In the early seventies there was a large, growing charismatic ministry in Orange County headquartered near Knott’s Berry Farm. A friend of mine worked for the ministry in public relations, and a friend of his, a secretary, came to him fearfully one day to relate a telephone conversation she accidentally picked up on her extension. It was between the head pastor and a man on the East Coast. They were talking about the ministry and how it might better launder money for the Mafia.

“What do we do?” she asked.

He thought a moment. “Quit,” he said.

Not so long ago my friend faced down a drug-addled punk threatening his family, so he’s no coward. But he’s always been prudent. What he understood those thirty-plus years ago was that a mere secretary and a new college graduate with an expectant wife could not right a terrible wrong. He was aware that local cops and FBI agents, or just their curious secretaries, could not always be trusted with secrets.

Sometimes they took bribes.

“Quit,” was a good answer for a man with a growing family. “Let’s go to the law,” would have been a bad one.

As far as I know, the ministry was never caught out, but over time it dwindled in influence, the number of congregates falling sharply. Yesterday afternoon all of this came back to me in a strange way. I was brooding on the Senate’s approval of a Chamberlain-like Secretary of Defense and the Iraq Study Group’s recommendation to the President to get out as soon as possible. Both, I thought, must be the morale boosters for the Mafia and disheartening for—

My friend’s story was taking on an unexpected allegorical bent. The Mafia is Islamic fascism. The ministry is the United States of America. The law is a lot of wishful thinking: that the U.N. might do something; that Saudi Arabia is an ally; that Syria and Iran aren’t already engaged against us; that it’s OK for a while longer to send men to die for something we’re planning to walk away from.

The friend? He’s someone like me, or maybe you, who marvels at the corruption of thought prevailing among our leaders but knows full well that one can’t do a thing about it. It is nations, not individuals, that make war, win, capitulate or surrender. Iraq’s immediate reaction to events here was a call for a “regional solution” to the war. Whatever else that means, it puts Iran in charge, and the leadership there has already said what it is planning to do—produces nukes, wipe out Israel and put the West under a caliphate.
Allegories can be stretched only so far, which is why I’m switching to an historical comparison. A family man in France in 1940 would have been well advised to find a rabbit hole.

Whether a German tank rolled over it was outside his province. Praying was called for because which side will dwindle is always up for grabs. But even if it is your enemy’s side, what happens in the short run can be pretty ugly and take years from which to recover.

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