But that brief experience had been more than enough. It had been a wake-up call, one that served to rock him from the long slumber he, and so many of his fellow Americans, had fallen into. In the late seventies, GO had left the Air Force just in time to partake in the unprecedented prosperity of the eighties. Using his father’s Idaho business as a base, he created a network of franchises which were unrelated and wholly unimpressive when viewed from Wall Street. From three furniture stores and two gun shops located in Boise, Twin Falls, and Pocatello, GO Thomas built himself an empire based upon these franchises as well as several small scale manufacturing ventures. There had been no grand, guiding plan that drove this expansion. The only thing unifying GO Thomas’s sprawling business concerns was Thomas himself and his personal ethics, ethics that included a belief in the supremacy and sanctity of the community, the church, and the United States of America. “The community is the heart and lifeblood of our nation,” he personally admonished each of his senior business managers. “The church is the soul and conscience of the community. And America is a quilt upon which each community is attached, patch like, to all the other communities to form one complete nation, stretching from coast to coast, unified and interconnected. Every patch, each community must be cared for in order to ensure the future and well being of all.”

It was only in the wake of the First Gulf War, where GO had served proudly with his Air Force Reserve A-10 squadron, that he came to the understanding that his view of the world was not shared by his fellow corporate chairmen. The global economy, embraced by so many American business leaders and politicians, frightened GO. He saw his beloved Idaho, a state he had worked so hard to protect from the ravages of a cut and slash economic boom, threatened by forces that he abhorred. Though his exploitation of the information age permitted him to run his vast and varied business concerns from the comforts of Idaho, the wild west atmosphere of cyberspace and borderless business world that it made possible loomed as a great, faceless threat in GO Thomas’s psyche. “It is a boogie man to me,” he confided to Fran Merkawitz, his personal assistant. “The new world into which we are so rapidly rushing is like the darkness under a child’s bed. Though the child is told that he has nothing to be afraid of, he still lives in fear every night because the child sees and feels things that his parents can’t.”

As Thomas pushed himself in a vain effort to eke out a few more yards, he could almost feel the nagging doubts that he harbored over the future of his country. Unable to go on, he slowed and lapsed into an easy walk. For several minutes he ambled on, staring up into the cloudless morning sky as fat beads of sweat formed on his forehead before starting their downward race along the sides of his face. A few made their way down through his thick blond brows until they were stinging his brown eyes. Exhausted from his vain effort to beat one mile’s worth of track, GO wiped the sweat from his eyes. With a shake of his head, he looked about, enjoying the last few moments of solitary peace he would have until he closed his bedroom door some time around ten P.M. that night.