E-Mail This Article to a Friend What’s my motivation? (continued)

God, glory, and real estate

Time for lunch. I decide to apply the lessons I’ve learned so far. I am bold. I am assertive. I avoid groupthink. Steering clear of the infinite queues at various concession stands, I venture a bit further afield and find a short line. In less than a minute I am forking over seven bucks for a dry hot dog and a medium Coke.

Outside, smoking Marlboros in a corner by the door, I find four uniformed members of the North Shore Recruiting Company 1D5, in Woburn.

While Sergeant Nickerson, a 28-year-old from Rockingham, North Carolina, thinks Town’s investing advice was "very inspirational," his buddy, 36-year-old Sergeant Mack, from Fayetteville, North Carolina, has already decided that "everything they teach you in there, we already know from the military." Mack cites Terry Francona (who hit the stage at eight sharp, and was done by 8:20), who talked about stoking the Red Sox’ never-say-die attitude as he led them to their historic backdoor sweep of the Yankees. "When you get a leadership role, you should be doing everything you possibly can to put the people working for you into a position to succeed," he says.

Inside, some female employees of Digital Credit Union who decline to give their names also think Francona was the highlight of the day so far. Still, says one, "it woulda been nice if the Sox had won last night."

I ask if they’ll apply the lessons learned so far to their own lives.

"Uh, sure!" says one.

"Yeah," says her girlfriend. "If I ever wanna take over a country, I’ll just listen to what Tommy Franks has to say."

Time for more music! KJ-52 is a Christian hip-hopper whose Web site describes him as "a Caucasian American MC who has risen to prominence in a largely black arena." He gets "old school" on us, hectoring the audience with truncated covers of "U Can’t Touch This" and "Ice, Ice Baby." Following him, there’s a dance-off, with an Orlando vacation as the prize. As "Surfin’ USA" echoes deafeningly, the stage is filled with prize-hungry attendees busting goofy moves. Inexplicably, hundreds upon hundreds of red, white, and blue beach balls suddenly materialize, ricocheting around the arena like lotto balls.

But soon, the time for fun is over.

"We’re gonna have to pull it together, guys," Tamara Lowe chides. "We got an American hero coming on stage."

As the revelers settle down, Lowe grows winsome. "Is there anybody out there who’s proud to be an American?" she asks.

Just to be sure, the JumboTron flashes an animated montage — a rippling America flag, fighter jets flying in formation — as a blonde croons Lee Greenwood’s "God Bless the USA."

As streamers fall and confetti sprays skyward, Rudy Giuliani takes the stage. When the thunderous applause finally dies down, there’s a moment of quiet.

"YANKEES SUCK!" someone bellows from the dark.

We all laugh and cheer, and Rudy’s face reddens.

"The Boston Red Sox made baseball history, and they’re to be congratulated for it," he says magnanimously. "Now, I’ll commit suicide." He mimes hara-kiri.

It’s the funniest part of a serious speech that centers — of course — on 9/11. As he speaks, humbly but eloquently, about rising to challenges and shining in the face of adversity, grown adults fill in read-along quizzes in their Get Motivated workbooks: "Know what you STAND FOR ... You have to be an OPTIMIST."

As Giuliani’s speech finishes to a rousing ovation, Tamara Lowe doesn’t hide her feelings. "I think that man would make an excellent president," she coos. "And I’m from Florida, so I’d get to vote for him three or four times!"

Next, it’s time for Peter Lowe himself, the ostensible centerpiece of a day filled with celebrity speakers. Tamara introduces her husband, meets him center-stage with a chaste peck on the cheek, then walks off as he stands, arms outstretched, proclaiming that "the American Dream is still alive and well."

Lowe points out that none of the speakers on the slate that day has been born in privilege — all were self-made. It’s a salient point, and gives pause for thought. But before long, Lowe is sounding less motivator than minister. To illustrate the power of positive thinking, he talks about Lazarus rising from the dead, about Peter walking on water, sinking like a stone the moment doubt creeps into his mind. He talks of the "spiritual component of success." He tells of a "God who loves you enough to die for you." Audience members start filing toward the exits. Soon after Lowe projects a Venn diagram on the JumboTron depicting the intersection of "circumstance," "me," and "god," so do I.

