Robert Coover - Public Burning

In an attempt to offset these fears, Treasury Secretary George Humphrey has let it be known that there is “no reason to fear peace, U.S. military spending is still necessary, armistice in Korea or no.” Defense Secretary Charlie Wilson has backed him up on this with talk of the arms race and the need for a lot of new weaponry, and General Gruen-ther of SHAPE has announced his plans to make use of new atomic weapons in the defense of Europe, few ground troops: a proxy attack by one of Russia’s satellites is expected there any day, and a lot of gear is going to get shot up. This morning, in a fresh move, two U.S. admirals — Combs and Oftsie — are sent into the arena: testifying before a Senate Appropriations subcommittee, they urge approval of Ike’s request for $115,000,000 in new funds for guided missiles and planes capable of delivering “small” atomic bombs, and lean irascible Admiral Oftsie, pushing for more new supercarriers like the Forrestal , says: “Small atomic weapons have created unlimited possibilities for naval aviation,” because there are many targets against which the “small bomb is the preferable weapon.” Which encourages the First National Bank of Boston to issue this statement:

The pessimism in some quarters, based on a belief that a Korean truce would have a depressive influence upon business activity, has been substantially modified.… It is now clearly indicated that there has been no fundamental change in the Soviet objective and that we must maintain a strong defense program. While savings will be made by the elimination of waste, indications are that no sharp curtailments are expected in our military outlay for some time to come.

And there are other reasons to modify the pessimism down at the Exchange this morning. Television set production is up 70 percent, for example, doing even better than pornography and missiles. Births are still outnumbering deaths nearly two to one, assurances of an expanding market. And there’s always American ingenuity: already this year it has come up with such products as plastic carpets, paper snow fences, blind-men’s canes that glow in the dark, cockpit listeners, 3-D movies, propane locomotives, chlorophyll cigarettes, and Eisenhoppers. Net sales of General Foods is up from $196 million in 1942 to $701 million today, and mainly, they say, thanks to research and packaging. A packing company has designed a new hide puller, a revolving safety knife, hydraulically operated, that tears a carcass right out of its birthday suit without injuring either suit or meat, a real breakthrough, while out in the nation’s meat-packing center a photo of Marilyn Monroe, still in her hide but nothing else, has been uncovered by a horny young cartoonist — and who knows? if he can come up with a magazine to go around it, he may well have the publishing sneak hit of the year with it.

This sensationalist trend in the nation’s magazines is worrying to some people, of course. The sex and violence in them have been attacked by everybody from the Phantom’s Daily Worker —which claims to be offended by “strip cartoons” and “hate campaigns” and “sex reports” and shocked at stories like “Girls in Gangs” and “Love Harvest in Blood”—to Arkansas Congressman Ezekiel C. Gathings, whose House committee, investigating salacious pocket books, comics, and cheesecake girlie mags, finds that the industry has “degenerated into a medium for the dissemination of artful appeals to sensuality, immorality, filth, perversion, and degeneracy.” The cheap pornography of the likes of Steinbeck, Farrell, Caldwell, and Moravia is cited by Gathings’s committee, along with the depravity of such newsstand successes as Whisper, Keyhole, Foo, Nifty, Zip , and Wham! , just as the Worker goes out after Flirt, Titter, Wink , and Climax, The Saturday Evening Post, G.I. Joe Comics . But, as Zeke Gathings himself has to admit: “Pornography is big business.” And in times like these, one must not, as they say, look a gift horse in his private parts. “Make money,” Mother Luce has said, “be proud of it; make more money, be prouder of it! School yourself for the long battle of freedom in this country!” And so, if it works, who can blame the American publishing industry for running pictures of girls in their panties, dead soldiers bubbling blood, or violated virgins, or for keeping up with current events by printing timely stories this week like “The Bride and the Hangman,” “The Night Love Turned to Terror,” or “We Played and We Paid — the truth about two who took the easy way”?

Likewise the movie-palace managers, struggling against the very TV boom that’s cheering others: they’re also swinging with the new tits-and-blood trend, what else can they do? and this weekend — at least in the area around Times Square — have booked timely films like High Treason, A Slight Case of Larceny, Devil’s Plot, Three Sinners , and The Atomic City , a flick about G-men hunting down H-bomb spies. They have no illusions, of course, about drawing away any of the nighttime trade from the Times Square burnings themselves. But it’s not yet certain just when that show will go on, maybe not for weeks, and meanwhile the streets are filling up with restless undirected masses and the summer sun is climbing in the sky — they can hardly be blamed for trying to lure in a piece of the popcorn action at the very least. If they don’t get it, after all, the pickpockets will. Indeed, it’s a service to Uncle Sam to keep these potentially inflamed and aimless mobs off the streets and air-conditioned while he’s sorting things out at the Supreme Court and the President’s Cabinet meeting. So some play the sex angle, others the executions, and many attempt a bit of both at the same time. Rita Hayworth dances for the Baptist’s head in Salome at the Rivoli, for example, and “Terror Stalks the Screen in 3 Dimensions” at the Paradise in Man in the Dark . Three-D “THRILLS that almost TOUCH YOU” can be had all over town today, but the one that’s lining them up in the streets is House of Wax , which, made by a one-eyed man, is all about reality and illusion and famous people going up in flames. Julius Rosenberg and his boy used to play a kind of baseball game in their ghetto flat using a paddle and a ball on an elastic string, and House of Wax pays tribute to this with a stunning bat-and-ball sequence that sends people leaping right out of their seats. “The Year’s Shock Drama,” Invasion USA , is on at the Fox, and O.K. Nero! , “A Roman Scandal of Roaring Spectacle,” is at the Globe. Murder Without Crime at the Beekman shares an imaginative twin bill with Double Confession , starring Peter (“the droop-eyed cinemenace,” as TIME say) Lorre, whose wife, Karen, is out in Las Vegas this week, suing him for divorce. The Grande puts on an FBI thriller, Walk East on Beacon , said to be the story of the original Groun’-Hog Hunt, and at the 6000-seat Roxy, that palatial old queen from the movie heyday of the twenties, Titanic gives way to Pickup on South Street , “The Double-Barreled Triple-Powered Forty-Five-Calibre Rocker-Socker of the Year: IT’S A BLOW-TORCH!” A veritable paradigm of the times! As TIME, open-eyed, sums it up:

a pickpocket (richard wid

mark) slaps a former road

house entertainer (jean

peters) in the teeth

knocks her out with a right

to the jaw and revives her by pour

ing a bottle of beer in her face

the b-girl retaliates

by conking him over the head

with another beer bottle a communist

spy (richard kiley) beats up

and shoots the girl hits a cop

over the head with a pistol

and kills an eccentric old necktie