PART 1 OF 2
CHAPTER 2
Nurse Jane Harper came home from a hard day in the respiratory unit at St. Vincent's, kicked off her thick-soled white shoes, and sank into her favorite armchair. Reaching for the remote, she turned the TV on and tuned to CNN to catch the news. Wolf Blitzer was in the middle of a story about the trial of those two Enron guys, Lay and Skilling. Jane hoped the judge would throw the book at them. She was on her way to the kitchen to make herself a Lean Cuisine when a loud squawk stopped her in her tracks.
There on the screen was a parrot, the most gorgeous bird she'd ever seen, all iridescent reds and blues and yellows, cocking its head and fixing her with its bright eye as it said with uncannily perfect diction, "Get up! Don't let America down!" Under the parrot's feet was a running banner urging viewers to call or e-mail about an improvement they'd like to see in the country, nationally or locally, something they'd be willing to work toward. "Get up'! Don't let America down!" the parrot squawked again.
Jane thought about Lucinda Jackson, a single mother who'd come in today with her two small children, all of them suffering from shortness of breath. Like many of Jane's patients, Lucinda and her kids lived near a bus stop and had to breathe in the acrid pollution the buses spewed every seven minutes or so. Jane knew that some cities were converting to cleaner natural-gas fuels, but not Birmingham, where the bus fleet was aging and poorly maintained for emissions control. She saw the effects firsthand every day. It was a terrible situation, and she'd been angry about it for a long time, especially on behalf of Birmingham's children, but when she'd gone to the mayor's office last year to lodge a complaint, she was told there was no money for conversion.
"Get up! Don't let America down!"
Nurse Jane Harper grabbed her telephone and dialed the toll-free number at the bottom of her screen.
***
Stan Yablonsky pushed open the heavy wooden door of Clancy's Cave, shrugged off his Buffalo Bills jacket, and sat down at the bar next to his friend Mike O'Malley.
"Gimme a double Jack neat, Ernie," he said to the bartender.
"Hard day at the plant?" Mike asked.
"Hell, yeah, with all the lay offs there's half the people doing the same amount of work." Stan sighed. "Could be worse, though. Least I got a job."
Ernie slapped a cardboard coaster down on the bar and set Stan's bourbon on it.
"Thanks, Ernie." Stan turned to Mike. "So how 'bout you, buddy? Those little tweakers leave gum on your chair again or steal all the chalk?"
Mike laughed. "Those kids are a handful, all right, but you know, I feel for them. They're in the sixth grade and half of them still can't read, not that there's enough books to go around. And it's a tough neighborhood, high unemployment, shitty housing, drugs --"
"Hey, lighten up, man. I'm not in the mood for one of your lectures. How 'bout I buy you a beer?" Stan knocked back his bourbon. "Another round over here, Ernie, and turn on ESPN, wouldya?"
"What do you care? The Bills've been out of contention since December," Ernie said, but he reached up and flicked the TV on. As he was about to change the channel, the screen filled with the familiar faces of Paul Newman and Bill Cosby.
"Liberty and justice for all?" Newman was saying. "Don't make me laugh, Bill."
"That's my job, Paul," Cosby replied, "but this is no laughing matter."
"Hang on, Ernie," Mike said. "Let's watch this for a minute."
"Aw, c'mon," Stan grumbled, "put on SportsCenter."
"[T]o expose the lie we tell every time we recite our Pledge of Allegiance. What we have in this country, Bill, is liberty and justice for some."
"Damn right, and the 'some' doesn't include the kids in our crumbling inner-city schools, the retirees defrauded of their pensions by corrupt corporations, the folks in New Orleans' Ninth Ward, the vets who come home to inadequate medical care and no jobs ..."
As Cosby continued his catalogue of the manifold injustices afflicting American society, the camera closed in on his face -- that reassuring, genial face welcomed into millions of homes for so many years, now grim with anger -- and then panned back to reveal a huge blowup of the Pledge of Allegiance with "for all" crossed out and replaced by "for some."
By now, Stan and Ernie were staring at the TV along with Mike.
"And so we urge you today" -- close-up on Newman now, with steel in those blue eyes -- "to take the Pledge pledge, to bring our Pledge of Allegiance in line with reality by saying 'with liberty and justice for some' until the day when we can all truly say 'with liberty and justice for all."
