"Three!" screamed half the audience.

"Two!" responded the other half.

"One!" they all cried.

"None!" The roar was unanimous.

"All right!" Lenny shouted back amidst the applause. "I face him alone! Man to worm! Let's welcome Thomas Russell!"

Tom wandered onstage, as smiling and as beautiful on TV as in real life. He stepped through a metal detector to reach his seat.

Lenny shook his hand and sat behind his desk. He looked delightfully ready to spill blood.

"Russell-you unmitigated scuzzpit-I understand you've written a book entitled The God State. I'll skip the obvious question of how one as morally bankrupt as you can even compose a coherent sentence. I'll even contain my amazement that Taylor and Siegal published itthough it's typical of those corrupt East Coast culture-distorters."

The audience cheered.

"Let me start by asking you who in hell gave you the right to spout this drivel about the two greatest aspects of Western civilizationGod and Government?"

The sardonic expression on Tom's face never even quavered. He seemed to be taking this about as seriously as his host.

"Well, Beaver, The God State is actually a sequel to my first book. In the first book-My God, My Self-I explained that God is an idea perpetuated as a means for the few to control the many. Initially, there was the priest class, who decided that all conversation with the forces of nature should be channeled through them. At a price, of course. In The God State, I deal with the rise of the Judeo-Christian cult of guilt worship and how religious ruling classes have-from the very startbeen in control of every government in the history of mankind."

The audience booed. The microphones picked up someone hollering, "Sweeping generalization!"

"Many theocratic groups," Tom continued, "have been quite flagrant about their clandestine involvement, leaving their signs and symbols openly displayed as if daring someone to expose them."

"Come off it, you smirking heap of atheistic garbage." Lenny leaned forward at his desk. "Are you accusing the United States of violating its constitutional guarantee of separation of church and state?"

The audience cheered Beaver on.

Tom smiled even more broadly. "The Constitution isn't worth the parchment it's written on." Over the hissing, he added, "We're dealing with deeds, not words. Nearly every President of the United States has been a member of the Ancient and Accepted Order of Freemasons-a secret religious society-"

"That's old news. Disney County perfected conspiracy paranoia."

Tom leaned back in his chair. "Nearly everything in my book is old news. I display it from a new perspective. By the time you've finished reading it, you'll be more suspicious of the chaplains that roam the corridors of Congress, setting up prayer meetings. You'll notice the mystical symbols and sentiments expressed on our currency. Blatant theistic sentiments such as `In God We Trust.'"

Lenny leaned on his fists. "I can't believe it! On my show, this pansy-haired wimp is attacking a tradition as old as our nation!"

"Not really, Beaver." Tom spread his arms out across the empty chairs flanking him. "The statement has only been on this government's money since 1864, when it was used as a rallying slogan for one side of a brutal, divisive war. It didn't even appear on all the coins until the twentieth century, when the five-cent piece finally received the Mark. And it wasn't until as late as 1954 that the slogan became the legal and official motto of the United States-during a flareup of patriotic witch-hunting."

Lenny turned to the audience with outstretched arms. "The phlegmbrained cretin is undercutting his own thesis!" he said with feigned amazement. "He's admitting that for nearly a century there was no religious control of government."

Tom waved his hand in dismissal. "They weren't as overt in their symbols primarily because most Americans still remembered the excesses of the God State back in England. The cults grew bolder, though. The Great Seal of the United States contains many mystical symbols. Significantly, they are all on the reverse side, which is never used to authenticate official documents. This is an astonishingly blatant depiction of the power of religion behind the throne of state."

"So what? If they're in control of every government, then the power is in balance and unimportant."

"Yeah!" screamed the crowd in unison. "So what!"

"The power is not in balance. That's why we have wars. The God State is not monolithic. Even in the United States there is evidence of an internal battle for control of this continent by at least two factionsa productive, isolationist sect of woman-worshipping pagans and atheists versus a brutal, interventionist patriarchic cult that worships the Hebrew and Christian god Yahweh."

"That's a pretty baldfaced mixture of blasphemy and treason, you feeble-minded, Bible-burning Satanist!" The color of Lenny's face verged on ultraviolet. He turned to the audience. "Do I throw this miserable sleazebag Antichrist out?"

"Yeah!" the studio thundered.

"You're getting close, gutterbrain," he said to Tom. "One more bit of sacrilege, and you're finished."

Tom smiled, addressing the camera. "Consider this. At the outset, this country's coinage depicted symbols of liberty-goddesses offering gifts of bounty, eagles flying majestically free, native Indians still noble and unbowed." He put an ankle up on his knee and leaned comfortably back.

"Then in 1909, Victor Brenner designed the Lincoln cent. It was the first depiction on official U.S. coinage of a dead U.S. statist. It was a clear victory for the patriarchists, who'd had the generic term for a masculine deity on several coins for half a century-sometimes right next to Lady Liberty herself." Russell looked straight at Lenny. "I don't have to remind you that World War One began five years later, or that the United States was dragged in three years after that. Both five and three are numbers sacred to the Goddess."

"You're not only a syphilitic little jerkoff," Lenny shouted, "you're a shitbrained mystic!" He whipped his head about to stare into the camera. "Do I throw this godless son of a bitch out?"

"Yeah!" The audience was eating it up.

"I suppose this anti-American mystical babble will end with you describing how communism is a superior form of government because it's free of religious taint."

Russell smiled that beautiful smile. "Actually, Beaver, despite their professed and official atheism, the Communist bloc nations were seized and are still controlled by an ancient hierarchy of renegade druids. Holy men who betrayed their Goddess to seek power and conquest through magick."

"Druids?" Lenny didn't even try to contain his shock. "Tree-worshippers? A bunch of looney-toons with leaves in their hair in control of the most brutal and powerful nations on earth?"

Tom looked as pleased as a first year chemistry student showing off the smoking ruins of his lab.

"Look at the flag of the Soviet Union. The symbols are right there."

"Beaver" Lenny buried his face in his hands, shaking his head from side to side.

"It consists of a golden sickle and hammer surmounted by a star, all on a field of red. The standard explanation of its proletarian, revolutionary derivation is nothing more than a smokescreen-much the same as the explanation of the Great Seal of the United States. There is a second, hidden derivation."

Russell looked toward the camera and raised fingers to count his points.

"One-the golden sickle was used by druids to lop mistletoe off oak trees in a symbolic recreation of the castration of Cronos by his son Zeus. Mistletoe is a phallic symbol, so watch out next Christmas-or Yule. Two-the hammer is suggestively phallic and crossing the blade of the sickle as if about to be cut."