American Savior (33 page)

“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.

Annie C. agreed without hesitation, and this odd end to our supremely odd campaign was announced on the day before the big debate.

I ask you: which do you think was a more interesting item on the nightly news, that Maplewith and Alowich were going into their third debate, preparing to say bad things about each other, or that Jesus would be running up the eastern seaboard with a beautiful Olympic silver medalist who gave a lot of money to sick kids?

The next evening, while all of us but Jesus watched on a TV in the back room of a fried chicken restaurant in Altoona, Pennsylvania, Senator Marjorie Maplewith and Colonel Dennis Alowich both used a great deal of their air time attacking the candidate who had chosen not to show up. There was some substance to their attacks. Senator Maplewith hammered away at what she saw as the ludicrous idea that we could fight the “Islamo-Nazis,” as she called them, without using ground troops in large numbers. She cited the comments of two respected generals to back this up. Attacking from the other side, Colonel Alowich, the inventor of GreenBiscuit, called Jesus’s stance on making environmentalism the new engine of the American economy “the pipe dream of someone with no real-world business experience.” For the first half hour, I thought Anne Canter’s prediction (that, as we drew closer to the actual election, voters would turn away from Jesus in droves) might be correct. Alowich and Maplewith had honed their styles over the long campaign, found their voices, and they lobbed grenades at the missing candidate—and occasionally at each other—like infantry corporals who’d seen service in four wars.