"Jesus, Mary, and Joseph," Mike O'Malley said. He had a long night ahead, still had to grade papers and do his lesson plan on the Underground Railroad, but at least he knew how he was going to start his class tomorrow morning.
***
Arlene Jones set a cup of coffee and a slice of apple pie in front of the lone customer in the corner booth of the Treezewood Diner, a truck stop just off I-70 in central Pennsylvania.
"Give a holler if you need anything else, hon," she said as she went back behind the counter.
Normally the Treezewood was packed at all hours, even during the graveyard shift, but tonight there was a blessed lull. Arlene turned on the news to see the latest on that big snowstorm they'd been predicting, but what she saw instead was a shock of silver hair over a puckish face. Was she in a time warp? Hadn't Phil Donahue been off the air for a decade or more? She turned up the sound.
"The always controversial talk-show host has stirred up fresh controversy with his op-ed piece in yesterday's New York Times," the anchorman said. "The piece was titled 'Who Is Denying America Its Future? A Wake-up Call.'"
Arlene didn't know who was denying America's future. She didn't know who was denying her own future. All she knew was that she'd spent thirty years working for tips and what she managed to make on the side mending clothes. According to the anchorman, Phil had said something in his op-ed about vested interests depriving people of their collective power and stripping them of their rights.
Arlene blushed, remembering those male strippers on Phil's show. She'd loved that show, and not just for the beefcake. She'd loved it for the way Phil raised issues no one else was willing to raise, for the way he'd given voice to his vast audience, mostly women who were home to watch him because they were caring for their children or their aged parents, or getting ready for the afternoon shift at some dull, low-paying job.
"Rather mysteriously." the anchorman said, "Mr. Donahue ended his piece with the words 'Stay tuned.'''
Arlene nodded. Yes, she would. She would definitely stay tuned.
***
On the outskirts of Oklahoma City, Jack Soaring Eagle walked slowly down the long, dusty drive that led from his trailer to his mailbox. He was hoping his unemployment check would come today. Up until last year, he'd been making pretty good money as a foreman in a kitchen appliance factory, but then the owners shut the place down and moved to China. Things had been tight ever since.
Jack opened the battered tin box, took out a handful of letters, and shuffled through them, scanning the return addresses as he walked back to the trailer. No check, just junk mail, a couple of bills, something from the local Cherokee council, and -- what was this? He stopped, arrested by a striking image in the upper left corner of the last letter. It was a simple, elegant line drawing of an eye that seemed to be looking far into the future. Under the eye were seven human figures, each extending a hand to the next, and beside it was a name: Yoko Ono.
Jack went inside and sat down at his kitchen table, studying the envelope. A letter from Yoko Ono? Must be some kind of joke. He'd never cared much for the Beatles, didn't like most of their music -- that "yeah, yeah, yeah" was like fingernails on a chalkboard as far as he was concerned -- but he remembered reading about John and Yoko's "Bed-in for Peace" back in '69 when he was stationed in Saigon. He and a lot of his buddies had already turned against the war in Vietnam, sickened by horrors like the My Lai massacre and by the politicians' lies about body counts, and he'd appreciated what John and Yoko were trying to do. Jack opened the envelope.
There was the eye again, at the top, followed by a letter from Yoko explaining its symbolism. She called it "the Seventh- Generation Eye," representing the principle that leaders must weigh all their decisions in terms of their impact on the future as far as the seventh generation to come. Jack didn't have to read on to learn that it was a principle derived from the Great Law of Peace of the Iroquois Confederacy; it was an integral part of the American Indian belief system, and one that guided his own tribe's deliberations.
Yoko went on to say that she wanted to do her part for the seventh generation by sending an energy-saving compact fluorescent lightbulb (CFL) free of charge to any household requesting one. All the recipients had to do was provide name and address, along with one sentence explaining why they wanted such a bulb and specifying wattage. "I know a lot of you will think I'm off in the ether again and this is just another one of my wacky ideas," Yoko wrote, "but when you stop to consider that a single CFL can save two thousand times its own weight in greenhouse gases, maybe you'll decide it's not so wacky. Multiply that by millions of people using these bulbs, and it's enough energy to replace dozens of fossil fuel and nuclear power plants. Please join me in this simple act that will help insure the future of our planet. With thanks in advance from myself and your great-great-great-great-great-great-great grandchildren."
