Robert Coover - Public Burning

, with assistance from Sol Hurok, Dan Topping, Bernard Baruch, the AEC and Betty Crocker, Conrad Hilton, whose Albuquerque hotel figured prominently in the prosecution’s case against the Rosenbergs, Sam Goldwyn and Walt Disney, Ed Sullivan, the director of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, the various chiefs of staff, Sing Sing Warden Wilfred Denno, the Holy Six, and many more. They audition vocalists, disk jockeys, preachers, and stand-up comics, view rushes of Uncle Sam’s new documentary on the two little Rosenberg boys intended as a back projection for the burnings, commission Oliver Allstorm and His Pentagon Patriots to compose a special pageant theme song, assign a task force of experienced sachems to work up a few spontaneous demonstrations, and hire a Texas high-school marching band to play “One Fine Day” from Madame Butterfly , “The Anniversary Waltz,” and the theme from High Noon , said to be a particular favorite these days of President Eisenhower. The President, just back from a week of moralizing and whoopee in the Badlands and Oyster Bay, has been visited at the White House this week by the Singing Cowboy Gene Autry, and Gene has been invited to render “When It’s Twilight on the Trail” and “Back in the Saddle Again” at the electrocutions. TIME, the National Poet Laureate, celebrating this spring his own thirtieth birthday, is asked by the Committee to read a commemorative poem, an American middleweight championship bout between Bobo Olson and Paddy Young is appended to the program, and someone hires Harry James and His Orchestra to play overhead on the Astor Roof. Efforts are made to rush through a new ordinance allowing the sale of liquor in city theaters, and thus by extension in Times Square on Thursday night. The weather has turned hot, and in such a pack-up it will help if there’s something with which to wet the whistle. As the day draws near, a massive contingent of New York State Troopers is dispatched to Ossining to relieve the 290 overworked prison police now guarding the Rosenbergs and to escort the atom spies to the city-and all of the other principals in the case are to be brought here as well: the Judge and jury, prosecution team and witnesses, including Ethel Rosenberg’s kid brother David Greenglass, the Los Alamos soldier whose self· incriminating evidence almost single-handedly brought about the convictions of Ethel and her husband and got them condemned to the electric chair. This chair, now looming stark and fearful on the Times Square stage, is the singular responsibility of State Executioner Joseph P. Francel, World War I veteran and Cairo, New York, electrician. Francel, who was badly gassed in the war, is a professional who has hastened hundreds of malefactors to their deaths — in fact, he is celebrating his own fourteenth anniversary this year as Sing Sing Executioner, having first been appointed on Columbus Day, 1939, and will receive a bonus $300 for this double bill. All of this is taken as a good omen.

Not that Americans are superstitious, of course. How could they be, citizens of this, the most rational nation (under God) on earth? They need no omens to pull a switch, turn a buck, or change the world, for these are the elected sons and daughters of Uncle Sam, né Sam Slick, that wily Yankee Peddler who, much like that ballsy Greek girl of long ago, popped virgin-born and fully constituted from the shattered seed-poll of the very Enlightenment—“slick,” as the Evangels put it, “as a snake out of a black skin!” Young Sam, “lank as a leafless elm,” already chin-whiskered and plug-hatted and all rigged out in his long-tailed blue and his striped pantaloons, his pockets stuffed with pitches, patents, and pyrotechnics, burst upon the withering Old World like a Fourth of July skyrocket, snorting and neighing like a wild horse: “Who — Whoo— Whoop! Who’ll come gouge with me? Who’ll come bite with me? Rowff — Yough — Snort — YAHOO! In the name of the great Jehovah and the Continental Congress, I have passed the Rubicon — swim or sink, live or die, survive or perish, I’m in fer a fight, I’ll go my death on a fight, and with a firm reliance on the pertection of divine protestants, a fight I must have, or else I’ll have to be salted down to save me from spilin’! You hear me over thar, you washed-up varmints? This is the hope of the world talkin’ to you! I am Sam Slick the Yankee Peddler — I can ride on a flash of lightnin’, catch a thunderbolt in my fist, swaller niggers whole, raw or cooked, slip without a scratch down a honey locust, whup my weight in wildcats and redcoats, squeeze blood out of a turnip and cold cash out of a parson, and out-inscrutabullize the heathen Chinee — so whar’s that Johnny Bull to stomp his hoof or quiver his hindquarters at my Proklymation? Whoo- oop! we love our cuppa tea, boys, but we love our freedom more, so bow yore necks and spread, you Hottentots, it is vain to extenuate the matter, the kingdom of sorrow’s a-comin’ and the Child of Calamity with her, and may Great Britain rue the day her hostile bands come hither! Lo, I say unto you, I have put a crimp in a cat-a· mount with my bare hands, hugged a cinnamon b’ar to death, and made a grizzly sing ‘Jesus, Lover of My Soul’ in a painful duet with his own arsehole — and I have not yet begun to fight! Yippee! I’m wild and woolly and fulla fleas, ain’t never been curried below the knees, so if you wish to avoid foreign collision you had better abandon the ocean, women and children first! For we hold these truths to be self-evident: that God helps them what helps themselves, it’s a mere matter of marchin’; that idleness is emptiness and he who lives on hope will die with his foot in his mouth; that no nation was ever ruint by trade; and that nothin’ is sartin but death, taxes, God’s glowin’ Covenant, enlightened self-interest, certain unalienated rights, and woods, woods, woods, as far as the world extends!”

The American Autolycus, they called him in the Gospels, referring to his cunning powers of conjuration, transmutation, and magical consumption (he can play the shell game, not with a mere pea, but with whole tin mines, forests, oil fields, mountain ranges, and just before Thanksgiving this past year made an entire island disappear!), and it’s been said that when he steps across the continent and sits down on Pike’s Peak, and snorts in his handkerchief of red, white, and blue, the earth quakes and monarchs tremble on their thrones….

“Oh, we must fight! I repeat it, sir, I am feelin’ awesome wolfy about the head and shoulders and I must have a fight, those who expects to reap the blessings of freedom must, like men, undergo the fatigue of twistin’ noses and scrougin’ eyeballs and rib-brakin’ and massacreein’! So carry the flag, you sons a Liberty, hang on to yer balls and keep step to the music of the Union, our brethren are already in the field, why stand we here idle? Time is money! No pent-up Utica contracts our powers, but the whole boundless continent is ours, it’s as much a law of nature as that the Mississippi should flow to the sea or that trade follers the flag! Fear is the fundament of most guvvamints, so let’s get the boot in, boys, and listen to ’em scream, let us anny-mate and encourage each other— whoo-PEE! — and show the whole world that a Freeman, contendin’ for Liberty on his own ground, can out-run, out-dance, out-jump, chaw more tobacky and spit less, out-drink, out-holler, out-finagle and out-lick any yaller, brown, red, black, or white thing in the shape of human that’s ever set his unfortunate kickers on Yankee soil! It is our manifest dust-in-yer-eye to overspread the continent allotted by Providence for the free development of our yearly multiplyin’ millions, so damn the torpedoes and full steam ahead, fellow ripstavers, we cannot escape history! Boliterate ’em we must, for our cause it is just what the doctor ordered, logic is logic, that’s all I say, and remember, if you will not hear Reason, she will surely rap yore knuckles! I tell you, we want elbow-room —the continent — the whole continent — and nothin’ but the continent! And — by gum! — we will have it!”

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