Sweet Heaven When I Die

by Jeff Sharlet

  Louise, Anthony, and Mary were veterans of Sondra’s workshops, “adepts,” so when it came time for me to graduate from the first level, they led me away from the living room and into a candlelit study, where Sondra awaited. With a sword. A real sword, much bigger and heavier than the Cord Cutting blade, but Sondra held it as if it were a butter knife. Only, this wasn’t Sondra, I was informed. It was Jesus.

  “Jesus?” I whispered to Louise. “But Sondra’s Jewish.”

  Louise just smiled.

  “So,” Jesus said, “you’re wondering if this is real.” Jesus spoke in Sondra’s voice, but an octave lower. He/she instructed me to kneel, then she hoisted up the sword, and a prayer followed as she swung it down with speed toward one shoulder and then the other, arresting the blade before contact so that the blows became taps: I was being knighted. I was now a member of the Brother/Sisterhood of White Light, Rising Star division.

  Jesus kept talking, murmuring just for me. My knees hurt. My legs were asleep. I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to get up. What Jesus was saying, she explained, was private, personal, a secret of sorts.

  “But Sondra,” I said.

  “Jesus,” she said.

  “Jesus,” I said. “You know I’m here to write about this.”

  “No details,” Jesus declared. She made me promise.

  But the gist, she added, I could share. So here it is: Jesus knew I didn’t believe her. And that was okay. Because she understood my skepticism, she said, and she knew where it came from. Then she delivered an outline of my life story. There was nothing magical about it: Sondra had simply stored every fact I’d revealed about myself in passing and assembled them as a narrative colored by her analysis of my motives and fears. For the most part she got it right: Sondra knew why I was there, why I was kneeling before her. I’m not a seeker, she said, I’m a doubter. Doubt, she said, is a calling. It is not unbelief, it is in between. That’s my niche, Sondra/Jesus whispered, my place in the chain of supply and demand. “Doubt,” she said, “is your revelation.”

  SONDRA HAS WORKED WITH thousands of clients since she left lawyering ten years ago. And since she recently received a new variation on her healing methods, she has trained hundreds of new practitioners, many of whom have launched generations of Rising Star healers of their own. One of Sondra’s first students is in talks now about introducing the Rising Star to a chain of spas for wealthy women. If I continued in my spiritual work to the point where I was ready to take another class, I, too, could practice and even teach the Rising Star.

  It’s Amway without the hooks, a pyramid scheme without a catch. According to the social critics John Naisbitt and Patricia Aburdene (themselves sort of New Age sociologists), American corporations spend $4 billion a year on New Age consultants. IBM provides employee seminars in the I Ching. On a smaller scale, a major New York real-estate agency invited Sondra to address a group of eighty brokers. And in the everyday, we all fill our lives with uncountable tiny totems, gestures toward the unseen. Not just candles and incense and Buddha key chains, but also commodities as ordinary as juice. Ever had one that claimed “antioxidant” properties, a scientific impossibility? Welcome to the New Age.

  Both the Right and the Left despise this phenomenon. The Right thinks New Age is, literally, demonic, or at least shallow. The Left thinks New Age is consumer capitalism at its most dishonest, and—yes—shallow. And they’re right, all of them. The Christian crusaders and the intellectual scolds and even the New Agers themselves. Not because truth is relative, but because faith, by definition, always is. If it had an empirical basis, it wouldn’t be faith; it’d be the humdrum material world from which people turn to faith for meaning.

  September 11, 2001, a date around which Sondra’s own spiritual biography revolves, is a case in point. After weeks of conversation Sondra exploded the chronology of her own story. “You know,” she said, “I was checking my records, and I realized it wasn’t 2001 that I met Derek. It was a year later.” She mentioned this in passing, as if it changed nothing.

  How could she mine September 11 for personal drama? The answer, of course, is even more obvious than the question. To make a story out of loss is to alter the reality of the dead to suit the needs of the living. Yet, take another look at your crucifix, listen to the stories of the patriarchs, open your Koran at random—that’s what faith does. That’s what we do. Rightly or wrongly, we search for a whole whenever we find a hole in our lives.