Jack sat drumming his fingers on the tabletop for a minute. Then he stood up and got the pad and pen he kept by the phone. "Dear Yoko Ono," he wrote. "I would like one seventy-five watt CFL to read by, and because it will brighten my life just like your letter has." He paused, then added "Gratefully yours" and signed his name with a flourish.
***
In the weeks following the Maui meeting, the activities of Warren's colleagues in the core group had exceeded his wildest expectations. He couldn't turn on the news or read the paper without hearing about an initiative one of them had launched or some controversy they'd stirred up.
As promised, Ted Turner and Phil Donahue had put their heads together to brainstorm about a mascot for the group's efforts. Ted's thoughts naturally ran along avian lines, and it wasn't long before they hit on the idea of a parrot. Phil called a friend of his in the highly regarded veterinary program at the State University of New York in Delhi, and was able to procure a splendid scarlet macaw, along with the services of linguistic trainer Clifton Chirp. Chirp rolled up his sleeves and went to work.
Patriotic Polly hit the airwaves in fifteen-second spots shown on thousands of stations, and was an immediate smash. She would have won an Academy Award in her category, if there were such a category. Amazing what an animal could communicate to humans, Warren thought. Fully 13 million viewers had e-mailed or called in their choice of a change they were willing to work for in their country or state or town, and Patriotic Polly was the talk of the nation for days. Late- night TV comedians joked about what else she might say, and Letterman offered a year's worth of crackers as a prize for the best submission. One unintended side effect was that the price of Amazonian parrots skyrocketed.
Hot on Polly's heels had come the Cosby/Newman telethon, a live three-hour event carried by all the major networks thanks to the behind-the-scenes exertions of Barry Diller. When the three men told the rest of the core group about their plan for the show at the first post-Maui closed-circuit conference, Joe Jamail and Bill Gates Sr. had suggested that the Pledge of Allegiance be one of the segments, which was why Mike O'Malley's class and hundreds of other classes around the country were now starting off the day with "liberty and justice for some." And that was only the first half-hour of the telethon. The rest of it was devoted to demonstrating how the media uses public property -- the airwaves -- to foster complacency, serve power, sell junk, and trivialize or distort or cover up the news. Cosby demanded a giveback of daily hours on the broadcast spectrum to citizens who wished to join together and create their own networks, to be funded by license fees imposed on the airtime that TV and radio had been using for free since their industries began. Newman showed clips from his own collection of independently produced films and documentaries to illustrate the kind of programming that the people, with well-funded studios, producers, and reporters, would put on the air. Then both of them announced an instant poll to be conducted via the toll-free number flashing on the screen, and over the next hour the audience registered an overwhelming desire for such a people's voice. Finally, Cosby and Newman urged viewers to flood the FCC and Congress with demands for legislative and regulatory hearings on such matters as children's television, coverage of civic action, and whatever ideas of their own they wanted to advance.
The next day, the headlines read, to paraphrase, "What the hell were Cosby and Newman doing? Trying to wreck their careers? Are they nuts?" The editors of the Wall Street Journal had a follow-up observation in an editorial titled "Possessed by Marx," wherein they dutifully accused the two men of being closet communists seemingly headed toward senility. Cosby and Newman wrote a letter to the editor in response. Unabridged and printed in full, it read, "Stay tuned."
On the flight home from Maui, Phil Donahue had composed the dazzling op-ed that was published a few days later in the New York Times and covered on some of the nightly news broadcasts, even on small local stations like Arlene Jones's. In his "wake-up call," he didn't beat around the bush about who was denying America its future. He pointed squarely to commercial interests that said no to the well-being of the people, and then he gave a rousing rundown of how the people's power, if awakened, could effect change. The response was tremendous. Not all of it was positive, but to judge by the letters that poured into his office, about 85 percent reacted as if they'd just overcome a long period of constipation: "What can we do?" they wrote, or "Here's what we're doing in our area that should be disseminated," or "Note to rulers: lead or get out of the way!" NBC was bombarded with letters demanding the return of Phil's talk show. Then there were the calls from friends who seemed to have come alive. Two of the wealthiest of them wanted to meet with him in Manhattan "to see how we can get things moving in this country." With his down-to-earth language, Phil had obviously hit a nerve. Lots of people were willing to jump out of the cake for him.