In the concourse outside, I meet Jake Picard, 31, a nurse manager at a Boston hospital who also dabbles in real estate.

"The guy speaking right now is a little ... strange to me," he says. "He reminds me of an evangelist, or one of those preachers."

Picard came here of his own volition but on his company’s dime, figuring that, even though he’s "motivated anyway," this would be a "great opportunity to see a couple of these big guys speak." Still, he says, "The thing that’s kind of crazy is you don’t know who’s speaking when. Some of these people I don’t want to listen to."

Back inside a guy on crutches bedecked in head-to-toe Patriots regalia looks on forlornly as Lowe holds a piece of plywood and an audience member karate-chops it in half. The guy is clearly wondering when the hell Deion Branch is going to come on stage. The thought occurs to me that hiring Francona and Branch as speakers might be some sort of a lure, a way to get die-hard New Englanders who ordinarily wouldn’t be caught dead at something like this to show up for an afternoon of evangelization and right-wing politics. Shrewd. But effective.

At any rate, the guy’s gonna have to wait through two more speakers before the Pats wide receiver takes the stage to show off his gargantuan Super Bowl ring — rendered even more giant on the JumboTron — and to reveal that "90 percent of football is mental," and that on the gridiron, "all glory goes to God."

Before him comes Tom Hopkins, who looks like a cross between Tom Ridge and William Shatner and is one of the most successful salesmen in the history of the world. Then there’s real-estate magnate James Smith, a silver-tongued, slick-haired huckster, a hybrid of Gordon Gekko and Donald Trump.

"Speaking of Jesus Christ, what do you think he did vocationally?" Smith asks. "He was a carpenter. Directly associated with real estate."

Smith made his fortune buying and selling properties, and by renting homes to lower-class tenants, then giving them the deeds if they stayed 15 years. People told him he was crazy, that that was no way to make money. Smith told them they were wrong. Poor people, after all, are a near infinite resource in this country. Volume! Volume! Volume!

Profiting off the poor. What would Jesus do?

No, no, Smith rationalizes in rapid-fire cadence: "I didn’t make money off the poor, I made it off the system." The audience, many of whom are probably not much better off financially than Smith’s tenants, nod their approval.

Bugging out

It’s been a long and draining day. A little laughter is just the prescription. And Jerry Lewis, trundling onto the stage, having lost a good deal of his steroidal bloat — and barely missing getting singed by the erupting pyrotechnics — is just the guy for it.

Thing is, he isn’t funny. Sure, the guy has raised almost $2 billion for muscular dystrophy. But his gushing reminiscences about Sammy, Dino, and Frank, and his hoary ethnic jokes, like the one about the Polish bobsled team (they won the gold — and were so proud, they had it bronzed) or the way Chinese people name their kids, prove he is a man out of time.

When the audience groans at one stinker, delivered in that timeless nasal whine followed by that cretinous laugh, Lewis shoots back: "You think I’m crazy? You’re paying!"

He has a point.

When his talk is through, half the audience is streaming toward the egress before the applause has died down.

Outside, near the North Station T stop, Alvin Weeks, 39, is waiting to reconnect with the dozen or so co-workers from Neighborhood Health Plan he came here with. I ask him if those eight hours in the Garden worked. Is he ready to tackle the workweek with newfound fervor? Maybe even get rich? Is he ... motivated?

"I do feel motivated," he says. "So motivated that I could say, ‘I’ll do this,’ or ‘I’ll do that,’ where I couldn’t say that before.... Like on that show Fear Factor? If they can eat bugs, I can eat ’em too. I’m that motivated. I couldn’t do that before, but I think I could do that now."

Probably not quite what Lowe had in mind. But if a few people left the Garden that day with a love for country and a passion for Christ to match this guy’s appetite for insects, Lowe would have considered the day a success.

And success, after all, is what it’s all about.

Mike Miliard can be reached at mmiliard[a]phx.com