“COMING IN FROM the cold, Greco?”
“You kidding? Writing for this rag is like being a side of beef in a meat locker.”
Ted Kaminski was Global Features Editor of the Journal American and, despite being a neo-imperialist of the first water, one of my oldest friends. What may have attracted me to him was his size; he was even shrimpier than me. (He denied this, insisting I wore elevator shoes.) Unlike me, he was preternaturally dapper, dressed to the nines in all weathers and climes, which may have given him the absurd impression that he was my superior physically as well as sartorially.
You had to be dapper in body, mind, and soul to work at the Journal American. The paper was the one surviving news-gathering organization on the planet anyone remotely trusted; its clout was so enormous even the federal government thought twice before crossing swords with it. For security reasons, financial markets had long since gone off-planet, being located in satellites three hundred miles above every would-be billionaire’s hair plugs and run by astronautical business majors from the Beijing School of Economics. There was no longer the identification there once had been between the paper and a gloomy couple of blocks in downtown Manhattan. So the name had recently been shortened to the Journal, with an identifier indicating national provenance. It had forty-seven thriving foreign editions, many even bigger than the U.S. one, such as the Journal Indian. An added advantage to the name change was that after a decade and a half of Sparrovian foreign policy, the term “Wall Street” had, for the rest of the world, all the PR appeal of “Bergen-Belsen.”
“Never thought I’d see you crawling over that transom,” Ted drawled hospitably.
He took the completed Jay story—I was calling it “The Revelation Will Not Be Televised”—and weighed the forty double-spaced sheets in one daintily manicured paw.
Diametrically opposed on almost every issue, Kaminski and I were both prehensile conservatives when it came to the superiority of the printed page over the screen. Only his very considerable footfall in the corridors of power allowed Kaminski to get away with insisting that all major stories—no matter how illustrious the writer—be delivered in hard copy.
“Five thousand or a little under,” he announced expertly. (It was 4,882 words.) “Paper only at that length; you’ll have to do a bullet version for the web-plebs.”
I’d pitched the story to him and him only: the JA was the one surviving news organization immune to blasphemy suits, and my piece was asking for it. As I’d expected, he’d liked the idea. Ted was a renegade Catholic (and on his father’s side a renegade Jew), with a vast and omnivorous interest in religion. Somewhere, he said, between agnostic and Gnostic.
He quoted Burke and Hobbes by the yard and, despite his rabid devotion to the free market and manifest destiny, was a fierce egalitarian, a very Lincolnesque Republican, convinced it was America’s job to end slavery of any kind in the world. (His favorite movie of all time was Spartacus.) He made no secret of being disgusted by the thinly veiled racism of his co-conservatives. It was he who, when we were both still at the newspaper of record, had run my Pulitzer Prize–winning series, which happened to be about wage slavery in the Ben-and-Jerry-style eco-farms of the tristate area.
He shared with me a general loathing of fundamentalism, which he believed inimical to freedom and profoundly un-American, and a particular loathing of the Reverend. But he was far too shrewd an editorial strategist to make that the basis of his pitch to Mount Olympus, as he called his top editors. When he’d presented my proposed story to them he’d argued successfully that there was a fascinating laissez-faire dimension to the new would-be messiah. Here was the Reverend, fresh from a free-market triumph in which he had swallowed whole his largest competitor, and lo, within weeks a cocky little enterprise showed up on his flank with a radically updated, more appealing model of the Reverend’s own product.
The God-Mother thing alone, Kaminski argued, was a fantastic add-on to the brand; it could have broad and deep appeal to women of all ages, disenchanted by fundamentalist sexism. Who knew if, in a few years, Jay wouldn’t be eating the Reverend whole? He deserved a shot at the title.
Ted liked the finished story. He took out the “egregiously communardy” bits and, to my disappointment, the Miracle in Metuchen, which he said, since Jay hadn’t been associated with it publicly, seemed “opportunistic.” On the other hand, he said the story would run in two or three days, there being no reason not to bring on, as soon as possible, the putative collision between two versions of Christianity.
As it turned out, his timing was impeccable.