Robert Coover - Public Burning

And so it goes, from one end of the world to the other, because, as Dr. Norman Vincent Peale has written in his book of Yankee Peddler’s proverbs, The Power of Positive Thinking , America’s runaway number one best seller for the thirty-second week running: “This is the one lesson history teaches… The good never loses!” Fulgencio Batista regains control of Cuba and General Rojas Pinilla, who fought with Uncle Sam as a staff officer with the first contingent of Colombian troops to Korea in 1951, pulls a quick coup in his country and ousts Laureano Gomez, who as TIME say: “slid like a wilted leaf down / history’s drainpipe.” From the Dominican Republic Generalissimo Trujillo (“an illustrious ruler,” the young Vice President Richard Nixon has called him) sends a priest as delegate to the United Nations, explaining that his country intends to use “the arms of faith and Christian charity to combat the poisonous Communist doctrine in the international organization,” and on television the Reverend Billy Graham backs him up: “Communism is a fanatical religion,” he declares, “a great sinister anti-Christian movement masterminded by Satan, that has declared war upon the Christian God! Only as millions of Americans turn to Jesus Christ can the nation be spared the onslaught of a demon-possessed Communism!” Yes, Daniel Webster expressed it long ago: “Whatever makes men good Christians, makes them good citizens!” A survey by the Catholic Digest shows that 89 percent of all Americans, including Jews, believe in the Blessed Trinity, and 99 percent believe in God — get rid of that one percent, it’s said, and the Phantom’s had it!

Not even the innermost precincts of the Phantomized world have been immune. In the Soviet Union Josef Stalin’s heart “has stopped beating,” and his presumptive heirs — Beria, Molotov, Malenkov, and Khrushchev — are said to be at each other’s throats. As though in sympathy, Czech Puppet Klement Gottwald has “died of a cold,” and strikes and riots have crippled the country. And now, overnight, with the Rosenberg executions just a day away, the big breakthrough comes: the East Germans, who until now have been fleeing Westward at the rate of nearly fifty thousand a month, suddenly stop, as though on cue, turn back, and confront their masters…

barehanded they gathered in the grey

morning rain — masons in white

carpenters in black day laborers

and factory hands in hobnailed

boots and raveled suits

in mumbling columns that suggested

disconnected centipede legs groping

for a body they streamed from all

directions toward the center where

the communist proconsuls rule

shopkeepers clanged down shutters peered

through the slits children on bicycles

circled in front trucks twisted through

the crowd nose to tail like a team

of prodding sheep dogs

an east german perched shakily

on an idle cement mixer

pointed with a sneer at a tall vopo

“hello long one!” he cried “your

pants are open!”

anger scudded in like a rain cloud

“freedom” they chanted thousands

began chanting the forbidden anthem

deutschland deutschland über alles

über alles in der welt!

on both sides of the iron curtain

the world heard with a thrill

of east berlin’s

rebellion in the rain…

“The Rebellion in the Rain”: no wonder TIME’S been inspired! This uprising in Berlin, which soon spreads to Magdeburg, Jena, Chemnitz, Rathenow, Leipzig, Halle — in Brandenburg, workers maul the Red D.A. to death on top of a police car and rip the ear off a “people’s judge,” while Czechs are pissing in Pilsen on portraits of dead Puppet Gottwald — is Uncle Sam’s crowning touch to over two years of stagecraft, prayer, and arm-to-arm Injun rassling with the Phantom’s ubiquitous agents.

But it has not always been easy, not even for America’s mighty Superhero. The tag end of the 1940s, which began so well, has seen the Red Tide swallow up half of Europe, sweep through Cathay and threaten all of South Asia, batter at the shores of Africa, Byzantium, and Latin America.

How did it happen?

The score in the middle of the decade is 1,625,000,000 people for Uncle Sam, only 180,000,000 for the Phantom, and most of them in declining health, thanks to Overlord, German tanks, and the A-bomb. What’s more, no sooner has Uncle Sam, virtually single-handed, won the war and saved humanity but what he’s out inventing the United Nations, unleashing television, laying a dose of freedom and morality on the Hottentots, funding the World Bank, and humbly taking over the world for its own good — he’s had to use up one of his best Incarnations of all time to do it, but it’s worth it. With the bodies of the Nazi hoodlums still dangling warm on their ropes, Ely Culbertson the Bridge Wizard can announce to the world: “God and the politicians willing, the United States can declare peace on the world and win it!” That’s mainly because the U.S. is holding trumps, of course — and keeping them. As Harry Truman, Uncle Sam’s unusual new disguise, puts it: “The atomic bomb is too dangerous to be let loose in a lawless world. That is why Great Britain, Canada, and the United States, who have the secret of its production, do not intend to reveal that secret until means have been found to control the bomb.” It seems like the Golden Age — like Mother Luce’s dream of “The American Century” come true!

And yet, suddenly, by the end of the decade, the Phantom has a score of 800,000,000 to Uncle Sam’s 540,000,000 and the rest — about 600,000,000 so-called neutrals — are adrift. What went wrong? Who’s responsible? People wonder if this is what the astronomers are talking about when they speak of the “red shift”: God drifting away and losing touch. The Phantom’s dark gospel has spread throughout the world, he has acquired dozens of new disguises and devices, Uncle Sam’s most private councils have been infiltrated. Not that the American Superchief and his Sons of Light have been idle — the Truman Doctrine has wrested Greece and Turkey from the Phantom’s grasp, the Marshall Plan has saved Christianity in Europe, West Germany and South Korea have been improvised, staffed, and armed, the Strategic Air Command has been revved up with atomic weapons and NATO created, and Point Four is spreading the American Dream upon the Yahoos like manna — but you can’t argue with the scoreline. “In 1944,” as Congressman Richard Nixon of California sums it up, “the odds were nine to one in our favor. Today…the odds are five to three against us!” And worse to come: in a few short weeks, before the 1949 World Series has even begun, Mao Tse-tung chases Chiang Kai-shek’s bony behind off to Formosa and the Reds take over all of China, America is hit by its first postwar recession, the U.S. Secretary of Defense commits suicide, and on top of it all, Russia explodes her first atomic bomb!

The news rocks the nation. “Treason!” cries the press. Others agree. “If the President says the American people are entitled to know all the facts,” declares Congressman Nixon, “I feel the American people are also entitled to know the facts about the espionage ring which was responsible for turning over information on the atom bomb to agents of the Russian government!” Espionage ring?! Here Uncle Sam’s been seeding the rubes gathering outside his tent all these years with whole pressruns of fresh greenbacks, and now that his wares are out on the table and it’s time for the payoff, not only have they pocketed the bait and wandered off, making ungrateful ridicule the while of his “Yankee notions,” but some bastard’s even picked his pockets while he was watching them go! “Sweet Betsey from Pike, 1 been hit by a pooper!” cries Uncle Sam as the Russian bomb mushrooms into the ether. “Thar she blows, goddamn it, our just and lasting peace with honor in our time, shot to shit, it’s most enough to make a deacon swear! Ed-GAR!”