The Last Testament: A Memoir (24 page)

³
That was the right answer; at least, to the extent that it was an answer; which it was not.

⁴
Elihu’s words were majestic and lyrical, but teleologically amount to little more than six chapters’ worth of “Because Dad said so.”

⁵
Then finally I appeared “out of the whirlwind” to ask Job a dazzlingly bullying series of rhetorical questions: “Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth?”; “Canst thou send lightnings?”; “Who provideth for the raven his food?”; “Who put the
bomp
in the
bomp-sh-bomp-sh-bomp
?”; and many others;

⁶
Along with some very frightening monologues about the sea monster “Leviathan” and the land monster “Behemoth”; the terrified Job had no idea what I was speaking of, and neither did I; for I made that part up as I went.

⁷
The point of it all was to follow up Elihu’s “Because Dad said so” with “Dad’s back, and I’ve been out all eternity busting my ass, and the last thing I need when I get home is to hear you complaining about your ten dead kids. Now go kill me an ox!”

⁸
Which was a) not an answer, and b) worked.

⁹
In the end, Job is restored to prosperity, and has ten more children; that is truly what happened, though I can tell thee he spent the rest of his life terrified I was only setting him up for some awful sequel:
2 Job: The Resuffering.

¹⁰
Yet it is not Job’s tacked-on happy ending, or even its sumptuous poetry, but the central problem it seeks to address— Why do bad things happen to good people?—that has made it resound through the ages with so many;

¹¹
Including me.

¹²
For from where
I
sit, there is an even more resonant way to rephrase the question:

¹³
“What is
wrong
with me?”

¹⁴
It had first come up with Abraham on Mt. Moriah; it arose again (unlike the Egyptians) at the Red Sea; and over the centuries it had continued to linger like unto a cloud on my conscience.

¹⁵
Yea, the question never truly went away; for I am the L
ORD
thy God, King of the Universe; where would it go?

¹⁶
And so I never told Job, or the anonymous poet whose hand I guided across the parchment to tell his story, the
real
reason I allowed him to be so horribly afflicted.

¹⁷
It was not to test Job, but to test
me.

¹⁸
I wanted to see if I could watch him endure his agonies without experiencing any of that same unnameable thrill I had derived from watching the binding of Isaac, and the drowning of the Egyptians, and the countless other mass atrocities and tragedies that I had over the centuries allowed—or, sometimes,
caused
—to happen.

¹⁹
Thou mayest say, that I wanted to see if my heart was in the right place.

²⁰
Did I pass the test?

²¹
For now, I choose to leave that as
my
unanswered question.

²²
Instead I will answer thine: “Why do bad things happen to good people?”

²³
I am sorry, humanity, that I have not gotten around to answering it sooner; it would have saved you much needless disquiet; for the explanation is not only logical, but I daresay extremely satisfying.

²⁴
Why do bad things happen to good people?

²⁵
To balance out the good things that happen to
bad
people.

²⁶
Lo; it’s only fair.

SELL-A-THONIANS

(“On America”)

CHAPTER 1

¹
T
he subject of who does and does not receive my blessing puts me in mind of a certain nation whose money claims to trust me.

²
And yet every time I hear “God Bless America,” I get angry.

³
It is not that I dislike the tune; to the contrary, it is far more pleasant than America’s national anthem—that shambling melody to which is set the fetishistic tale of the nocturnal survival of a magical pole-cloth.

⁴
No, my objections to the song and the saying are not artistic, but personal; for Americans asking me for more blessings is like Tahitians asking me for sunnier days.

⁵
America is amply blessed; copiously blessed; blessed a thousandfold; countless are the blessings with which I have blessed America in its compulsive blessability.

⁶
Consider but a few of the blessings I, the L
ORD
thy God, King of the Universe—a region of space that, I might note, extends beyond the central portion of North America—have already bestowed upon the U.S. of freakin’ A.

⁷
I blessed it in its land: the richness and variety of its topography, the fertility of its soil, the temperateness of its climate, the spaciousness of its skies, the purpleness of its mountains, and what I think any observer would concede is the unusually high level of its plains-fruitedness.

