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He held up his right hand. On the third finger was another thick gold band. The audience burst into applause and hallelujahs. I kept trying to make sense of it, and kept coming up short. Here were people who routinely used their computers to stay in touch with their friends and get the news of the day, people who took weather satellites and lung transplants for granted, people who expected to live lives thirty and forty years longer than those of their great-grandparents. Here they were, falling for a story that made Santa and the Tooth Fairy look like gritty realism. He was feeding them shit and they were loving it. I had the dismaying idea that he was loving it, too, and that was worse. This was not the man I'd known in Harlow, or the one who had taken me in that night in Tulsa. Although when I thought of how he had treated Cathy Morse's bewildered and brokenhearted farmer father, I had to admit this man had been on the way even then.
I don't know if he hates these people, I thought, but he holds them in contempt.
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