Jonathan Franzen - Strong Motion - A Novel

He bent over his plate to scrape his last beans into a pile. He pushed up his glasses with his middle finger on the bridge and sucked his teeth clean, peering up at Renée with penetrating curiosity. “You came here to tell me my building’s unsafe.”

“I came because one of your women was bothering me at work.”

“Mrs. Wittleder.”

“I said something on TV that you disagreed with, and my life has been a mess ever since.”

“You’re getting calls. Letters, visits.”

“Very offensive and invasive ones.”

“Yeah, I understand, it’s sort of the lunatic fringe. People who’re all anger and no love. I don’t know if you saw the news today, the drive-by shooting in Alston? Some jackass blew out all the windows of a clinic yesterday. The little teeny-weeny windows? I mean, that’s real bright. Same thing with the bombings in Lowell. Anger I understand, but not violence.”

“The only thing I did on TV was criticize you,” Renée said. “Who else but you would care?”

“How should I know? Somebody saw the show and didn’t like you. See, I personally didn’t even mind what you said. You were honest, you expressed the opposing point of view real nice. You happen to be dead wrong. But I can tell the difference between a geophysicist and an abortionist. I got a lot more useful things to do than picket your lab, frankly. And Bebe Wittleder is a fine woman who I can’t believe was ugly to you.”

“She wasn’t ugly. Not deliberately.”

“Well, so. Somehow she still made you mad enough to come down here.”

“No. I didn’t get mad until I saw the videos.”

Stites wiped his plate with a slice of bread. “What made you mad about them?”

“Women who have abortions are vicious sluts who sit around snorting coke. Women who have babies are sweet pretty wives who adore their children.”

“Understand it’s not journalism. It’s an advertisement.”

“Which uneducated people swallow as truth.”

“Ah.” The bread, folded twice, disappeared into his mouth. “So you want me — me who believes that human life is a mystery and not some chemical process, me who believes that in the eyes of God an individual begins to exist at the moment he’s conceived — you want me to show the congregation pictures of mothers abusing their children? And saintly women having abortions? Sort of a balanced view there? I don’t think you understand the essence of advertising.”

“A Nazi film showing gorgeous Aryans and filthy Jews is only an ad.”

“Well, except I don’t happen to be advocating genocide. I’m advocating the opposite. Aren’t I?”

“The persecution of pregnant women.”

He nodded. “Persecution, sure, that’s your line on it. But not deportation and murder. See, I think what’s bothering you about these videos is they’re effective. They affect you . But there’s even more effective ads on TV for buying jeans or buying beer. Ads that use sex, which is the most powerful and dishonest thing of all. You know, like if I drink Bud Light I’ll get my own hot little beach girl to mess around with. You talk about dishonest and manipulative and harmful . And if you’re up against a pernicious thing like that, you need some powerful images yourself. And the fact is, there is something beautiful about a mother and her baby, and there is something ugly about abortions. All I want’s an equal shot at the market. And the thing is I can’t get one. There’s no commercial station in America would run these. I’m into radio a little bit, but you can’t do diddly with radio, not compared to video. It’s pretty ironic you think we’re the persecutors here. We the persecuted minority.”

“Which is trying to impose its views on the majority.”

“No network station in America will run a single one of our ads. All Americans, every day, watch half an hour of advertising promoting sex for the sake of sex, and another half hour promoting the selfish consumption of material goods. All national news media have a consistently anti-religious, anti-life slant. You want to deny that? The same goes for prime-time programming. And this is going on every single day, seven days a week, year after year, sex sex, buy buy, abort abort. And still forty percent of all Americans are opposed to abortion except in cases of rape or incest. That’s our minority. We’re looking at the hugest propaganda effort in the history of mankind, and still only a little more than half the people are persuaded.”

A whistle blew sharply in the courtyard. The gym teacher cried, Let’s see some Christian volleyball!

Renée laughed. “You’re scary.”

Stites offered her half his orange. “Why’s that?”

She took the orange. “Because you’re smart and you’re so sure you’re right. You’re so sure that everything is simple.”

“You got it backwards. It’s your world thinks everything is simple: take what you want, and there won’t be any consequences. Because let me tell you, there’s two kinds of certainty: positive and negative. The Bible teaches us it’s wrong to be certain in a positive way, like being certain you’re right or that you’re saved. But the Bible is full of people with the other kind of certainty: my certainty that this society is wrong . I am full of that negative certainty.”

“It’s wrong about a lot of things,” Renée said, “but not about a woman’s right to privacy. And I don’t actually think it persecutes you. Running your ads is just bad business for a TV station. If the majority truly weren’t satisfied with their lives, they’d turn to religion. The fact that they don’t seems to indicate that they are satisfied.”

“You’re not the first person who proved revolution logically impossible: the fact that people haven’t revolted yet means they’re satisfied. That’s real persuasive.”

“I think people mainly want you not to interfere with their private lives.”

“I wouldn’t interfere if I didn’t think lives were at stake. But as it is, I’m morally bound to interfere. And you think my church’s anger is ugly, and my methods are extreme, but just think how ugly and extreme the hippie protesters must have looked to conservatives in 1969, even though they had a good moral argument , just like I have today. Plus it’d be one thing if society just openly worshipped mammon and said yes, we’re willing to destroy innocent lives for the sake of easy sex. What gets me is the piousness. The idea that you can turn people’s lives into hellish pursuits of pleasure and claim you’re doing them a favor. It’s hard to figure a world that sees religious belief as a form of psychosis but thinks the desire to own a better microwave is the most natural feeling there can be. People who send money to a TV preacher because they feel a lack in their lives are under a evil spell, but people who need fur coats to show off in at the grocery store are just normal folks like you and me. It’s like the most holy thing in this country is the U.S. Constitution. The human race has never been without suffering in its history, but Mr. Boston Globe and Mr. Massachusetts Senator are suddenly smarter than everybody else in human history. They’re certain they’ve got the answer, and the answer is statutory this and statutory that and university studies of human behavior and the U.S. Constitution. But I tell you, Renée, I tell you, the only reason anyone could possibly think the Constitution is the greatest invention in human history is that God gave America so many fantastic riches that even total idiocy could make a showing in the short run, if you don’t count thirty million poor people and the systematic waste of all the riches God gave us and the fact that to most of the downtrodden people of the world the word America is synonymous with greed, weapons, and immorality.”