America Rising (41 page)

And you never do.

I found it on the site of a guy who blogged about downtown Memphis. He apparently lived in one of the condo-lofts fashioned out of old warehouses along the Mississippi and kept himself busy by posting photos and video and commentary on everything from restaurants and shops to the trials and tribulations of urban life. It was all so tedious even his own mother would fall asleep reading it, but if he was here in my hotel room I’d give him a big, sloppy kiss and buy him the most expensive steak dinner in Georgia.

Deep in his archives, under the headline, “Takedown at the Depot” was a video taken with a cellphone cam. Shaky, indistinct, badly shot, it showed a sidewalk full of people who’d apparently just gotten off a bus. There was a commotion, two men pushing through the crowd, three others moving quickly but stealthily to intercept. There were no clear shots of the men’s faces; they seemed to sense the cameras’ presence and turn just enough to avoid them. But suddenly the two pushing men were gone, lost in a scrum erupting behind a parked taxi. Two people got into the cab—a man and a woman, white and black—then a man who could have been in construction pounded on the cab’s hood and shouted, “Go, go, go!”

I couldn’t see the man’s face, and the body could have belonged to a million different people. But I recognized the voice. I had my proof. The circle had closed.

* * *

At nine o’clock in the morning on July 3, one hour after the SayNo caravan had left Atlanta and filed back on the road, President Nancy Elias strode to the podium in the White House press room and delivered a statement. She did not take questions and stalked from the room the moment she finished.

“Ladies and gentlemen of the press, my fellow Americans. This morning I received some terrible, terrible news. My former chief of staff, my friend and mentor, my closest and most trusted advisor, Ray Carmody, has died by his own hand.

 

“I’ve known Ray for almost three decades, since I first ran for the Los Angeles City Council, and during that time I came to love him like the older brother I never had. His service to his country and to my administration has been selfless and beyond reproach. But the pressures of his job began to overwhelm him and he felt he could no longer perform up to his exacting standards.

 

“I begged him to stay; half of Ray Carmody is still twice any other man. But he said that recent events—the kidnapping and murder of Vice President Josephson, the attempts to foment class hatred and warfare by groups like the one headed for our nation’s capital even as I speak, the rise of dangerous demagogues who have crawled from the gutter speaking with the forked tongue of populism—had robbed him of his appetite for public service, stolen his vitality, injured his very spirit.

 

“I don’t blame Ray for ending his pain. I blame myself for not recognizing how deep and abiding it was, for not urging him to get help. But I do blame those forces that have chosen to tear our country apart, who would set American against American, who would destroy our system of government and the very fabric of our nation. And I would say to my fellow Americans: Don’t listen to these demagogues, don’t participate in their schemes, don’t fall for their false promises of justice and fairness, of opportunity and renewal, of hope and change.

 

“Instead, place your faith in those who are working tirelessly for the greater good, who have dedicated their lives to serving the public, who shun class war and demagoguery. Working together, these prevaricators, these provocateurs, these poseurs will be defeated. Working together, we shall overcome.

 

“Thank you, and good morning.”

 

T
he SayNo caravan, now almost four hundred vehicles, rolled into Washington D.C. beneath a sky that seemed as portentous as the day, bright and sunny with an ominous black thunderhead lurking off in the distance. It was just after nine o’clock in the morning of July Fourth and already the scene in and around the National Mall was near chaos.

Legal parking spaces and parking garages had filled hours earlier, followed by streets blocked off by police to take up the overflow. Those streets overflowed too, and drivers then simply abandoned their cars in place and began walking.

I was traveling in a two-car group with John Doe, Sheila and four men with taut bodies, tight faces and eyes that never stopped moving. They didn’t speak to me and I didn’t speak to them. John and I had bonded during the three-day trip over our love of jazz, blues, spicy food, strong women and a general ambivalence about everything else. Sheila began to warm up to me too, no longer casting bone-breaking glances in my direction. I was moved by her fierce devotion and protectiveness. Even the four tough men who followed Doe everywhere knew better than to infringe on the space she’d carved out for the two of them.

A generous bus driver created just enough room for us to squeeze our cars into a lot about half a mile from the mall, and we joined the throngs hiking through East Potomac Park, double-timing it to the stage in front of the Capitol Reflecting Pool at the east end of the two-mile-long expanse of tree-lined lawn.

It was an amazing journey. As our fellow marchers recognized John, word spread with fiber optic speed. He could have been Moses parting the Red Sea. When they saw us, people moved aside, created a lane for our little party to hurry through, shouted words of encouragement, support, affection.

“We’re with you, John.”

“Keep it up.”

“We need you, John.”

“Give it to the bastards.”

“Give ‘em hell.”

“We love you.”

John appeared awed by their passionate intensity but no more than the rest of us. Even our quartet of minders couldn’t keep the wonderment off their normally impassive faces. But as exciting and inspiring as it was, I couldn’t help feel a twinge of sadness. After more than two centuries of holding ourselves up as a shining light for the rest of the world, our last, best hope was a slight young man who a few weeks ago had been pounding nails in a dilapidated house in a devastated city.

With the crowd’s help we quickly made it around the Tidal Basin, past the Washington Monument, the Museum of Natural History, the Smithsonian, the National Gallery of Art to the stage. It was barely controlled chaos there too—speakers, comedians, famous bands scheduled to play, hundreds of support staff, AnnaLynn and other organizers, all thrown into a cauldron of frantic activity. The buzz over John Doe had evidently reached there too, as even celebrities whose faces I’d only seen on the pages of glossy supermarket magazines turned to gape as we passed.