  One of the rules attending the drawing of the Prema Agni is that the recipient must give at least seven dollars to a good cause. One day I told Sondra I’d given my seven dollars and then some, to tsunami relief. Sondra agreed that that counted. But the 2004 tsunami, responsible for the deaths of 230,000, didn’t really register for her as it did for most of the world.

  “If you want to know the truth, my guides told me it was gonna happen about a year ago. That’s why I wasn’t like, ‘Oh, the tsunami! The tsunami!’ ” And she won’t be shocked by the next disaster. “It’s already written in the karmic book, the Book of Life,” she said.

  The “karmic book, the Book of Life”—in a phrase Sondra assimilates Buddhism, Hinduism, Judaism. But these awful fated events “can be erased,” Sondra said—she was vague on whether they’d be prevented or simply made irrelevant—if we’d all just learn “compassion” in our individual spiritual realms.

  There’s that grammar of faith: “if,” the offer, the deal. Theologians dismiss such negotiations with the divine as elementary, nothing more than a phase in the spiritual development of the soul. But money knows otherwise. That “if” is the prerequisite for the awesomeness of faith in a globalized world, the sovereignty not of a god but of the consumer. An entrepreneurial New Age faith like Sondra’s can serenely pigeonhole terror attacks and global disasters, regardless of why—or evidently when—they actually occur, because their meaning can be recast instantly, according to the spiritual need of the moment. It’s simple, really: Home Depot sells the idea of home, Best Buy sells a wired world, the new New Age sells “spiritual health”—while the right of the sovereign consumer to acquire it, purchase by purchase, is praised as the law of nature: an orthodoxy of a thousand choices, an infinitely marketable economy of belief.

  12Rock Like Fuck

  ONE SUMMER NIGHT IN PHILADELPHIA, as a band called the Boils was preparing to play, seven men with badges—police officers and agents of Philadelphia’s Department of Licenses and Inspections—walked into the basement of the stately old First Unitarian Church at Chestnut and Van Pelt. Nobody knows who tipped them off, but it was clear that someone wanted the Church, as the club in the basement was called, shut down. The show’s promoter, Sean Agnew, had been booking acts there for six years, but before the night when the inspectors appeared his shows had not warranted a single official complaint. Tall and lean with an undertaker’s jaw, long, dark eyelashes, and a trademark black mesh cap—on which dorm slut was scrawled in silver, graffiti style—invariably crammed over a shock of thick black hair, Agnew was a local hero to kids who couldn’t get into twenty-one-plus shows and to older music fans who appreciated the eclectic acts he brought to town. He was known locally, and in little music magazines around the country, as “DJR500,” an icon of rock-and-roll integrity, living happily on the twenty thousand dollars a year he pulled in selling cheap tickets to his shows. His shows were “straight-edge,” which meant that drugs and alcohol were not welcome. A local paper had named him a man of the year.

  The Department of Licenses and Inspections does not keep records of complaints. All the deputy commissioner could tell Agnew was that someone had gone down to City Hall, pulled the Church’s permit, and discovered that the Church was not zoned to hold gatherings for entertainment purposes. No bingo, no swing dancing, and definitely no Boils. The inspectors gave Agnew a red-and-white-striped “Cease Work/Operations” sticker to affix to the Church’s door and declared the conc
ert over.

  Agnew got onstage and told everyone to go home; his friends circulated through the crowd, whispering that the show was moving to West Philadelphia, to a theater called the Rotunda. Soon Agnew cut a deal to produce all his concerts there, but he was able to produce only one more show before the Department of Licenses and Inspections shut that operation down as well. Someone had gone down to City Hall, pulled the theater’s permit, and discovered that it was zoned for drama only. Then inspectors visited the record shop where Agnew sold his tickets, with the news that someone had gone down to City Hall, pulled the shop’s permit, and found out that it wasn’t zoned for selling tickets. A few days later the inspectors were back at the shop, looking for a box under the counter in which the store kept Agnew’s mail for him—another violation, reported by yet another concerned citizen.

  “I was completely, totally, shut down,” Agnew told me.

