Let Us Select the One, by Dan Marsh
I woke up from a nightmare with the television on. An evangelist was hustling cash. This man had been defrocked by his own church. He had cried on his television show asking for forgiveness for consorting with a prostitute. Then another prostitute appeared. His redemption slowed. But he sees himself redeemed by his Lord. And needs cash now.
There are different views on prostitution. Some see it as an evil, some as a victimless crime. I think it depends where the pimp in his sharp suit stands. After all, the televangelist in his midnight maneuver is holding a Holy Bible. And that’s where I learned at 5 years of age of prostitution; I don’t know about you.
The defrocked preacher’s son has of late taken over his father’s ministry. He is taking in $100 from Jay in New York and $300 from Mary in Maryland, who is asking for prayers. The more one gives, the more prayers said, apparently.
It was Emerson who wrote, “The louder he talked of his honor, the faster we counted our spoons.”
Once I was sitting at a picnic table in a flyover state with my family, including a man who was also a close friend. We were talking about ranch riding horses (good and ill-tempered), and then he said to me, out of the indigo, “My father and grandfather were members of the K.K.K. in Indiana.”
I was eating franks and beans at the time and nearly choked on a piece of a Nathan’s hot dog from Brooklyn. “They lived outside of Indianapolis but traveled to burn down the houses of Catholics and Jews, to drive them out of other neighborhoods,” he said.
I pushed my food away.
I tried to have a good thought. I thought of a song by an Irish band, the Pogues. They sing, “The boys of the N.Y.P.D. choir were singing ‘Galway Bay,’ and the bells were ringing out for Christmas Day.” New York values, maybe.
As I walked back to our room with my wife past the saguaros so familiar from the films of my youth in which cowboys killed Indians, and kids in dark theaters cheered and had been taught nothing up to that point about a Trail of Tears, I was feeling, as Joni Mitchell once sang, “hollow like a cactus tree.”
This brings me years forward to today. The presidential election looms. (As one always seems to be in an endless spin cycle.) The candidates are shrill and, frankly, though some are very sharp individuals, sound idiotic. (This is because their handlers have told them to speak the language of the people.)
I saw in my newspaper the other day photographs made by Peter van Agtmael of members of the Ku Klux Klan. Though I am a Long Islander by birth and temperament, I live at present 12 miles as the raven flies from the White House in Maryland below the Mason-Dixon Line. The photographer nailed these robe-wearers hiding in their masks in houses and barns in Maryland and Tennessee. These are smallish states. One photo van Agtmael made was of a picture of Anne Frank that was tacked to a K.K.K. wall nearer to me than I would like that had this caption: “Hide and Seek Champion, 1942-1944.”
I rushed to a bathroom and puked.
Who stands for “truth, justice, and the American way”?
And what now is the American way?
Dan Marsh has been a “Guestwords” contributor since 2003. His writing has appeared in Newsday and Rolling Stone.