daughter run. It was a sad, wonderful story, made more wonderful by the fact that Annie was a sweet black-haired beauty who donated to children’s charities a third of her substantial earnings from commercial endorsements. On a tour to promote her latest running shoe, she’d accidentally crossed paths with Anna Songsparrow somewhere in the Deep South, listened to her talk, liked what she heard, and had come out publicly for Jesus the next day.

  “Get her on the phone, would you? I have an idea.”

  Jesus’s idea was that he’d take his opponents’ charge that he was running away, and use it to his advantage. He and Annie Ciappellino would “run” from her home in Cape May, New Jersey, to West Zenith, Massachusetts, a distance of 361 miles. “Run” in quotes, because they wouldn’t actually run the whole distance, but would run between five and ten miles each day for the last ten days of the campaign, side-by-side, along city streets and country roads, and then, after stopping someplace for showers and changes of clothes, they’d go another twenty or thirty miles by bus, making brief stops along the route.