  Although he had no evidence, Agnew’s suspicions fell on Clear Channel Communications. Clear Channel controlled almost every concert venue in and around Philadelphia—from the Theater of the Living Arts on South Street to the Tweeter Center in Camden—as well as six radio stations and nearly seven hundred billboards. The company’s local viceroy, a man named Larry Magid, once ran the city’s live-music scene as a private fiefdom, but after Clear Channel bought him out in 2000, he began managing it as a corporate franchise. Clear Channel maintained a similar chokehold on live music in almost every major city in America, as well as in most of the small ones. Agnew, who had managed to book bands that could have made far more money playing Clear Channel theaters, suspected that he was grit in the machine.

  “Four or five years ago,” Agnew told me, “there were a lot more people aware of corporate power.” Now, he said, money so dominated the music scene that a lot of younger kids didn’t even know what “selling out” meant. When I asked him what had kept him in business, he corrected me: “I don’t consider what I got into a ‘business.’”

  Philadelphia music fans had rallied to his defense. After the closures, Agnew sent out word to his e-mail list, eight thousand people who had attended at least one of his shows, and within days one thousand of them had written to City Hall. He rented a mailbox. He persuaded a lawyer to represent the Church pro bono, and soon the Church had a dance-hall permit, the record shop had a ticket-selling permit, and Agnew had more events scheduled than before he was shut down.

  Whoever was behind the attempt to close the Church, nearly every concertgoer I talked to blamed Clear Channel. They adored Agnew for “standing up to the evil empire,” as one musician put it. Agnew, a vegetarian who lives with a cat and thousands of obsessively organized records, is now the most authentic rock-and-roller in the city. When he walks down the street, people nod and smile and pat him on the back. DJR500 is huge, and one day soon Clear Channel might make him an offer.

  SOME PEOPLE COMPLAIN about Clear Channel because they miss their old local stations, some because Clear Channel stations shrink playlists and recycle an ever-smaller number of songs. Musicians say touring has become a cross-country hopscotch from one Clear Channel venue to another, each more sterile than the last; their agents and managers say that if artists don’t play when and where Clear Channel says, they will suffer less airplay or none. Clear Channel has made commercial radio nearly reporting-free, believing that its syndication of Rush Limbaugh to as many stations as possible fulfills its mandate to provide news and political diversity. Evangelical Christians are distressed about radio firsts pioneered by Clear Channel DJs, such as torturing and killing live animals on the air (a chicken in Denver, a pig in Florida), but this can happen only where there’s a DJ: Clear Channel has put hundreds of radio veterans out of work, replacing them with canned broadcasts tailored to sound local and live through a process called “voice tracking.” Consumer advocates argue that such robot radio is the only efficiency Clear Channel has passed along to the public. The cost of “free” radio—in terms of time spent enduring ads—has spiked. Concert ticket prices have nearly doubled, and radio advertising rates have risen by two-thirds, pricing small businesses off the airwaves.

  Clear Channel says that its enemies snipe simply because it’s big, and this is probably true. No one had imagined that a radio company could get so big. When Clear Channel was founded in 1972, with one station bought by a San Antonio investment banker named L. Lowry Mays, federal law forbade a company from owning more than seven FM stations and seven AMs, regulations rooted in the fact that the airwaves are public property—the commons. By the 1990s that cap had crept up to forty stations nationwide, no more than two per market. Then, in 1996, Congress passed the Telecommunications Act. Up to eight stations per market would be allowed, and as many overall as a company could digest. Within less than a year more than one thousand mergers occurred; by 2000 four behemoths dominated the business. And then there was one: Clear Channel.

  Z100 in New York? Clear Channel. KBIG in LA? Clear Channel. KISS in Chicago? Clear Channel. KISS, POWER, the FOX, and the ZONE are all Clear Channel brands, and the dozens of radio stations nationwide that bear one of those names take their orders from San Antonio, where Clear Channel’s headquarters remain, in an unassuming limestone box next to a golf course. Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck are Clear Channel, and so is Casey Kasem, founder of American Top 40.

  Clear Channel is proud of the fact that it is, in the words of an executive from its radio division, “the poster child” for media consolidation. In 2003, when the Federal Communications Commission raised the caps on how much access to the American public any one media company could control—a move too crassly reminiscent of the days of robber barons for even the Republican-controlled House of Representatives, which voted 400–21 to roll it back—the one media company the commission hinted might actually be too big was Clear Channel. The debate over television ownership that followed focused on two numbers: 35 percent, which is the portion of American viewers to which a single TV station owner can currently broadcast, and 45 percent, which strikes media giants as a more reasonable number. Clear Channel, meanwhile, reaches roughly 200 million people, or more than 70 percent of the American public. It owns 1,225 stations within the United States, and it broadcasts from at least 200 more stations abroad, many clustered just south of the border like radio maquiladoras.

