“I DON’T GET it,” said Kuni. “If they know you hate the guy so much, why did they make you report the Oscars?”
“Because when you’re fifty-plus-plus and not exactly employable, you do what the boss says—even if his name is Mohandas.”
We were sitting in Fairlawn’s legendary no-star eatery, the Dish of Food, having a beer to wash away the memory of the Reverend’s triumph. I couldn’t take my eyes off the four-foot-high Ten Commandments displayed behind the bar. Perhaps it was the Reverend’s talk of temptation, but Number Seven was jumping out at me tonight. How long, O Lord, since I’d even had a shot at adultery?
“It seems totally sadistic,” said my young friend, toying with the meatballs on the bar. I moved them out of his reach. You couldn’t risk it, with mad pig everywhere. And now mad chicken.
“Corporations are sadistic,” I said. “They’re like any herd; they despise the weak and wounded. They know my history with this guy, so they torture me by forcing me to say nice things about him.”
“I never understood this hard-on you have for the Reverend. I know he’s the Enemy, et cetera, et cetera, but it seems . . . personal.”
I stared into my beer, wondering if I should explain. Why not? He was the only under-thirty who’d ever shown any interest in my hopelessly outdated politics. He said he wanted to be a reporter. It’d be a cautionary tale.
It was back when I was still at the newspaper of record, basking in the afterglow of the Pulitzer I’d won ten years earlier.
With the blasphemy-sodomy-witchcraft statutes in hand, the first thing the Christian Right did—even before they went after Hollywood—was to start suing major post-progressive newspapers. Any story in which Christianity or Christians were mentioned (proposals, strategies, activities, initiatives, anything) triggered a blasphemy suit. They were mostly nuisance suits and were thrown out over and over on First Amendment grounds. But they kept coming, costing newspapers—who were already sweating about declining circulations—millions they could ill afford. Right-wing papers, naturally, were immune.
The tricky thing about being accused of blasphemy is that the accuser has enormous freedom to define the extent of your guilt. It’s like sexual harassment. Unless actually witnessed, it’s judged on the emotions. He said/she said? The guy’s probably guilty. He said/God said? Same thing.
The big papers started backing away from stories about Christianity. But far-right Christians were running the show everywhere: the judiciary, the military, the legislatures, the budget, foreign policy. News and Christians couldn’t be separated. The papers’ coverage became spottier and spottier, and readership declined even further. This Big Chill was exactly what was intended.
I should’ve seen my demise coming. I’d just lost my editor of twenty years, Ted Kaminski, a good friend despite his being as skewed to the right as I was to the left. He saw the writing on the wall and fled downtown to Wall Street, where the writing was safer. If he’d stuck around, he’d never have let me write myself into a hole the way I did.
Although our news was getting softer and softer, with back sections of the paper—fashion, dining, lifestyle, the arts—becoming front sections, we were still the newspaper of record. If the fundos (as we called them) went too far, we’d have an obligation to cover them, whatever the legal consequences. Came the day that obligation arose.
The Christian Right had long maintained that sex was for one thing only: making babies. Halfway through Sparrow 2’s third term, the Reverend began pushing the more radical notion that any other kind of sex was a form of abortion (since a baby-making op had been deliberately averted). He christened the movement Pro-creationism. With Roe v. Wade a distant memory, this meant that anyone who made the beast with two backs for—God forbid—pleasure could go to jail. How could you catch the sex-crazed bastards? You couldn’t. But you could remove from the culture all those pernicious stimulants that cause even nice Baptist couples to claw feverishly at each other’s clothes as soon as they get home from church.
Of course the initiative wasn’t aimed at Baptists but at every kind of sexual activity the Right hadn’t yet got its mitts on, extramarital or birth controlled, sex education, the ever-popular porn industry, suggestive advertising, cinematic sex scenes. (Straight sex scenes, anyway; gay sex was already a felony.) Most of the areas we still covered would be affected, even wining and dining, if you consider a good dinner with a bottle of wine a form of foreplay.