Yoko Ono had returned from Maui and gone straight to her New York studio. She'd been deeply affected by everything she'd heard at Warren's gathering, and particularly by an impassioned conversation she'd had with Bernard Rapoport over dinner, about the universal human obligation to posterity. Dear old B. Yoko fervently believed that the future could be made beautiful. Most people didn't see it, but art could put it right in front of them, give them an unmediated awareness, what she liked to call "a somersault of the mind." It was strange how people could tolerate injustice, brutality, fraudulence, and a host of other wrongs without being moved to act. Maybe they were bored, or maybe just defeated by a combination of the complexity of the world's problems and their own sense of powerlessness. But they did care about their children and grandchildren's future, a future they viewed with anxiety and uncertainty in this fast-changing, perilous world over which they had so little control, except to strive for a modicum of financial security. Art could cut through all that. Art could move them toward action.
Hour after hour, in silence and solitude, Yoko searched for the tao, the way, the path to the image that would crystallize the Maui mission. Finally it came to her, in her own somersault of the mind: the Seventh-Generation Eye. Quickly she sketched it, and then the seven linked generations, a symbol representing the connection between present and future through the most expressive organ of the human body, the window of the soul.
Yoko sat up at her drawing board and stretched. Astonishing how she'd seen it all at once, as if the proverbial lightbulb had dropped down over her head to signal a sudden idea or inspiration. She laughed at the cliche, and was still laughing as she moved to her computer and began typing a letter about lightbulbs. Oh, art was grand!
Over the next few days, Yoko mobilized her extensive network of friends and contacts to help her send out a million letters like the one Jack Soaring Eagle received, and close to 20 million e-mails, all from lists properly rented. She went personally to the main manufacturer of compact fluorescent bulbs and cut a deal to buy them at a wholesale price of $2.50 each, a considerable reduction from the usual wholesale price of $7.50 or more. Attached to each bulb she sent out would be a message estimating the amount of coal, oil, gas, and nuclear fuel wasted because General Electric, through its near monopoly well into the seventies, sold incandescent lightbulbs that burned out quickly and had to be replaced often.
As for Bernard, he'd also been thinking about his conversation with Yoko when he returned home to Texas. Bernard had always had a dream, ever since his father told him that if a society takes care of its children, it will also be taking care of itself. Part of what Papa meant was that people who would otherwise resist change could be persuaded to support it if they thought it was for the benefit of children.
Bernard placed ads on select cable channels saying that he would establish after-school Egalitarian Clubs to teach children civic skills and democratic values like equality of opportunity and the importance of a decent standard of living. Then he unloaded the provocation that brought a torrent of attention and criticism in the following days. He said that the big corporations were on an omnicidal track in the world -- destroying our democracy and the environment, to give just two examples -- and that a new generation of Americans had to learn to control, replace, or displace corporate power, especially since the schools were now instruments of corporate propaganda, both directly and indirectly. He spent hours giving interviews, drawing on his impressive historical knowledge of corporate crimes, abuses, tricks, and treasonous behavior toward the masses. It was as if he had prepared for these interviews all his adult life. A CEO himself, he was accused darkly of being a traitor to his class by at least one prominent business commentator, but Oprah Winfrey had him on her show for an hour with six seventh-graders from the Chicago public schools. It was an interaction for the ages.
Like Bernard, Jeno Paulucci had a long-cherished dream, that of establishing an alternative national chamber of commerce with local and regional chapters. He had had his fill of existing chambers that put corporations ahead of people in what amounted to a master-servant relationship. Jeno was the most naturally gregarious of the core group members. When he called himself "just a peddler from the Iron Range," this Republican wasn't kidding. Starting dirt poor in northern Minnesota as the son of immigrants, he'd built and sold some fifty companies, having a ball all the way. He loved his workers and treated them so well that he welcomed unions. He loved competition so much that he once proposed a price war to a larger competitor, until his lawyers admonished him about the antitrust laws. If there was one thing he knew, it was that commerce had to serve people, not the other way around. He had recently made just that point in his boisterous autobiography, Jeno: The Power of the Peddler.
