God Bless America

May 2024

Harry was an unpleasant man to face on the tennis court. It was not that he was bad at playing or particularly unsportsmanlike for that matter. It was that he would always seek to, and usually succeed in, totally dominating his opponent with a cool, mechanistic acuity. Harry was the drilling machine and his opponent was John Henry. Except in this version of the tale, John Henry not only dies, but faces the additional indignity of losing the competition too. While Harry always shook hands and exchanged kind words with his opponents after eviscerating them, one could tell that, behind his stoic countenance, he took extreme pleasure in domination on the court. He was well known and mildly feared at the athletic club.

A better world for those who played tennis at the club would have been one where Harry picked up golf as a kid instead. But he wasn’t drawn to it in the same way. It is true, the sport’s purity was attractive to Harry. And though the player’s march towards the unattainable goal of perfection was so clearly measurable (with handicaps, discreetly measured strokes, striking distances, greens in regulation, and fairways hit) would no doubt appeal to Harry, the sport was not nearly adversarial enough. Even when playing in tournaments, a golfer is mainly competing against himself. The fiercest of wars are waged within the player’s mind. Dozens, hundreds of psychic battles are won and lost over the course of a four hour round. Realizing this unseen reality of the sport makes spectating it at a professional level somewhat unsettling, even terrifying: the idyllic beauty of the course, lush fairways, perfectly manicured greens, delicately trimmed trees lining each hole. Lakes and ponds, almost motionless, waiting patiently to swallow any errant balls. The slow, methodical pace of play. The extreme decorum and sportsmanship. The peacefulness of it all is counterbalanced by a unseen and often bloody battlefield in each player’s soul. This is all to say that Harry preferred his battlefield be tangible. For sport, he preferred to dominate an opponent, not his own mind. There really was no satisfaction for Harry like that of burying the man on the other side of the court, and this was almost entirely absent in golf, with the possible exception of hitting the ball retriever’s caged cart on the driving range, which an adolescent Harry took great pleasure in.

James was either on his game or having particularly good luck that Sunday morning when he found himself up “thirty, love” against Harry in a tied set. His luck did not last long. Harry the man gave way to Harry the machine. A cacophony of commands flashed through Harry’s head whipping him back into his usual robotic state of excellence: rotate left forearm, strike from the foot upward through the entire body, predict opponent’s next move, change up, racket angled down at thirty degrees for this return, racket angled up for sidespin on the next return. Commands were fed through Harry’s head like punchcards into a tabulating machine. His play became nearly perfect.

Fifteen, thirty.

Thirty, thirty.

Forty, thirty. Match point.

Game.

“Damn…” an exhausted James exhaled between labored breaths. “You played a damn perfect game!”

“Not quite.” Harry replied expressionlessly.

“I’ll certainly never play one.” James laughed.

“It’s possible.”

James shrugged half-understandingly as he stretched out his hand. They shook and trotted off to the locker room together. “Well, Harry, you joining us for lunch this aft?”

“Can’t, going to be at church.”

“Church!” James guffawed. “You don’t go to church!”

“Funeral. Mother died.”

“Oh, I’m sorry to hear. You never mentioned.” James gave Harry a light slap of camaraderie on the shoulder.

“Don’t worry about it, we were never that close. See you in the office tomorrow.”

Harry walked up the steps of the shabbily kept Methodist church that his mother took him to when he was a kid. He enjoyed it when he was little but never went back after university. The church was quite now, much quieter than it used to be. Attendance had fallen steadily in the past decades, his mother being one of the few who stubbornly attended every Sunday for almost her entire life. It wasn’t like the church was following some doomed demographic trend of a dying town—it was just outside of DC for God’s sake. The town was doing nothing but grow. Town swelled and swelled, bursting at its suburban seams to accommodate the incessant demand for people in DC, the all consuming leviathan. Politicians and their staff, law firms and theirs, lobbying groups, and the bevy of industries and help coming in to support it all—all this meant people needed space to live. Church was the last thing on the mind of these industrious Americans moving into this once sleepy town outside of DC. And so the church, despite the population influx, was withering. Of those who already attended, the church asked very little. It didn’t seek constrain them or impose too much on their lives for fear it would lose also them to the siren song of the city. So it asked less and less. Its constituents came to be used to that. Eventually all it asked was an hour of time on Sunday. They got used to that too. Soon, even that paltry demand came to be too much. And so Harry’s mum stood in the pews surrounded by dwindling attendance and an every-aging peer group.

