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What’s my motivation?
Searching for wealth, finding God and the GOP at the Garden
BY MIKE MILIARD

It’s 8:30 am and the caffeine has yet to take hold, but I suppose it’s never too early for pyrotechnics and ear-bleeding music. As sparks shoot skyward and Patti LaBelle’s "New Attitude" blares from the rafters, Zig Ziglar, 74, bounds onto a stage ringed with potted plants and surrounded by enormous screens projecting his outsize image to the throngs filling the TD Banknorth Garden.

I’m surrounded by more than 15,000 office workers who have answered the call: "Welcome to the Get Motivated Seminar! You are going to have a life-changing day!"

One of today’s featured orators, Ziglar bills himself as one of the world’s foremost motivational speakers. His motto, "You can have everything in life that you want if you will just help enough other people get what they want," is decent enough, and resonates with the sensibility that has made companies like Google and eBay successful. But he also looks and sounds like a televangelist, as he gesticulates passionately with upraised palms and declaims in a honey-dipped Mississippi accent, grinning broadly. And as Ziglar peppers his motivational spiel with greeting-card banalities ("The God of the mountaintop is also the God of the valley") and homespun witticisms ("I read the Bible every day, and I read the paper every day. That way I know what both sides are up to"), I begin to feel like I’m stuck in some middle-American megachurch. As it turns out, it’s only the beginning of a long day of Godspeak.

For that you can credit 45-year-old Peter Lowe, a bug-eyed carrot top with a lispy Canadian accent, whose aw-shucks visage is plastered all over his Get Motivated Seminars brochure. "Motivation! Inspiration! Career skills! Wealth building!" Those are the buzzwords of Lowe’s traveling panoplies of high-wattage celebs (today in Boston the slate includes Red Sox manager Terry Francona, "America’s Mayor" Rudy Giuliani, Retired Commander in Chief of the US Central Command Tommy Franks, Super Bowl MVP Deion Branch, and funnyman Jerry Lewis), investment gurus and real-estate tycoons, and a smattering of wholly wholesome musical acts. Over the course of nine hours, amid torrents of uplifting platitudes and small blizzards of red, white, and blue confetti, audiences made up of corporate groups, cadres of office workers, small-business owners, and ambitious individuals are instructed how to make themselves smarter, more successful, richer, better.

But beneath all the cheerful bombast and mile-wide smiles lurks an interesting subtext. It isn’t long into Lowe’s dog-and-pony show before speakers start dropping not-at-all subtle references to God and the Good Book. And it’s also hard to miss the right-wing cast of many presenters’ throwaway comments.

By keeping mum in advance about the partisan and sectarian aspects of these heavily advertised events, Lowe has been able to build his Get Motivated Seminars, Inc. into a huge and profitable enterprise over the past 23 years.

Right attitude

"Ladies and gentlemen," proclaims Lowe’s wife, Tamara, a Sally Struthers–esque virago in corkscrew ringlets and a red pantsuit, "national recording artist Jáven!" Bass booms. Beats break. A black guy in designer denim hops around the stage, goading the audience to "get motivated!" On the JumboTron, cameras zoom in on housewives swaying stiltedly and clapping out of time. One man, paunchy in a polo shirt, munches on a jumbo pretzel.

Ziglar had just informed us that in the US, legal immigrants are four times more likely than native-borns to become millionaires. Why? Because they’re thrilled to be here and they’re motivated, dammit. The next presenter, Krish Dhanam, a speaker with Ziglar Training Systems, bears that out. A hulking guy with a finely tailored suit and an elegant Indian accent, Dhanam LOVES America.

"If we don’t do anything for the next 500 years," he yells, "the country in second place will still wish they were us."

"Take this to the bank," he hollers, "if you woke up this morning and were lucky enough to call America home, you have already won!"

Dhanam grew up in Southern India, on the side of the fence where there was no grass, where his family was so poor that "we would go to KFC to lick other people’s fingers." As a kid, he would lie on the beach at night, looking at a star, and dream of coming to America. And he did, and did quite well for himself. That’s why his speech is genuinely inspirational.

It’s also why the cynicism of the next speaker is so galling. Phil Town is an investment guru. According to his Web site: "I teach people how to get rich ..." Before that, in the 1980s, he was a Green Beret in South America. After his tour of duty, he spent 10 years as a river guide in the Grand Canyon, where he saved a wealthy tourist from drowning. In gratitude, the tourist advised him on how to play the market. Town invested $1000, and five years later was a millionaire.

You can be too, Town promises. And he’ll show us how — all with a simple Web site and a little common sense. But after a half-hour tutorial, Town lets it drop, quite matter-of-factly, that access to the Web site is contingent on taking a special class that costs $6000. But, because we’re such a lovely audience, the workshops can be ours for just under $1000. Fantastic.

Retired general Tommy Franks is up next. As fireworks fulminate and confetti falls in squalls, the man who prosecuted the war in Afghanistan strides on stage.

"What a hoot!" he hollers.

Franks declares to the crowd that the world we leave to our grandkids and their grandkids is "more important than politics." And with those words, Franks makes clear that he’s above the partisan fray. Which is why it’s strange when, just minutes later, he thinks back on Bill Clinton’s call offering him the CENTCOM job — overseeing the US military presence in 25 countries with "more problems than you can put in a sack." Even though his response was "Yeah, Mr. President, that’d be cool," Franks allows that we "might think it’s strange" that he’d accept an appointment from a Democratic commander in chief, as if in doing so he’s somehow going above and beyond the call of duty. The lusty boos elicited by the mere mention of Clinton’s name indicate that much of the audience agrees with him.

Franks’s speech was a down-home jes’-plain-folks tale about how he — admittedly "not the brightest bulb in the socket" — worked his way up to become one of the military’s most powerful men. Oddly, though, it’s also peppered with perplexing rhetorical flourishes.

"Anyone here from the national media?" Franks asks, apropos of nothing.

"Boooooo!" rises the audience’s scattered refrain.

"Anyone here from France?"

"BOOOOOOO!!!"

I wonder if Jerry Lewis heard that backstage.

Franks isn’t finished. He rattles off a list of terrorist attacks: the African embassies, the USS Cole.

"What did we do about that?"

"Nothing," mutters the guy next to me.

"Then Bill Clinton, that sucker, left," Franks says incredulously, to substantial applause.

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Issue Date: July 22 - 28, 2005
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