Jeno drafted a two-page proclamation of the People's Chamber of Commerce, barnstormed with news conferences in ten cities at the rate of two cities a day, and took out ads on business cable channels, all of which led to extensive television and radio interviews. He always sounded the same note, inviting businesses of all sizes to join up by paying initial dues of $50 and signing the declaration of people's business principles and practices that a business ethics friend of his had written back in 1978. Once this first stage was completed, a more comprehensive founding convention would be held to create a chaordic organizational structure on the model originated by Visa founder Dee Hock. Hock coined the term, a blend of "chaos" and "order," in a book published in 2000, Birth of the Chaordic Age -- "chaos" being defined in the context of current chaos theory as elaborated by the Santa Fe group, not in its more familiar dictionary meaning. In accordance with Hock's principles, the People's Chamber of Commerce would feature maximum autonomy on the periphery (the local chapters), which would be loosely linked to a small core group that set obligatory minimum standards. The PCC would be chaordic for optimum creativity.
To the astonishment of everyone but Jeno, 78,000 businesses signed up in two weeks. As he had anticipated, many of them were franchises, large and small, which promised to bring in thousands more members. The PCC, Jeno said, was the beginning of the end for the giant trade associations -- drug, auto, mining, food, energy, banking, insurance, defense, real estate -- that monopolized the voices of business.
This incipient challenge to the sodden hegemony of the Washington-based trade associations became the news and then the speculation of the hour. "Where is it all heading?" one trade group president asked. "How can the people speak for business?" remarked another in a CNN interview, unaware how much he was communicating. After the first round of press, Jeno would only say to the legions of interview requests, "Stay tuned," a comment that was tantalizing to reporters almost beyond their endurance. The news media knew Jeno well from his days as a grand networker with a Rolodex the size of a Ferris wheel, and they knew something big was coming -- but what?
The uproar over the PCC was matched by the uproar Peter Lewis created in the insurance industry. Peter had forged his tumultuous, iconoclastic career in this industry, and he owed his massive, still-growing wealth to it, but he had long wondered about its central hypocrisy. Insurance companies talked about risk management as if it meant the best way for their computers to get the most profit out of existing risks. To Peter, that was not risk management. To Peter, risk management meant risk reduction or loss prevention. The insurance companies' dirty little secret was that they would accept more losses as long as they could collect more premiums. Why? So they'd have more dollars to invest. Today investment income was central to the swollen profitability of insurers, in contrast to the situation decades ago, when insurance underwriters were more like engineering firms, scrutinizing risks and trying to make it on premium income. In the nineteenth century, insurance companies would refuse to insure a factory without improvements in boilers to avert then-frequent explosions, but the insurance companies didn't operate that focused way anymore.
Peter took out a full-page ad in the Wall Street journal, disclosing for starters that the fire insurance industry didn't do much about fire prevention because fewer fires would mean less business. Despite lip service to prevention, these companies went out of their way to overlook weak fire codes, lax enforcement, and substandard materials. At the bottom of the ad was Peter's signature and the line "Interviews by the media are invited." Minutes after the paper hit the stands, the phones in his office started ringing off the hook The fireworks, so to speak, began exploding all over as Peter extended his criticism to health, life, worker's compensation, and auto insurers, and then to gigantic reinsurers like Munich Re and Lloyd's of London. He had an easy time with the reporters, who knew little about the subject, and the insurance executives were afraid to debate him. "Human and property tragedies have become the near exclusive inventory of the insurance companies," he declared, "when these companies should be the sentinels of health and safety in every area, from the local hospital operating room to the global environment."
Cascades of controversy erupted in every sector of the society and economy touched by the insurers. The story broke on a Monday, and by Saturday, Peter was satisfied that the dynamics he had generated were multiplying on their own. He settled back in his favorite chair at his Park Avenue duplex and inhaled deeply, Tomorrow he would digest the week. Today it was time for sweet serenity.
Having slept the entire way home from Maui to San Diego, Sol Price awakened the next morning refreshed and rejuvenated, or at least alive, and immediately took out full-page ads in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, the Boston Globe, the Los Angeles Times, and the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. He also bought a minute to run the ad on Meet the Press. Under a big, bold headline -- "IS THIS THE WAY WE, THE SO-CALLED OLDER HIGH AND MIGHTY, WANT TO LEAVE OUR COUNTRY?" -- was a series of short phrases describing the decay and decline of our nation, all the worsening trends and tragedies. In large type at the bottom was the message "O Rich and Powerful, arise, you have nothing to lose but your country, your world, and your descendants' respect! Let's go to the heights and exit not with a whimper, wallowing in luxurious boredom, despair, and discouragement, but with a bang!"