The newsroom watched the debate with slack-jawed disbelief: Were they really going to make sex illegal? But the subject was a minefield. We clung to the hope that lunacy this extreme would, for once, shoot itself in the foot.
Driven by the Reverend, the debate morphed into concrete proposals. Pieces of Pro-creationist legislation began making their way down the streams and creeks that flowed into the great sea of salvation. Most were bans on something, all were fascinating insights into the right-wing Christian libido. There were to be no lipstick ads where lipstick was shown in contact with lips, no shampoo ads where hair swung in slow motion, no images of two or more people in a hot tub, no close-ups of the snap in pro football coverage. There were proposals to clothe the nether regions of male pets and farm animals and numerous bans on apparel: ankle bracelets, pointy shoes, pants with things written on the butt. Iowa wanted to outlaw grain silos with rounded tops. Anything that got right-wing Christians hot was facing the Big No.
The tipping point had come. My editorial board decided that outlawing sex was so outrageous it couldn’t be allowed to pass. A major piece on the ultra-extremism of Pro-creationist proposals was planned, mainly to arouse public indignation. I lobbied hard for the assignment.
It was a conscientious piece. I gave a dispassionate account of the ongoing debate and detailed the potential impact of Pro-creationist bans on lifestyles, advertising, and the arts. I interviewed countless religious lunatics, bending over backward to be balanced (which is a pretty interesting posture to be in, believe me).
Where Kaminski would’ve stopped me dead was my going a step farther—into the Bible. Ironically, I was trying to be fair to the Pro-creationists by quoting the biblical basis for their proposals. I found a basis for many of them: For example, St. Paul would definitely have had a cow about female hair swinging in slow motion. But I did write, after exhaustive research, The Bible is silent on condom use.
It seemed an innocent enough statement. Our blasphemy attorneys cleared it, the fact-checkers double-checked it. The editors ran the article deep inside the A section as a lifestyle piece. But it wouldn’t have mattered how deep it was buried. Within days we were in the middle of the perfect shit storm.
The furious responses came from every quarter—though we soon discovered the Reverend was coordinating the whole thing. They all boiled down to the infallibility of the Bible. There was a chasm between the two sides. For us, if the Bible was silent on condom use, it meant there was no prohibition. For them it meant condoms didn’t exist in God’s plan for man.
The paper braced for the inevitable lawsuit. Or lawsuits: one against the paper and one against me. In questioning the Bible’s infallibility, we’d caused chronic spiritual trauma to, and grossly infringed on, the freedom of worship of the plaintiff, a young and telegenic Pure Holy Baptist mom from Indiana, personally selected, I’m sure, by the Reverend.
In other words, the First Amendment was being used against the First Amendment. (For legal historians, this was several years before Sparrow 3 suspended the First Amendment with the First Emendment.)
Our blasphemy attorneys said we could win, but the fight would be protracted and expensive. After so many battles, the paper had no stomach for another. They’d counted on arousing public outrage, but the public didn’t seem to care. There was an election coming up in a year. . . .
You never knew.
The Reverend was in an expansive mood that windy March morning in the tenth-floor boardroom. He was riding into the very heart of the enemy camp to issue his terms to the Antichrist. The moment brought out the good ol’ boy in him. He’d chosen to wear Tony Lama boots and sat with them up on the boardroom table, his teeth clenched in a triumphant leer as our attorneys went into their good-cop bad-cop routine. After a few moments, he shut them up with a wave of his hand, jumped to his feet, and leaned on his fists.
“How’s it feel, boys—oh, ’scuse me, ladies, and girls—after all these years? Fifty–sixty years making fun of us dumb rednecks? For dunking ourselves in muddy rivers and speaking in tongues. Now us dumb rednecks are right beside you on the bridge of the good ship Sodom-on-the-Hudson!”
“Let me interpose,” said his lead attorney, a silky-smooth Atlantan called Lamar, “that the Reverend’s remarks are without prejudice and not for attribution.”
