Robert Coover - Public Burning

As for the new man this morning, he’s wandering around the White House in his pajamas in a playful mood, practicing his oral clumsiness and startling his staff with bounding Eisenhoppers — those little plastic grasshoppers with springy metal legs and rubber suction cups on the bellies, given to him by his old friend Louis Marx the Toymaker, not to be confused with his Martian theorist. Reporters christened them “Eisenhoppers” at Christmastime and they’ve since sold like hotcakes. There is much curiosity, even among insiders, as to how and when Uncle Sam chooses his disguises. The National Poet Laureate has called Dwight David Eisenhower “The Man of Destiny,” and certainly there have been few Incarnations less obvious (as Harry himself has said: “Why, this fellow, this fellow don’t know any more about politics than a pig knows about Sunday!”) and yet more inevitable than this grinning aw-shucks farmboy from the wrong side of the tracks who clowned his way through West Point and the Mexican border troubles, only to find himself suddenly the Supreme Commander, Allied Expeditionary Forces, and, without firing a shot, the Number One Hero of World War II. And yet, it must be admitted, all American Superchiefs are “men of destiny.” So few men actually seek the office, it should be easy to get if they want it, yet there seems to be no evident connection between their own eagerness to surrender to the hypostasis and the actual takeover — indeed, it’s often just when they’re giving up and looking the other way that suddenly and improbably the famous plug hat falls down around their ears. How does this happen? Why them? Does Uncle Sam groom his Incarnations from birth, for example, or does he play it more impulsively, adjusting to the surprises that come along? Does he field a range of options for himself and drift speculatively among them, or are these apparent alternatives merely illustrations of discarded possibilities? And what about the reserves: do the same rules apply to the Vice President, or is this a kind of wild card that Uncle Sam allows the world to play just to liven things up every twenty years or so? Finally, when a candidate does arise (or is conceived), does the actual Incarnation hit him like a ton of bricks, a sudden brutal invasion of the Presence, or has it been growing in him all along? Does the voter, entering the polling booth, exercise his own free will, or is he too the captive of some larger force — and if the latter, is that power exercised upon him directly by Uncle Sam, or more subtly through some sort of force field that even the American Superhero cannot entirely control? Are political parties, in short, living organisms, abstractions, solvents, catalysts, viable alternatives, or merely the visible form of Paradox in the world?

Well, only Uncle Sam knows why this or that receptacle is chosen to receive the Host, but one thing is clear: Uncle Sam moved toward Dwight Eisenhower with more conviction and gusto than toward any other Incarnation since the Father of the Country himself. The new President was packaged and sold by BBD&O as “Strictly a No-Deal Man Clean as a Hound’s Tooth Who Will Go to Korea Restore Faith in God and Country and Carry On a Crusade to Clean Up Creeping Socialism Five-Percenters the Mess in Washington Crooks Cronies Mink Coats Deep Freezers and Rising Inflation,” but the true source of his power was summed up more simply in the big badge Uncle Sam wore last fall on his blue lapel: I LIKE IKE. Uncle Sam seemed to want Eisenhower like a child wants happiness. Perhaps it was because he was nostalgic for the old days, the time of his childhood when life was simple and causes were clear, the days of the Minutemen and Bunker Hill, of cracker barrels and hayrides and old-time religion. A “crusade” Eisenhower called his political campaign, and he told stories about his old Uncle Abraham Lincoln Eisenhower galloping his goofy gospel wagon through prairie villages, shouting “This way to heaven!”, and he told about selling hot tamales three for a nickel and riding a raft in a flood with his brother Ed while singing “Marching Through Georgia,” learning to fire old muzzle-loading guns with powder and shot, about seeing a real cowboy shootout on Texas Street in Abilene. He conjured up the crackle of a campfire, the taste of country fried chicken and thick potato salad at church picnics and the thump and clank of a game of horseshoes, lamented the passing of the old country store, and recalled the time during the Spanish-American War when the whole town ran out in the streets on hearing the rumor: “There’s a Spanish airship over Abilene!”—it turned out to be a box kite advertising a sale of straw hats. Straw hats! Box kites! Airships! Wow, it felt so good to think about these things again! The early 1950s has been a time of great national prosperity but also a time of great national malaise: things seem to have gone sour somehow. Uncle Sam is running half the world and scaring the pants off the rest, but it’s not as easy or as much fun as people had thought it would be. So maybe Uncle Sam just wanted to get inside all those old memories again, experience for himself once more the dusty heat of a lazy summer day on the prairie, the excitement of hearing the C. W. Parker Circus parade coming down Main Street, the romance of a young happy-go-lucky officer in a Mexican border town on a Saturday night, even the old-fashioned sting of a hickory stick on his fanny. It may be so.

“Behind the dingy walls inside cramped rooms,” his Man of Destiny is declaiming now, “and airless, ah, there are thousands of homes let me say in which parental love and care burn as brightly as, as intensely…” He spies his wife’s personal secretary, presses an Eisenhopper down on her desk, pokes his finger in his ear as though absently cleaning it. “As in the homes of, uh, Abilene…” She pretends to be startled when it pops up and Eisenhower roars with delight. Mamie, staggering half-blind out of her bedroom, fumbling with trembling hands for a wake-up fag, asks him what the hell’s so funny this morning, what’s got into him? He grins, that effortless affable grin that has brought him to these premises (what’s got into him? well, for one thing, he woke up a short while ago with the handsomest hard-on in a dog’s age, dreaming of his old Irish WAC girlfriend, they were both stark naked, running around in France somewhere in the middle of the war, he wasn’t even sure which side of the lines they were on or who was winning or losing, but they were balling the jack something fantastic, out in the open fields, in tents and bivouacs, village streets, in the mud of the trenches, and the only thing spoiling the fun at all was a weird little runny-nose private — he looked foreign or Jewish or something — who kept wandering by looking miserable and threatening to tattle on them…but somehow even this was exciting in its way), and says: “Hey, listen, Mamie, what do you think of this: Hemmed in by masonry and, uh, by masonry walls confined to thin streets, boys, let me assure you, in New York even as in Kansas they have found ways to enjoy themselves without hurt to property or to their elders, the farm boy and the tenement boy are one, ahem, at heart. That’s what I’m trying to get at.” He smiles. His wife stares at him for a moment through squinting eyes. Then she grunts, shrugs, and shuffles back into her bedroom. “I should say, or remind you,” he calls after her, “that does not mean that we can forget about the unforgenate, uh, FORTCH-inut circumstances growing up — which many young per — people grow up in trusting that good will! Ah, will flower out of evil! At least that is my opinion!” He has meanwhile pressed down another Eisenhopper, having glimpsed his own secretary coming in the door behind him: the hopper leaps with a loud BO-I–I-ING! the secretary squeals, Ike’s laughter booms.