But today her dead body packed the pews. She was a well-liked woman. These days, the church was usually the liveliest for funerals. Harry sat third from the front row for the ceremony. He gave a short speech before relinquishing the pulpit back to the priest. He certainly mourned his mother’s death, but his mind couldn’t quite focus on one thing. Memories from the past flickered to and fro, thoughts about tennis, about work, about the war, then his mother again. The priest’s words occasionally entered this carousel of daydreams:

“—is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, for ever. Amen. Of course, in this prayer, ‘thy will be done in earth’ is an acknowledgment of the fallen state of our world. This is not hard to grasp, with Pearl Harbor not months passed, the world at war again. The prayer is a supplication to the Lord to make things right, to redeem the world, our souls, fallen as it and they may be. Because it seems everything is very uncertain. We do not know what will befall our country, or what will befall each of our own souls. Will we be saved? We can only pray the Lord make it so—”

Harry now thought about the war, about his new role running the Lend Lease Administration. He knew he would set things right. The administration had a plan. Concrete. Real. Real as the timeworn white oak pew he clutched with his hands in front of him. It was a plan that would work. I am sure of it, absolutely sure of it, he thought to himself…

“—and in these times, we must rely on love. The love Christ has for us. The love we have for the late Mrs. Hopkins. The love we have for each other. This love is more powerful, more lasting than all that seems most permanent to us day-to-day. It will outlast our industries. Our railroads. Our ideologies. Our steel. Our nations—”

Harry continued to drift in and out during the pastors speech. Eventually, all rose and the casket was brought to the graveyard. Harry went home that night and slept soundly.

He rose for work at 6 a.m.. As usual. He was in the Lend Lease Administration office on K Street NW at 7 a.m.. The first one in. As usual. With a hot cup of coffee in hand, he pored over reports from his staffers. They were chock-full of statistics, absolutely full of them. As former head of the WPA for Roosevelt, he pushed for a more analytical approach to their research and work. His staff was notoriously full of recent college graduates and academic types, much to the ire of his older peers who had been doing things the “old way” for some time. They didn’t much enjoy these young, brilliant, mildly autistic twenty-somethings flooding them with a deluge of graphs and numbers. At least back in the day you had to convince the room with a good presentation, with bravado, with confidence. These kids could barely speak up enough for a room of five to hear, but the numbers almost jumped off the page and spoke for themselves. The old boys certainly didn’t have a bevy of statistics at the ready to convince the young whippersnappers of why they arrived at a different set of conclusions. And those numbers, those graphs, those charts were just so damn convincing, so impossible to argue with. One was left with the impression that these young statisticians just had to be right. Well, Harry’s data-driven strategy worked. It worked so well that the WPA’s budget tripled and staff count doubled under his stead. Eventually, due to his eminence, he was moved to run the Lend Lease Administration by direct orders from Roosevelt himself. FDR wanted this analytical approach applied to every department relating to the war effort. That morning, Roosevelt, along with many eminent men in his cabinet, arrived at the office to meet with Harry.

Harry delivered a long and vigorously detailed presentation on his plan for the administration. The US was now formally engaged in the war, with the attacks on Pearl Harbor but months passed. Harry’s presentation finally wound down. With beads sweat dripping down the sides of his pale forehead, he concluded, “Gentlemen, I trust that you will approve of these proposed measures. My team has done extensive research, and we are certain that this path will not only lead to favorable outcomes in terms of the war, but also confer economic, political and social benefits domestically. I am sure of it, absolutely sure of it.”

“Soviet planning seems to be rubbing off on you with all those meetings in Moscow with Molotov!” chuckled Roosevelt. The men in the room smiled at the playful jab. Harry had met with many officials in Moscow several times over the past year, including Stalin himself.

“Ha. Well we have something to learn from their efficiency. In any case, I trust this means there are no objections to the plans laid out?”

Everyone leaned back in their chairs, scanning the room. They nodded causally in agreement. In this room sat a dozen or so men. Secretary of War. Secretary of the Navy. Of the Interior. Of Commerce. Agriculture. Treasury. State. President of the United States. A room of men whose casual nods of assent had the power to authorize massive sums of spending on programs like this.The power to print billions. To control media. Command the nation. Ration food and fuel. Send their country’s young men off to slaughter. Raze entire cities. Exterminate countries. The world.

And these men were sure of their designs, absolutely sure of them.

That evening, with his massive and intricately detailed plan to support the Allied war effort approved, Harry delivered a speech on NBC’s Radio Network to the people of America. It succinctly laid out the broad plans of the Lend Lease Administration, and communicated to the people America’s growing role in the war for the Allied cause. While almost the entire speech was given by memory, Harry had to look down at his notes to mechanistically recite the concluding remarks,

“—while we know that in the long run God is on our side, our immediate future is completely uncertain. Nothing we can be sure of. But each and every one of us must try his absolute best and do everything he can for his fellow countrymen. We hope that Good will prevail. We humbly ask that God bless America. Thank you and goodnight.”