Robert Coover - Public Burning

Elsewhere, the Phantom strikes out even more boldly, using every weapon from hysteria to hyperbole, tanks to terrorism. In Korea, firing thousands of artillery and mortar rounds, the Phantom’s troops attack along a broad front, capturing Finger Ridge and Capitol Hill, breaking through Allied lines near Outpost Texas, scattering chickenshit ROKs and exhausted GIs in all directions. “If this is getting ready for peace,” bitches a shot-up U.S. rifleman as they cart him away on his stretcher, “I’d just as soon go back to the old war!” TIME, the National Poet Laureate, records this sentiment for immortality, then adds:

americans could not forget

korea and it spoiled

some of their pleasure in

tv sets and Cadillacs

Uncle Sam wants the hell out of this war, but Syngman Rhee is threatening it go it alone. He sends mobs of schoolgirls out in the streets to attack the GIs from the rear in protest against the truce negotiations under way. Key to these negotiations are the North Korean prisoners of war in South Korean compounds, most of whom are said to be anti-Communist. “Just so Rhee don’t go berserk,” mutters a U.S. negotiator, “and let them prisoners go!”

Almost as a kind of reflex, the guard is doubled on the Rosenbergs at Sing Sing. The Rosenbergs are said to be gloating over their new stay of execution. The Phantom whips up anti-American demonstrations in their behalf in Milan, Toronto, Jakarta, Genoa, Paris, London, and swamps the White House with protest letters — nearly ten thousand letters asking Eisenhower to spare the couple are passing like stuffed ballots across his desk every day now. The Rosenberg lawyers, augmented by a gang of last-minute interlopers, are scrambling frantically through ancient lawbooks in search of any new shyster tactic that might confound Uncle Sam.

To gain time, the Phantom sends his terrorists into action in Malaya and French Indochina, and his tanks into East Berlin. The Russian T-34s come clattering in over the cobblestones, “rocking and snarling,” as TIME say, wagging their big 85-mm guns about like magic wands…

the machine guns and submachine guns

began chattering the crowds broke threw

themselves into gutters and down subway

stair wells to dodge the bullets but

not all made it…

Some run, some stand, some die, many are glad they stayed at home, most are frightened, and everyone soon vanishes, as the Rebellion in the Rain gutters out, all of it watched morosely by Uncle Sam, sitting helplessly on his blistered duff on the wrong side of Potsdamer Platz. Soon, nothing can be heard in the divided city but the soft dripping of rainwater, the clink of knives through the evening rituals of black bread, butter, cheese, and sausage, the odd Soviet firing squad off in the fields….

AMERICA THE NATE OF THE WORLD

AMERICA THE NITE OF THE WORLD

it was a quiet rainy night in

prisoner of war camp number nine

under the brow of a green hill in

pusan

at 2:30 a.m.

pfc willie buhan was reading

a book in the “maximum security”

compound (for prisoners who had broken

minor rules)

he wasn’t

worried much though vaguely aware

that his two rok buddies on guard

duty had been acting sort of

“funny”

the next thing

he knew he was looking down

the barrels of two carbines

one garand rifle and one pistol

all in the hands of

rok guards…

They’re gone: some twenty-five thousand of them. Dashing out into open fields, remote villages, the alleyways of Pusan: Rhee, the obstreperous old bastard, has pulled the straw mat out from under Uncle Sam’s feet and let his prisoners go.

By Thursday, peace hopes have been dashed in Korea, the East German freedom fighters have been crushed, and all preparations for the great atom-spy pageant have been thrown into utter confusion. The wires have been pulled on the electric chair and a manikin has been strapped into the seat, dressed up to look like Uncle Sam with a Hitler moustache. Bombastic handbills, instruction sheets for clemency vigils, tattered bunting, and dirty pictures showing President Eisenhower and all his Cabinet in compromising positions litter the streets.

The fire in Alaska is quenched at last, after millions of dollars of damage to military installations and supplies, but simultaneously the new $3,000,000 U.S. Embassy in Rio de Janeiro bursts into flames. Smaller fires break out in a random pattern across New York City — on Fourth Avenue, West Thirteenth, Eldridge, and East Forty-ninth in Manhattan, Fulton and West Eighth in Brooklyn — and during a demonstration at Fort Dix, a mortar shell explodes, injuring sixteen American GIs and killing Private Frank X. Zirnheld, 20, of Buffalo. Adlai Stevenson travels all the way to Turkey to praise the Turkish troops fighting in Korea, but his words are drowned out by earthquakes that rock Adrianople; he sighs, remarks on his usual luck, and goes for a hopeful swim in the Bosporus.

Three Israelis are slain by a Jordanian patrol, three Home Guards by terrorists in Malaya. The Red Chinese crack down on the last of the Roman Catholic missions, arresting eleven priests in Shanghai, ten in Tientsin, more in Canton, as “well-known spies.” Indonesian terrorists kill 60 villagers and burn 800 homes in a raid on 4 villages south of Jakarta, leaving 3500 homeless. U.S. casualties in Korea shoot up to 136,029, while at home 305 new polio cases are reported for the week, bringing the year’s total to 3124. These numbers rattle through the streets like apocalyptic codes, signals of some numerological conundrum, resolving itself toward catastrophe. Broadway bookies now give the Rosenbergs a fifty-fifty chance of survival, which is better than they’re giving the best horse running that day. The local boatmen, holding out for another thirty-five cents, still refuse to take pilgrims over to Miss Liberty on Bedloe’s Island. Clemency floats containing photographic blow-ups of new documents brazenly stolen from the office of the Green-glasses’ lawyer, purporting to prove that major prosecution witnesses lied against the Rosenbergs, roll into Times Square. Enraged loyalists try to smash up the floats and fights ensue. AMERICA THE BITE OF THE WORLD, the sign reads. BILE. PILE. PULE. PUKE. JUKE. What kind of game IS this?

AMERICA THE JOKE OF THE WORLD!

There seems no stopping the Phantom in his blasphemy. It’s almost as if he has been playing dead all this time, like those inscrutable Japs used to do in all the World War II movies, lying in ambush, flat out, with a pile of hand grenades tucked under their yellow bellies. It’s not even clear who Uncle Sam’s friends are. The French, facing the most serious crisis in the dismal history of the Fourth Republic, are losing their nerve in Indochina, and everybody from President Auriol on down is protesting the Rosenberg executions. So are the Scandinavians, and the Pope is not exactly standing up and cheering for the Sons of Light. Churchill has talked about withdrawing British troops from Korea, where only 40,000 outside forces now support the 460,000 ROKs and 250,000 American GIs in this so-called United Nations action as it is. “United Nations, my ass!” Uncle Sam is heard to mutter, trying to find a toehold along Finger Ridge. “Hal-lucy-nations, more like it! In-subordy-nations!” India and Switzerland actually threaten to quit the commission to supervise repatriation of war prisoners in Korea, confirming Uncle Sam’s mistrust of “neutralism,” and there are suggestions — even at home in the Americas! — that Red China be admitted to the United Nations. TIME say: “SHADOW OF THE RED DRAGON!”

Not only are the North Korean hostages out of the prison camps and living like the golden boys of Pusan, heroes of the local dongs, but women and children are out in the streets, screaming insults at the Americans for failing to unify the nation, and mutilated veterans are staging a very unappealing lie-down strike on Pusan’s main drag. Syngman Rhee smiles at Uncle Sam’s discomfiture. Says a soldier-friend of TIME: “We came over here to help him, and now he’s kicked us in the face.”