Robert Coover - Public Burning

This was disturbing. Not the part about the Phantom, but the part about Uncle Sam. Kennedy, I knew, was a skeptic, a freethinker, didn’t even believe in Uncle Sam, much less have congress with him — he’d told me so on a long trainride together six years ago. He’d laughed cynically then at my simpleminded fundamentalism and called me a gullible Hollywood primitive. And now—! Well, it was clearly worse than I’d supposed — and Kennedy might not be the only one. It occurred to me that a lot of guys had been showing newfound flash of late — my fair-haired-boy days with Sam Slick were over. But Kennedy? What was happening to Uncle Sam? Maybe we needed to revive the Know-Nothings and the American Protective Association, put a stop to the contamination, I thought sourly. Close the door, fuck the oppressed of every nation, get the Old Man back in the pink again. Distantly, I heard something about “the OPA.” Kennedy laughed. The girl tittered. The sonuvabitch. I hoped at least he sat in a different car this time.

That other time was in the spring of 1947, we were both fresh out of our Naval Officer uniforms (I outranked him) and newly elected to the House of Representatives, both on the same Education and Labor committee, and Frank Buchanan had invited the two of us up to McKees-port, outside Pittsburgh, to debate the merits of what was then the hot issue in Congress, the Taft-Hartley Act. I was for the bill. Kennedy was against it. I won. Kennedy was a pushover in fact. Of course, the entire audience was made up of employers, I couldn’t help but win, but I could have beat him anywhere. Maybe this had pissed Kennedy off and made him unusually sarcastic. After the meeting, we’d ridden a sleeper from Pittsburgh back to the capital. During the long rocky ride, we’d talked about foreign affairs, the handling of the Communist threat at home and abroad, and religion: where America was going, what it all meant. I didn’t recall the details — except that he kept wanting to talk about getting ass and at one point, when I tried quoting Alf Landon on the “new frontier,” complained that I had the imagination of a fucking peasant — but of one thing I was absolutely certain: Only I had the true faith. Not that I’d had any concrete proof yet myself, I’d had as much contact with Uncle Sam as I’d had with Jesus, but as usual, my instincts were right about this and Kennedy’s were wrong.

At the time, I’d thought: it’s probably his Catholicism standing in the way. But he didn’t seem to be much of a Catholic either — not like Charlie Kersten, for example, who was on the committee with us, or Monsignor Sheen or my friend Father Cronin — hell, in a way, I was more of a Catholic than he was! I eventually realized it was mainly his money and good looks that had agnosticized him: he didn’t have to fight for anything, didn’t have to ask hard questions. Probably got a soft push downhill at Harvard, too. The only reason he’d beat Lodge out of his Senate seat was because his old man had bought off the pro-Lodge Boston Post with half a million dollars. At the time I’d seen this as yet another stroke of historical luck for me, getting rid of Lodge like that, but now I couldn’t be sure. Uncle Sam had a lot of respect for money, I knew that — hadn’t he just lectured me on it? But Kennedy was too frivolous, too cocky, a pampered arrogant snot who wasn’t interested in anything unless he could get into its pants — he wasn’t called “Shafty” in the Navy for nothing — and if my butt was made of iron, his was made of peanut brittle. Like my brother Harold, he had a certain reckless charm, but no discipline, no staying power. I’d never taken him seriously, and assumed Uncle Sam hadn’t either — Uncle Sam was born an Episcopalian, ate a whole side of cornfed Nebraska beef every Friday night and would rather whip a papist paddywhack than a nigger any day. Negro, I mean. Not a single one of his Presidential Incarnations had even mentioned Jesus by name in an Inaugural Address, much less his R.C.-idolatrized Mother. The only occasion I’d ever heard Uncle Sam mention the Virgin was the night he’d interrupted my Caribbean cruise back in 1948—just the second time I’d ever seen Uncle Sam that close — to fly me back to Whittaker Chambers’s pumpkin patch. He still didn’t know me well then, and, while working the rowing machine in the S.S. Panama’s gym, which we’d snuck away to, he’d asked me a little about my life. I’d begun at the beginning, as I always do, with the day of my birth, but he’d interrupted to ask me when I’d lost my cherry. I’d stammered something clumsy about honeymooning with Pat in Mexico, and he’d laughed that rattling disconcerting peddler’s laugh of his and, keeping rhythm with his strokes, had chanted:

The Virgin Mary stumped her toe

On the way to Mexico!