AnnaLynn came over, her face lighting up at the sight of John and Sheila and, I hoped, me too. She seemed exhausted but ebullient, hugging my friends, then me, a little longer, a little tighter. She gave me a quick kiss on the cheek and was gone, guiding John and Sheila and their security contingent to the rally’s “command center,” a giant open-air tent behind the stage packed with people working with controlled fury and barely cooled by whirring fans.

I tagged along in my usual role as observer. With a hard drive overflowing with notes, observations, stories I couldn’t use for Public Interest, I’d decided to record everything for a book that would offer a ground-level view of either the beginning of the slow rise or long, terrifying fall of a country founded almost three hundred years ago with such hope and promise.

Amid the maelstrom of activity, I couldn’t remain an observer for long, and was eventually drawn in to running errands, answering phones, helping the small crew of overworked roadies set up equipment for the bands who’d be playing on and off through the evening. Looking out across that stage in the building heat and humidity of a Washington D.C. summer was one of the most awe-inspiring moments of my life. A seamless blanket of bodies covered the park all the way to the horizon, spilling over its boundaries, creating its own enormous cityscape. Estimates were that three, maybe four million people would be here today, and they didn’t seem far wrong.

I left the stage to look for AnnaLynn, found her wrapped in conversation with John and Sheila. I read its trajectory on her face—from confident to astonished to resigned in the arc of a few words.

“What do you mean, you’re not going to speak?” she said incredulously, trying to keep her voice down. “There are millions of people out there, John. Millions of people in the country, who are
dying
to hear you.”

John looked at her with round, sad eyes, a man trapped in a world not of his own making. “I can’t do it,” he said quietly. “I just can’t. I’m not the man they think I am; I’m not fit to carry their burden. I’ll only leave and disappoint them; I always do. They deserve someone better, someone stronger, smarter. . . better. Someone who will stand with them until the end. That’s not me, AnnaLynn. That’s not me. I am not The One.”

AnnaLynn tried again, appealing to his sense of justice, fairness, morality. She tried Sheila but was stopped by a slight but definitive shake of the head. Finally she smiled wanly, almost to herself, as if in acknowledgement of her own folly. She touched John lightly on the arm and said, “I’m sorry, John. I understand. I really do. You’ve done so much already, more than anyone has a right to expect.” Then she hugged Sheila, whispered in her ear, “Take good care of him,” and quietly walked away.

I shuffled away too, feeling like a Peeping Tom who’d just been nabbed peering through a keyhole. Further off in the tent a crowd was gathered around a portable TV. I wormed my way to the front and caught a glimpse of Nancy Elias standing at the podium in the White House Press Room.

“. . . in honor of our great country’s birthday,” she was saying, “and in recognition of these trying economic times, I am declaring today national Debt Freedom Day. I have proposed, and the business and financial communities have accepted, that interest charges on all loans, all debts, be suspended for the month of July. This is the kind of cooperation between the government and. . .”

A sardonic chuckle eddied through the crowd. That was the president’s big announcement—a one-month reprieve that was scarcely more than window dressing and would doubtless be made up later when no one was looking. What struck me most, however, was the sourness of Nancy Elias’s expression and the passionless monotone of her delivery. She’d always been able to infuse even the most baleful proposals with a politician’s cheery faux-optimism. This time she couldn’t keep the disdain for what she was selling off her own face.

It was a sign. I should have seen it. But I didn’t.

* * *

For Nancy Elias, though, it was more than just a sign. It was recognition that her presidency was in fact at an end. Frank Bernabe had promised her one last chance, promised she could match SayNo’s New Declaration scheme and show the public the government still had some relevance to their lives, some interest in their welfare. Instead, he’d double-crossed her, sent her into battle with a proposal that was doomed to fail. Designed to fail. She was just as much a patsy as the poor dumb cluck set up to take the fall for John Doe’s attempted assassination in Memphis. Funny how things work.

* * *

The president’s speech over, the gathering around the TV broke up and last-minute preparations for the kick-off grew even more furious. AnnaLynn was a dervish, whirling from person to person, problem to problem with cool assurance. When she stepped onto the stage in front of millions of people and said, “Welcome to a new day for America, a new day for Americans. A New Declaration of Independence!” I couldn’t have felt prouder.

What followed was as much celebration as rally. Politicians had been banned from the stage, their places taken by those whose words and work had gained the public’s trust, from the satirist heirs to Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert to independent journalists to ordinary citizens who’d stood up to power. They alternated with bands playing everything from jazz and hip-hop to rock and reggae, with theatrical skits and live improv sessions.

Technology and social media were omnipresent, allowing those in the audience and thousands of miles away to watch live feeds from more than a dozen cameras, to interact with the speakers and bands and attending celebrities, with the organizers and each other, to track the progress of a slew of different initiatives. Even a brief downpour dampened only heads and umbrellas, not excitement and enthusiasm. Everything was going, if not exactly to plan, as close to it as a giant enterprise with millions of human moving parts could reasonably expect.

Until it didn’t.

The twenty-four-year-old lead singer of one of the country’s hottest rock bands—neither of whom I’d ever heard of—doubtless had only good intentions. To young people of an activist bent, John Doe was already an underground icon, and the kid was probably a little starstruck, caught up in the moment, trying to give the enormous crowd what he knew it wanted. So as the final chords of their latest hit faded into the atmosphere, he pointed backstage where John Doe, Sheila and I were standing and announced, “There’s someone back there I know you’ve been wanting to see: John Doe! C’mon out, John!”