⁸
I blessed it in its indigenous peoples, whose innate love of freedom was evident in their own freedom from heavy artillery, tolerance to alcohol, the concept of property, or resistance to smallpox.

⁹
I blessed America with the two groups of European settlers who first colonized it: the Puritans, an odd-hatted, fun-loathing people who imbued the new nation’s character with a healthy sense of wrong and wronger;

¹⁰
And to the south, the tobacco farmers of Jamestown, who showed the world that the new “land of opportunity” could bestow success on
anybody
willing to rely on hard work, the free market, and millions of black slaves growing a death-crop.

¹¹
I blessed it with its Founding Fathers; who, though they dressed funny, had wisdom, and leadership, and courage, and foresight, and eloquence, and the ability to compromise;

¹²
And who are like the current Tea Party, in that they dress funny.

¹³
I blessed it with Abraham Lincoln, one of the greatest leaders in history; he and I were very close; during the Civil War he cried to me many times; usually about Mary, for she was nothing but trouble.

¹⁴
I blessed it with millions of immigrants from every nation on earth; mankind in its heaving diversity arrived on its shores, and every ethnicity fought to find its place, and in so doing each one strengthened the character of the nation.

¹⁵
Yea, even the Mexicans.

¹⁶
I blessed America with abundant labor; and abundant capital; and abundant means of keeping the two at a healthy distance.

¹⁷
I blessed it with the Greatest Generation, whose boundless heroism in World War II helped redeem the nation for the band of spineless cowards it sent to fight World War I.

¹⁸
I blessed it with a perfect Cold War bad guy: comically evil, and patently wrongheaded; alternately frightening and incompetent; I blessed it with an era where everyone thought of the United States as the good guy; yea, I go
way
back with America.

¹⁹
I blessed it with Martin Luther King Jr., whose love and forbearance toward those who despised him was so great, Jesus once asked if he was his brother from another mother.

²⁰
And most recently I blessed—literally, for his name means “blessed”—America with Barack Hussein Obama; my Messenger; the Deliverer; the Messiah.

²¹
(Or at least that is the position he held from January 2008 through February 2009.)

CHAPTER 2

¹
Y
ea; I am as American as baseball, apple pie, and acting like it’s the only country I give a crap about.

²
I was on board the
Mayflower
with the Puritans for all 66 days of their voyage; over two months trapped on a boat with Puritans; talk about an ordeal.

³
I was there for the first Thanksgiving; I ensured the turkey was properly herb-crusted and brined; it was a hit; even the Wampanoags were impressed, for they just roasted theirs plain.

⁴
I was there for the Boston Massacre in 1770, when redcoats killed five civilians; back then that qualified as a Massacre; times change.

⁵
I was there when Thomas Jefferson drafted the Declaration of Independence.

⁶
He asked how I felt about the line “all men are created equal . . . they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights.”

⁷
I said, “Tommy, it’s not a lie if
thou
believest it.”

⁸
And I was there in Philadelphia that fateful summer of 1787 for the Constitutional Convention.

⁹
I remember the long conversations I had with James Madison; one in particular I recall: it was an early July morning, and James had decided to engage in an exertion with a brisk morning stroll along the Delaware.

¹⁰
I tagged along in his cerebral cortex.

¹¹
“God,” he said, “we are starting this experiment called America anew, and as a deeply devout Christian I want my nation to follow on the path of salvation through Jesus Christ.

¹²
How best can I frame our new Constitution so as to achieve this goal?”

¹³
“Jim,” I said, “the best way to achieve that goal is to state that Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; and that no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States.”

¹⁴
“God,” he said, “that is counterintuitive.”

¹⁵
“Jim,” I said, “if we out-and-out write ‘Congress shall pass only laws in keeping with the precepts of the Judeo-Christian tradition,’ there would be no way to weed out the heretics in our midst; moreover other countries would get all jealous, and the Supreme Court would have nothing to interpret.