Robert Coover - Public Burning

The lights have come up in Times Square on a scene, as the people now discover, of widespread madness, dissipation, and fever, an inelegant display of general indiscretion and destruction, corruption, sacrilege and sodomy, twisted camera booms, base iniquity, smashed klieg lights and shredded trousseaus, tipped and scattered chairs and pews, incest, desecration, tangled bodies, rampant nihilism, bestiality, liberated freak shows, careless love and cheating hearts, drunkenness, cock-sucking, and other fearsomely unclean abominations, all of it liberally sprinkled with soot, snot, and pigeon shit — not exactly Cotton Mather’s vision of Theopolis Americana! What a mess! There’s whiskey and blood all together, mixed with glass where they lay, not to mention sweat and tears and puddles of cum, vomit and the smashed melonheads of the pageant figures!

Well, an “orful, onnatr’l, and tarifine sight,” as Sain’t Sut would say, and as if things aren’t serious enough, it turns out that while the cops’ and secret service’s guard and pants have been down, all the pro-Rosenberg lawyers and demonstrators have escaped: Walt Disney’s Whale has been spouting them by the bellyful back into the Square, where the scoundrels have somehow recovered their pickets and legal briefs and have nearly reconstructed their Clemency Float! But Uncle Sam, spying them, whips his top hat high into the air and, when it comes down again, plucks an American bald eagle out of it: “Sic ’em, hoss!” he cries, and the eagle swoops down on the interlopers, firing off arrows of war into the backsides of the lawyers and lashing the clemency nuts with olive branches. “I wish to remark,” remarks Uncle Sam, setting his plug hat firmly back on his hoary brow, “and my langwidge is plain, that for ways that are dark and for tricks that are vain, the foe’s most abominable lop-eared lantern-jawed half-breed whiskey-soaked and generally onscropulous and haughty host do take the cake, if you don’t watch ’em! They are disgraceful, depraved, and putrescent, endowed by their Creator with certain gangrene hearts and rottin’ brains and similar unalienated blights, and given to sech public frothin and jumin’ as to wound and disease the body politic like thorns in the flesh and other eeroginous zones! But hey! if the Red slayer thinks he slays, boys, he knows not well the sub-tile ways I keeps whuppirí the she-double-I-it outen any slantindicular sidewinder what trifles with freedom, swells the caress of disunion, incites domestical inch-erections amongst us, eats out our substance, or notherwise bites the hand what lays the golden egg of peace, property, and the bottomless pork barrel! Whoopee! A nation, like a person, has got somethin’ deeper, somethin’ more permanent and pestifferous, somethin’ larger than the scum of its parts, and what this nation’s got is ME! So keep your heads down, ladies, whilst I pours out my wrath upon ’em like water!”

This bit of positive action and unabashed bullroaring rouses the people at last from their nighttime stupor, and they suddenly realize that the Phantom’s laughter has ceased entirely, the sky has brightened, and not only has the Doomsday Clock stopped beating, but the starry dial atop the Paramount Building still says 7:53! They glance at their own watches, shake them to see if they’re still ticking: yes! the sun hasn’t set after all! Nothing has really happened, they’re still okay! It’s like coming out of a scary movie — nothing but camera tricks, the illusory marvels and disasters of Cinerama and 3-D, th-th-that’s all, f-folks! Lights up and laugh!

East side, west side, all around the town, the people stagger to their feet, grapple with the clothing knotted around their ankles, hobble and lurch, boys and girls together, toward their proper places, encouraging each other to shake a leg and making a generally raucous appeal for national unity. Up on the Death House stage behind Uncle Sam, Judge Kaufman and his family, Irving Saypol and his prosecuting team, the Rosenberg jury, Herb Brownell, wives and children and prison officials, Pentagon Patriots and Singing Saints disconnect themselves from one another and creep sheepishly toward the wings, squatting and waddling like ducks, hauling on their pants and panties as they go, while out front Indians pull up their loincloths, Rat Packers their three-holed britches, Suffragettes their bloomers.

“That’s the style, fella citizens!” thunders Uncle Sam, cracking a mighty bullwhip like a ringmaster— “This is the end, so why pretend — now’s the time to strain every nerve and bend all your energies to keep well in fronta the mighty struggle for men’s minds, hearts, and raw materials! The untransacted destiny of the American people is to establish a new order in human affairs, to confirm the destiny of the human race, and to pull that switch and shed a new and resplendent glory upon mankind! Men’s hopes call upon us to say what we will do — who shall live up to the great trust? eh? and who’s the yaller low-lived red-mouthed pusley-gutted huckaroo who DARES FAIL TO TRY?”

None dare, of course — except for a few professional troublemakers and close-minded bellyachers, and these the bald eagle, flapping and cawing vehemently, is rounding up and driving toward the Whale’s mouth like a cowboy pushing dogies into the stockyard. One the eagle misses is the Rosenbergs’ defense lawyer, who, unnoticed in all the excitement, has finally managed to gain a purchase on the edge of the stage. He now draws himself up, lifts one leg over, and gasps: “I demand a reply to my petitions!”

“Very well,” says Uncle Sam, and he picks up Betty Crocker’s fallen dentures and bites Manny in the nose with them.

Bloch screams and falls from the stage. “What kind of animals am I dealing with?” he rages. “The actions of the Government of the United States in this case reveal to the entire world that the people who are running the Government are much more barbaric than the Nazis when they had power in Germany! I feel ashamed that I am an American today!”

The Square is rocked with hooting and hissing: the people are finding their way back now, getting the feel of things again. “I place the murder of the Rosenbergs at the door of President Eisenhower, Attorney General Brownell, and J. Edgar Hoover!” shrieks Bloch insanely, and the Union County American Legion in hasty assembly demands his disbarment. Bloch is dragged away, his new suit rumpled and his career in ruins, sobbing huskily: “Please tell them I did the best I could for them! Tell them I respect and admire them! Tell them I love them…!”

But his words are drowned out by boos, his own histrionics, and sudden laughter, for just as Manny is being stuffed into the Whale’s belly, somebody else — looking as miserable as an abused dog in his crushed homburg and dirty socks — is being led out like Jonah by a stiff-backed old lady in prim rimless specs! Who is it? Smokey Bear? The Atomic Bum? No, it’s Vice President Richard (Dick) Nixon and his late great Grandma Milhous!

“Everybody’s tryin’ ta git inta da act!” snorts Uncle Sam, hands on hips, winking down over his nose at the old woman. “Awright, Granny, send that onregenerit bluebellied tatereater up here where I can take a swat at him with the flat side a the dictates a reason and justice should it come to the raskil’s imperdint mind to discomboberate us with any more surjestshuns, prayers, or other dierbolical sass!” The old lady returns Uncle Sam’s wink and gives the Vice President a whacking high-buttoned boot in his henchbone, sending him flapping forward through the untangling pack-up like a clipped goose trying to take flight. People add their own toes to his general forward endeavor, holding their noses and hollering taunts at him like “Little Dick, he was so quick,” and