Last Monday, Aug. 25, for the second time in four years, I waltzed down to KeyArena, strolled up to the will-call window and picked up my free ticket to the circus sans animals, Get Motivated! as presented by Peter and Tamara Lowe.
Get Motivated! bills itself as a business seminar and has been touring the country for 25 years. Famous folk, labeled Super Achievers by the hyperbolic Lowes, come in and basically do a get-rich pep rally. When I last attended, I was screamed at, er, motivated by loudmouth announcer Dick Vitale and the man who made 9/11 work for himself, Rudy Giuliani.
Now, evidently, politics has raised its ugly head and coopted even get-rich-quick-without-much-effort, feel-good schemologies. This year's Get Motivated! started out like a rally for ostriches with money, or at least ostriches that wanted a lot of money someday soon.
This year, the opening speaker and headliner was former Army and Junior Bush cabinet bigwig Colin Powell.
Powell stood on a small stage swathed in American flags and surrounded by tiki-torchlike, very dim illumination, which somehow put me in mind of Nuremberg on a gray, fine-day-for-a-book-burning morning. By the time I made my trek to the highest level of the KeyArena - almost all the lower seats were filled, maybe 13,000 folks on hand - the onetime Secretary of State was cranked up and preaching to the choir.
"I was working for a wonderful man, Ronald Reagan," Powell said, then had to pause as the crowd went into a frenzy of clapping and whistling.
Powell then did his imitation of Reagan's voice, and the crowd laughed and clapped some more. I felt as if I were at the wrong family reunion.
"He [Reagan] was telling me about the Russians," he said. "Two years from that day the Iron Curtain was gone and what we feared never happened. Russia is now doing well as a nation ... it is never going back to being the Soviet Union and a threat [to us]."
The crowd cheered on this fine August morning in 2008, and I couldn't help but wonder if I might be the only person among the 15,000 who knew that Russians had destroyed Chechnya, were currently bombing and burning Georgia and - according to The Economist, a British newsmagazine that makes both Time and Newsweek look as if they are written for idiots - have designs on and maybe plans for Ukraine and Belarus. Was I the only audience member who knew that dictator Vladimir Putin was still in the KGB?
I was confused, but the rest of the crowd apparently got Powell's message. The sky is not falling, damn the facts, full speed ahead.
And what the hell did this have to do with making money?, I wondered.
"China," Powell continued, "is a nation where 36 years ago everyone was poor. Then they got a great leader [?] who asked, 'How do we use this human talent?' ... China needs to be our friend ... globalization is a most important force. And global warming is a reality-"
This stopped the good-feelings train, very briefly. Maybe five people clapped. (I would have, but I was taking notes.) Powell, despite being around a lot of guns, evidently could still hear well, so he switched gears again.
"We need to stay the course for the Afghani people and give them the democracy they deserve.... The Middle East is a challenge.... The world wants the U.S. to solve its problems. America is up to the challenge."
Powell exited to a rousing cheer from the folks.
An employee from Get Motivated! with nice big hair rushed out and told us that whenever "we survey our audiences they tell us the number-one thing is more information about the topic of spirituality. Number two is economics ... how to use the Internet to get more [money]...."
She went on chirping for another minute or two, but I couldn't hear. One question kept echoing inside my battered brain: Was it Jesus who threw the moneychangers out of the temple? Or was Jesus a moneychanger?
Next up was some guy named Phil Town, who I'd seen here a couple of years ago. Town was a Green Beret who came back from Vietnam, grew out his hair, rode Harleys and lived wild until he got a chance to make some money. That straightened him right out. Town, an alleged multimillionaire of some kind, had a simple message: "Since 1985, only 4 percent of money managers have beat the market.... You get nothing for your money from a professional fund manager...." Full-throttle, Town seemed kind of insulting. I think the way out of this money managing mess was to buy his book; but to be honest, I'd soon quit listening.
Rudy Giuliani was back in town, coming on later with a speech entitled "Staying the Course" (hmm, not about marriage). And Suze Orman, "America's Number One Personal Finance Expert" according to the Lowes, was trailing in Rudy's pseudo-patriotic wake.
But I was too dizzy with all the contradictions I'd heard from Town and the general, and I could take no more of this demented pep rally. Instead of motivated, I Got Depressed! I was a wishy-washy leftist who couldn't stay the course.
I gave my re-entry ticket to a homeless guy I knew, drinking a can of Icehouse beer at First and Mercer. "Lots of big women in pantsuits, man," I said. He immediately headed toward the Key. He, at least, seemed motivated.
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