“For God’s sake, San, why can’t we leave them alone?” Emilie broke the silence. “Why do you have to ruin my life just so you can keep them from ruining theirs?”
And by ruining her life I think she meant both stirring up the sort of fear and uncertainty that is unconducive to economic growth and, perhaps, luring me off a path that she considered suitable for a mate. Emilie knew that, despite my burst of enthusiasm upon becoming a partner, I had become dangerously distracted by the public drama that was playing out every day. After all, my making partner was not the limit of her ambition. Only a few weeks after I became a partner, she said in the jesting voice that she used only when she regarded the topic as very serious, that she hoped I had now turned my sights on becoming head of my practice group and then, eventually, chairman. She knew this required a single-minded focus on my work that permitted no distractions, and Emilie feared that I was being distracted. Being married to a B-list partner, even of the city’s best firm, would have been difficult for her. A cheating spouse would have been better than a professionally mediocre one. Thus her fear of my increasing interest in current events. But she didn’t fear—and couldn’t imagine—what I was soon to do.
In early August 2013, less than nine months after I had become a partner of RCD&S, it was an ordinary day in the office. I was supposed to be marking up a prospectus for the initial public offering of a South American paper company. Looking up, I saw a CNN e-mail news alert and read that the federal Department of Education and the National Science Foundation had jointly released for comment rules setting new conditions for participation by colleges and universities in federal grants and funding. Almost every American college depended on its students continuing to be eligible for federal loan programs, and eligibility for federal grant funding was vital to any top-tier scientific program. As a result, although presented as conditions to a federal benefit, they would, if adopted, become de facto requirements. The first of the new conditions was that the university must not maintain any rule or practice that prevented university libraries from acquiring books dealing with creationism or intelligent design as legitimate theories. The second condition was that the supported institution must not maintain any rule or practice preventing the display of Christian symbols in public places on campus. Such a rule prohibiting Islamic, Hindu, or Wiccan symbols, the commentary explained, would be acceptable but was not required. The final condition was that the supported university would be required to adopt a policy forbidding the further acquisition into any university library of any book “celebrating or promoting” a “homosexual lifestyle.”
I went to the Federal Register website and read the proposed rule in its entirety. The first two conditions—merely requirements that a college
not prohibit
creationist texts or religious symbols—would doubtless be viewed by much of the general public as trivial or perhaps even fair. But that view was profoundly in error. To say that you cannot deny or exclude the patently false (creationism) is only a small step away from requiring you to believe it. And for our greatest universities to ban from their collections any new work acknowledging homosexuality or dealing with its implications would require them to acquiesce in and enforce a sexual taboo, thus failing their core missions to be custodians of civilization and clear-eyed proponents of reason.
As tempting as it was to see this as more symbolic pandering to the religious right, and far less serious than the other parts of Palin’s legislative program, it affected me more strongly. Our elite universities were the stewards of our true national history, our temples of reason and the keepers of our collective memory. They, more than the Supreme Court, are the ultimate guardians of the enlightenment. To me, a door had opened that could lead only to a single destination: a new dark age of ignorance and superstition. This was about far more than politics and power.
It seems strange in retrospect that it was this relatively minor regulatory initiative in the field of education, and not the broad frontal attack on the Constitution, that finally triggered one of my moments of situational awareness. Just like that day long ago before my first middle school football game, I seemed to rise above the noise and complexities of the moment and look down on the field of play. I saw neither ambiguity nor uncertainty but a society tumbling toward the most conventional type of religious authoritarianism. They would tell us what to think and believe, and those beliefs were primitive, ignorant, and dangerous. They would systematically eliminate from society any potentially contradictory voice. Their efforts were relentless and gaining traction and speed. I saw that Sanjay was right.
Since the night before the election when Sanjay asked me to join him at TW, he had not raised the subject again. We had adopted one of those comfortable fictions, each behaving as if the question had not been asked and as if the answer were not outstanding.
The very next day I walked into the office of the partner who had been my longtime mentor, who had become a friend, and who had been instrumental, I was sure, in having me elected as a partner. I sat down and decided to dispense with the pleasantries.
“John, I think you know how much I appreciate all you’ve done for me. I couldn’t have imagined that I would ever do something to let you down.”
He interrupted.
“Greg, if you’ve screwed up in some way, we can work through it. We’ve all made mistakes.”
“No, it’s not that. I’m resigning from the firm and going to work with Sanjay at Theocracy Watch. Given what’s happened, I feel I have no choice.”
He stared at the papers on his desk, and then he looked up.
“You always have a choice.”
“You’re right. I’m sorry. To be more precise, I have made a choice. Not because I don’t owe everything to you and the firm. Not because I’m unhappy in my work. Not because I don’t think I’m a damn fine lawyer. I have chosen something … well, something more important.”
“Sanctimonious doesn’t become you, Greg. And you know better. You sell your judgment to the brightest people in the country for thousands of dollars an hour. You know that it makes no sense to throw away your career to help people who … well, who don’t know the world as it really is and don’t know how to make things happen. They have no standing. No power. People like you, people like us, Greg, if we want to save the world, we do it from the inside.”
“I don’t want to save the world. John, think of World War II. What did the partners here do? Did they say the war was for others and their place was with their clients? No, they jumped, and jumped first. Think of Roger Leman.”
He was an RCD&S partner who was the first American killed in action in World War II when he was helping evacuate the British army at Dunkirk. I knew that John admired him.
“Where’s the war, Greg?”
“It’s here, John. It’s all around you.
They
call it a war, why shouldn’t we? What do you think will happen to RCD&S in a Christian fundamentalist state?”