  A giant corporation’s brilliance is measured not by its singular focus but by the vastness of its reach. Clear Channel’s arms are many and long, a fact they don’t attempt to disguise. “Clear Channel, the many-tentacled,” Loraine Ballard Morrill, news director for Clear Channel’s Philadelphia stations, calls her employer. Critics who call Clear Channel the “evil empire” are “like blind men describing an elephant. They can’t even imagine.” Corporate headquarters likes it that way. “Wherever you go, we’re there,” they boast, a slogan Big Brother himself would have envied.

  When I asked to interview Clear Channel’s executives, a PR rep for the company told me that Clear Channel wouldn’t speak to me, because it no longer needs the media: a Zen koan of consolidation. After the company learned that several underlings had talked nevertheless, radio CEO John Hogan agreed to an interview over the phone. An amiable, forty-six-year-old former radio-ad salesman, he told me that “the key to radio is that it’s a very personal, intimate medium.” Hogan’s first executive role was as the general manager of WPCH, a fully automated station in Atlanta known as “the Peach.” Hogan made running the station sound like changing a diaper. “It was a ‘beautiful music’ station,” he said, meaning easy listening. “You didn’t have to make any decisions. All you did was put the tape on in the morning and you let it run for twenty-four hours and then you changed it the next day. There were no decisions to make, they were made for you. It was nice, you know, it was easy.”

  His idea of what radio is and can be does not seem to have changed since his days at the Peach. “People use radio ’cause it works,” he told me. “If it stops working for ’em
, they stop it.” He didn’t mean the truckers who roll from one radio tower blinking red in the night to the next, or the contest callers, or the love-song requesters, or the kid waiting for a hook she’s never heard, a riff or a groove or a beat or a rhyme that will make her feel all grown up and totally fifteen years old at the same time. Hogan meant advertisers. “For the first time ever, we can talk to advertisers about a true national radio footprint,” he told me. “If you have a younger, female-skewing advertiser who wants access to that audience, we can give them stations in, you know, Boston and New York and Miami and Chicago, literally across the country. Los Angeles, San Francisco. . . . We can take outdoor”—he meant billboards, of which Clear Channel owns a literally countless number—“and radio, and drive people to live events and concerts and capture the excitement, the real visceral experience.” The goal? “A different kind of advertising opportunity.”

  Promoted to radio CEO, Hogan tried to soften the company’s image after several years of brutal acquisitions under the leadership of Randy Michaels, a former shock jock (who subsequently moved from Clear Channel to the Tribune Company, one of the biggest newspaper publishers, to do for print what he’d done for radio). Clear Channel wouldn’t let me talk with Michaels, but not long after he left the radio division he gave a trade publication called Radio Ink an even blunter rationale for the company’s push to dominate live music as it does radio. “People attending a concert are experiencing something with tremendous emotion,” he said. “They’re . . . vulnerable.”

  ACROSS TOWN FROM THE CHURCH, I went to see a show booked by Clear Channel’s man in Philadelphia. The headliner was a band called the Dragons, best known for their album Rock Like Fuck, but the night belonged to the opening act, the Riverboat Gamblers. It was their singer, Teko. Tall, skinny, gruesomely pretty, he vibrated across the two-foot-high stage, shouting loud and hard, sweating at full velocity from the moment the drummer began hammering a beat like a boxer pounding the face of a man who has stopped fighting. He shook his arms as if he wanted them out of their sockets, he shoved the mike so far down his throat it was a miracle he didn’t choke. Everyone in the room, a little club called the Khyber Pass—an oversize cigar box painted matte black top to bottom, beer on the floor and loose wires hanging like vines from the ceiling—knew that Teko was making it happen. No one was there to see him, or really, for that matter, the Dragons, they were there to get loaded or laid or stupid for a little while, but the crowd, maybe one-hundred-strong, pressed forward, chins bobbing, drunken eyes widening, men in wife beaters and women in fishnets shouting “Fuck!,” everyone spilling their liquor, they were so happy and mad.