“Don’t you worry ’bout that, Lamar.” The Reverend rolled right over him. “I don’t mind who hears this—or reads it, either. Listen up, boys and girls. I don’t want your blood money. I got more money in my back pocket than you ever dreamed of. I want your humiliation. Tomorrow, a full-page retraction on the back page of every section. The article? Out of your archives! Paper, microfiche, electronic: de-leted! And—he turned to me, the toothy grin of triumph wiped instantly from his face—“a full apology on the front page of next Sunday’s edition from this sacrilegious weasel to every Christian in America, for his antireligious Bible-hating filth! In his own words. Approved by me.”
He sat down.
There was a long silence. The board and the attorneys exchanged whispered comments.
Then the editor in chief said, “Every section might be diminishing returns, don’t you think? How about A, B, Business, National, and Arts?”
“And Sports,” said the Reverend.
The newspaper of record agreed. Who could blame them? Seventeen pairs of eyes turned toward me. Another silence.
“Just so’s we understand each other,” said the Reverend to the room, “this man saying no is a deal breaker.”
“He’s an independent journalist, Reverend,” said Ye Ed. “That’s how we do things around here. People think for themselves.”
Well, up to a point. Outside the boardroom, they said if I refused they would respect me enormously but they couldn’t support the cost of two major lawsuits. They could arrange early retirement, triggering a considerable lump sum that would take care of my legal costs. As for their case, they’d fight it all the way to the Supreme Court.
When I returned to the boardroom—alone, the Reverend rose from his chair, smiling, and invited me to sit next to him. Lamar had vanished. So had the triumphant redneck.
“Sorry about the name-calling, Johnny. Just putting on a show. I hope we can work together on this.”
“I’m willing to talk.”
“Alrighty, let’s talk. What I’d like your apology—if you don’t mind me calling it that—to say is that I and my people believe in something, but you and yours don’t.”
“That isn’t true. I believe in America. I want it back.”
“I don’t think you know what you mean by America, Johnny. I don’t think you’re certain of anything.”
“I know this,” I said. “There’s one kind of person capable of certainty and another kind incapable of it. The second kind envies the first. The first doesn’t envy the second; doesn’t even know, in fact, by what right they’re alive. In that arrogant ignorance lies most of human tragedy.”
The Reverend’s pale eyes were the color of muddy water. While we spoke, they’d focused on me, but now they refocused through me, on some greater audience.
“You are a worthy opponent, Mr. Greco. Your apology will say that your America is a place of uncertainty, that your truth is relative, that your morality is like the shifting sands of the desert. You will say that you realize there are those for whom America is different and that you envy them: the believing, the certain, those who know truth and morality. You will also say that just as you once legislated respect for your own—minorities, feminists, homosexuals, the handicapped—Christian believers now in the ascendant have an equal right to legislate respect for their own. You will apologize to them from the bottom of your heart for your lack of respect. In your own words, of course.”
It was a mistake to go on the bender; I’d been sober for years. But I needed to die for a while and benders are temporary suicide. I committed it around Tuesday lunchtime. When I came to, it was late Friday. I had an hour to write my apology. Lamar was down in the Risen Lamb headquarters in Atlanta waiting to approve it. If I wrote it.
If I didn’t, I’d be respected enormously and without a doubt go to jail, where good reporters go for what they believe in. For what they’re certain of.
I had it framed just as it appeared on the front page of the Sunday edition. It began: My America is a place of uncertainty and relative truth.
The Greco Option, my peers called it. Overnight I became the pariah in the schoolyard again, the runty bookish kid no one wants on their team or tells their secrets to.
Most of those who shunned me had long abandoned outrage; they resisted nothing, watching from behind the curtains as the America they said they loved was demolished by the hard hats of the Lord. Maybe deep down they felt the same shame I did, but they wanted me to go to jail for it.
“Shame breeds benders,” I concluded. “After two more, the paper fired me. It was a year before I found another job—my proper level, I guess—working for this outfit. That was five years ago.
“I used to hang the Greco Option in front of me wherever I wrote, to remind me of my cravenness. And so I’d never never forget the man whose words they were. . . .”
I’d been staring for a long time now into my flat warm beer. I shook my head to get the memories out and looked over at Kuni.
Fast asleep.