“I find it all as distasteful as you do. But I find most politicians distasteful. You think I don’t cringe having to listen to that idiot night after night on TV? But you have to learn not to overreact. The economy goes on. Companies get bought and sold. Capital needs to flow. RCD&S will be fine.”
“Is that all that matters?” I asked, instantly regretting it.
“Don’t be insulting. If I thought there was any possibility that fascism was around the corner or that a real religious authoritarianism could take root in this country, then of course I’d be with you. But it can’t happen here.”
I wondered if he’d read Sinclair Lewis, but I decided not to go there.
“I hope you’re right, John. I will do everything possible so that the firm is not embarrassed.”
“Do you understand what you’re leaving behind?” he asked.
“I do.”
His face was passive, revealing neither annoyance nor sympathy.
“Thank you for telling me.”
And that, after eight and a half years of striving and sacrifice, was that.
For true blissed-out and vacant servitude … you need an otherwise sophisticated society where no serious history is taught at all.
—Christopher Hitchens,
“Why Americans Are Not Taught History,”
Harper’s
magazine, June 1999
I hope I live to see the day, when, as in the early days of our country, we won’t have any public schools. The churches will have taken them over again, and Christians will be running them.
—Jerry Falwell,
America Can Be Saved
(1979)
F
OR THE ENTIRETY
OF MY WORKING LIFE,
I had only one job. For almost nine years I entered the same lobby, rode the same elevators, and passed through the same double mahogany doors into the offices of RCD&S. I had focused relentlessly on the single goal of becoming a partner, and I had achieved it. And then, one Monday morning, I pulled on jeans, took the subway to Chambers Street, and arrived at the third-floor loft space that housed the staff of Theocracy Watch.
They say humans are creatures of habit, but for me the habits of those nine years were set aside in a day. Within only a week or so, the years I spent at the firm had assumed a dreamlike quality. In contrast, other memories were fresh, harsh, and hurtful. At some level I must have known that my decision to leave the law was a decision to end things with Emilie. But although we had been together for eight years, I did not consult with her about my decision or even tell her what I intended to do.
The night after my meeting with John, Emilie was there when I arrived home. I looked her in the eye and told her that I had resigned from the firm and was going to help Sanjay at TW. For a moment she held her breath. Then, slowly, she started gulping air with sharp hiccup-like inhalations. Her arms reached across her chest, and she embraced herself. I remember watching the bare skin on her upper arm turning white from the strength of her grip. Within moments, her staccato exhales evolved into loud sobs. She sat on the couch, rocking back and forth. I stood perfectly still. Her crying continued wordlessly for what seemed to me to be a long time. When it abated, she raised her head and showed a face contorted with a mixture of humiliation and rage.
“Out. Get … out. Now.”
I didn’t answer.
“Now,” she screamed.
I turned and left and have not seen her since.
As I write this, I again feel a dull tightness in my gut, as I have every single time during the past fourteen years that this scene has replayed itself in my mind. I make no excuses. It is one of the two things in my life about which I still feel a deep sense of shame. Looking out at the lake, I see that it is perfectly still, a featureless mirror. There is no current, no ripple connecting one point with another.
In an effort to distract myself from the disaster of my personal life, I threw myself into work at TW. Sanjay had surrounded himself with young people who were bright and motivated, but none had my ability to get things done. Of the $400 million from the sale of
You and I
, little had been spent on the organization. Sanjay wasn’t cheap; he certainly wasn’t spending it on himself, nor did he have any desire to grow or even maintain his wealth. Instead, he believed that TW’s credibility depended on a wide base of support, and he was determined that its successes should not be perceived as having been “bought” by his fortune.
I managed to persuade him that now was the time to let a bit of his money do some good. We hired a recently retired reporter, Walter Evans, who had spent his career at the
Wall Street Journal
and resented enormously the loss of that paper’s independence as under Rupert Murdoch’s ownership it eventually became yet another vehicle for the F3 movement. Walt was tough, well connected, and mad as hell. We had our new communications director. I also realized that our online footprint needed to be reinvented from the ground up. I hired a tech entrepreneur from California on the rebound from founding a clever but failed shopping co-op online social network. He understood middle America and was gay, horrified by the direction of the country, highly motivated, wonderfully creative, and much more tuned in to the rising generation than either Sanjay or I.
About a week later I found Sharon Heller, a middle-aged woman who had spent a career doing professional fund-raising for charities, most recently for the Topeka Symphony. That orchestra had been disbanded when the Kansas state legislature suddenly withdrew all support for cultural institutions in the state, banned National Public Radio, and conditioned the state tax deduction for charitable giving on an annual certification that the charity was not involved in “the promotion of abortion, homosexuality, secularism, or other evil.” Within months, she said, the vibrant cultural scene in Topeka—once a bastion of enlightenment against the retrograde politics of Kansas—was lost. Thousands of artists, musicians, writers, and liberal academics left the state. She too was motivated and really knew how to raise money. My final hire was a director of security. We had kept it quiet, but a few months before, someone had fired a shot through TW’s third-floor windows. The bullet lodged harmlessly in the ceiling, but I did not believe it to be an accident. We catalogued dozens of threats against Sanjay’s life on social networks and blogs, and—despite his disregard for his own security—I convinced him he owed it to me and all his other employees to take security more seriously.
Two weeks after I arrived, Walter Evans came to my desk.
“So, Greg, guess what I got. It’s too brilliant. Nah, you’ll never guess.”
“Well then, I won’t. Tell me.”
“Stewart. Jon Stewart.
The Daily Show
. Where our target demo gets their news and laughs. Average of one and a half million of them every day. He’s in love with Sanjay. Bloodly hopeless love. Thinks he’s a prophet. Wants to help. I mean really. Not take cheap shots. Really help.”