Robert Coover - Public Burning

Flags are now unfurled from all the hotels and from atop the Times Tower, and huge blow-ups of Uncle Sam strangling a bear and a dragon are mounted under the starry-digited clocks on the Paramount Building, with General Eisenhower’s immortal D-Day rouser as a caption:

I CALL UPON ALL WHO LOVE FREEDOM TO STAND WITH US NOW!

Not only is a terrible dignity thereby attached to this momentous occasion (D-Day having been the nearest thing to the Second Coming mankind will probably know until the real thing comes along), but an overwhelming sense of righteousness and ultimate victory as well — some start calling it E-Day, Electrocution Day, the proper sequel, long-awaited; but others prefer D-Day II: a Day of Death, Drama, and Devotions. Not to mention Decency, human Decency. The little man in the Johnnie Walker whiskey spectacular above the Whelan drugstore is today sporting a red-white-and-blue topper, and the sanitation crew-members wear little badges that read THE LARGE THING TO DO IS THE ONLY THING WE CAN DO. A blue-white-and-orange flag — same as that of the Netherlands in 1626—with the seal of New York City in blue on the white stripe is hung out on the façade of the Times Tower, the five stars above the seal indicating that Mayor Vincent Impellitteri is in the Square or soon will be. Still early, but the Square is filling up. Cafeterias are crowded already, and they’re standing in line under the Eveready sign at Elpine Drinks. Workers, theater people, young execs, guys in sportshirts with cameras around their necks, women in sleeveless blouses with high collars, long pleated skirts. Carpenters and electricians, too, already in some dismay over the seemingly impossible task that confronts them here this morning. Colored boys are sweeping out the theater lobbies, grinning up at the sun, jigging around their brooms like the late departed Bojangles Robinson, winking at all the passing girls. And off to the north, over Central Park, there are already kites in the skies.

The Police Commissioner, overseeing the Times Square operations alongside the Sanitation Commissioner, is examining the statue of Father Duffy. It has been splashed during the night with a bucket of red paint — now being scraped away by the clean-up crews — but it’s not certain whether this was the Phantom’s doing, or a citizen’s righteous protest against the rising tide of treason among, not only American clerics, but scientists, teachers, and judges as well. To be sure, someone has daubed Omar Bradley’s famous line all over the pavement: WE HAVE GRASPED THE MYSTERY OF THE ATOM AND REJECTED THE SERMON ON THE MOUNT! But on the other hand, right there on Father Duffy’s bronze behind are the words THE ABOLITION OF RELIGION AS THE ILLUSORY HAPPINESS OF THE PEOPLE IS REQUIRED FOR THEIR REAL HAPPINESS, so it’s a moot point.

“These are the times that try men’s souls, George,” says the Sanitation Commissioner with a sigh.

“Yes, Andy, an appeal to arms, and to the God of Hosts, is all what is left us.”

President Eisenhower, of course, has long insisted that “the church, with its testimony of the existence of an Almighty God is the last thing, that it seems to me, would be preaching, teaching, or tolerating Communism,” but even the President is said to be taking a hard second look this morning. For a starter, the Chief has turned over to Edgar Hoover’s G-men the names of 2300 clergymen who signed a “special plea for clemency for the Rosenbergs,” as well as the list of 104 signatories to a follow-up letter, taken to be the hard-core Comsymp preachers. “The Rosenberg campaign,” warns Harold Velde’s Early Warning Sentinels, has “afforded the Communist conspiracy a momentous opportunity to remount a long-planned invasion of the churches of America!” FBI undercover mystery man Herbert Philbrick thinks many of the 2300 are dupes, “unsuspecting victims” sucked in by the wily Angels of Darkness at the center, but turncoat Joe Zack Kornfeder, former bigwig in the American Communist Politburo, disagrees:

REP. GORDON SCHERER, OHIO: Among those two thousand ministers were, however, some just idealists and pacifists, were there not?

JOE ZACK KORNFEDER: I do not think so. I think that those two thousand were pretty close to the machine.

Demonstrators, moving past the White House this morning toward the Supreme Court, are actually carrying blown-up posters of the Son of God Himself, with the text:

REWARD

— for information leading to the apprehension of Jesus Christ…

Wanted — for Sedition, Criminal Anarchy, Vagrancy, and Conspiracy to overthrow the established Government…

Dresses poorly…has visionary ideas, associates with common working people, the unemployed and bums… Alien — believed to be a Jew… Red Beard, marks on hands and feet, the result of injuries inflicted by an angry mob led by respectable citizens and legal authorities.

“One of the most sacrilegious propaganda pieces ever used by the Communists!” scream the Early Warning Sentinels, still much agitated by their overnight dreams and eager for some kind of consummating encounter. “The Communists did not need the churches in past years; they had ample other channels of subversion,” G-man Philbrick warns, coughing up a little early-morning phlegm: “They do need the churches now; they will fight savagely for your church!”

And for anything else they can get: Uncle Sam has been whipping about his vast domains all morning, struggling against crooks, Commies, and crawfishing backsliders. He has just been called to Coney Island to investigate a report of a monster said to be tangled in the roller coaster there, but this turns out to be a metaphorical alarm. Not so phantasmal is the corpse of Steve Franse, former owner of the Howdy Club down in the Village, found brutally beaten, face down, on the rear floor of his automobile just south of Times Square, nor the cynical overnight robbery of the Muscular Dystrophy Association on Broadway: at least nine grand missing, only the Phantom could do such a thing. “Just thinkin’ about it,” quips Uncle Sam, “takes the starch right outa me!” And then a call comes in from further up the street: a thief has just jammed a pistol in the back of a Greystone Hotel secretary and seized a $3600 payroll. Uncle Sam draws himself up, gazing austerely in the direction of this newest outrage, his blue eyes glinting in the morning sunlight, his famous top hat cocked forward on his brow in manly defiance, shoulders squared, lean jaw rippling with suppressed fury, exhibiting all that “rugged strength and radiant beauty” so admired by the great American Prophetess Sarah Hale, ready as ever for his “humble toil and heavenward duty,” but clearly pretty pissed off at the same time. He looks like Grover Cleveland confronting the election returns of 1888.

“Do not delay!” the people cry, gathered apprehensively about their Superhero in front of the sacked Muscular Dystrophy offices, “the golden moments fly!”

Uncle Sam turns and gazes compassionately down upon all these common people whom the Lord and careless fucking have made so many of, and gripping his lapels like Abe Lincoln, declares “Yes, friends, the fack can’t be no longer disgised that a Krysis is onto us. But, hey, politics ain’t beanbag, folks, and repose is not the destiny of man! The ripest peach is often highest on the tree in the boisterous sea of liberty! Yea, the credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose map is marred with sweat and dust and bloody bung-balls, so shoot if you must this old gray head, for the manners of women are the surest criterion by which to fool all of the people some of the time! If destruction is to be our lot in order to insure domestic tranquillity, a new frontier, and a full dinner pail, we must ourselves be its author and finish the work we are in until every drop of blood shall be sunk in this sea of upturned faces!” It seems like no one can hold back from celebrating the Poets and Prophets this morning, least of all the American Superhero, who speaks by custom with the grandeur of a nation of runesmiths, from Davy Crockett to Longfellow, the Carnegies and Cranes to Hank Williams and the Whittier Poets: “The tree in which the sap is stagnant, my friends, is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration, so like that sweaty old nigger piss-fire Ira Aldridge used to say, ‘The bow is bent, the arrow flies, / The winged shaft of fate!’” And off he flashes — WHOOSH! — up Broadway to the north.