On the way back she broke her back

Sliding on the railroad track!

Queevy, quavy, Irish Mary,

Stingalum, stangalum, buck!

He said the Indians had taught it to him.

Not that Uncle Sam was a secularist — how could he be? He was Uncle Sam, after all. Faith was essential to the Incarnation, it wouldn’t come off without it—“any deeply felt religious faith,” as Eisenhower liked to put it, “and I don’t care which it is.” True, by the letter of the Covenant, any would serve, but on the other hand, Uncle Sam clearly was not partial to Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, Voodooists, or Romanists. If he had any favorites at all, they were among people like Ezra Benson’s Mormons, the eccentric, evangelical, and fundamentalist sects nurtured here on this soil and here primarily, Adventists, Shakers, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Christian Scientists, Hardshell Baptists, Church of Christers, Four Square Gospelers…yes, and Quakers. And so I hadn’t been surprised at Jack Kennedy’s blindness, his blasphemies, and as always I’d held my peace when confronted by them: some men are born to greatness and some are not, no point in helping those who are slow to catch on. Especially a rich fucking Ivy League Brahmin like Kennedy — I hated all those guys, not personally, but because they didn’t play fair, they corrupted the American Dream with their bankrolled head starts: goddamn it, if they couldn’t sell penny candy and rescue millionaires like the rest of us, they could go to hell. I always thought that was how Uncle Sam saw it, too, that enthusiasm he had for the log-cabin starting line, but now suddenly there was this conversion: it could only mean one thing. I shrank miserably into my seat as the train pulled out, huddled in my rumpled clothes, smelling the acids of my fathers rise in an ancient indignation: the only good papist is a dead papist. Poo. I needed a fresh shirt and a deodorant, I stank worse than Sheba, but fuck it, I was past caring.

The car had filled up with festive exuberant people singing songs, uncorking hip flasks, drawing out mouth-harps and decks of cards, lighting up cigars…but no one had come to sit by me. Not that I gave a shit, that passion for anonymity was no joke with me, in school buses, at choir practice, on the bench at football games, at family picnics, I’d always had a place apart, I was the original Lone Ranger and wanted it that way, but still I didn’t like the implications — it was as though I’d been set up as a humpty dumpty and everybody smelled this on me, knew better than to get contaminated themselves. It was that same total isolation I’d been feeling since the fund crisis, like maybe Checkers had given me rabies or something, it was as though the last dozen years had not happened and I was back in Washington in the OPA, getting crapped on by the big-city Jews and Yalie New Dealers. Could I kill, I wondered? If it came to that, could I kill? Not something easy like the Rosenbergs, but this crowd in here…if they got in my way…? Why not? Killing was as meaningless as anything else. The only question was whether you risked getting killed yourself — and even that might be just another reason to go ahead and have a try. Not that I’m suicidal, I’d been scared all my life of dying and I was scared still. Yet I needed to confront it constantly. “That swarm of black thing.” I drew energy from it, only provided I didn’t name it. Though the threat of it paralyzed me, I was never so alive as when it threatened me. It made mere survival the central principle of my life. It molded my face. It made me reckless. I wanted to plunge into it and out the other side over and over again. It taught me that Self, though nothing, was everything. And it was what dragged me down the aisle that night in Los Angeles, when Dad took us boys in to Dr. Rader’s revival meeting. What a night! This was not the Friends Meeting House in tranquil reasonable Whittier. This was the goddamn truth. Awesome and fundamental. No play-acting piety here, no “Joy to the World,” there was a terrible choice to be made, and there were no third alternatives. Dr. Rader made one thing perfectly clear: the truth did not make you comfortable. I was wide open and ready for this — I had just started high school the day before and I wanted to bleed! We joined hundreds of others that night in making our personal commitments to Christ and Christian service. Or perhaps this was a formula for some transformation deeper than commitment. I remember the crying. How vulnerable my father looked. Jesus was like some kind of radiant loving cloud one walked through out of Death toward Progress. Toward true freedom. I believed . I thought: only in America could this happen!