Robert Coover - Public Burning

Fighting words, worthy of Johnny Mack Brown and Tim McCoy before him, even the lazy old Chief Doorkeeper Fishbait Miller is on his feet: time to strap on your shootin’ irons, boys, give the Sheriff a hand! But even here, here in the town meeting hall, there is cowardice and indecision, maybe even treachery — else the enraged Georgian wouldn’t be laying all this heated-up rhetoric on them. There are those who aren’t even here, ducking out just when it’s time to stand up and be counted. Moreover, the foreign-aid bill under debate this morning includes payoffs to Communist outlaws like Tito of Yugoslavia, and Wisconsin Congressman Alvin O’Konski is jumping up and down, trying to get the floor to raise hell about that: whoa! what kind of a Congress is this anyway? Congressman Forrester eventually yields to him, but not before laying the blame for all the street fights looming up today squarely on Justice Douglas and the “civil rights Congress”: “Too many have gawn CRAY-zy ovuh so-cawled SS-EVIL rahhts, a CUM-yunist propaganda FAY-vrit, and this heah class a PEE-pul is most ri-SPAWN-subble fer this heah FOO-lishnuss!” O’Konski’s target this morning is those “Communist devils” who were sent to instigate and “engineer a civil war in Spain,” and in particular the “unwanted Communist horror and terror” of the priest- and nun-killer Josef Tito, who’s in for a piece of cash from the foreign-aid bill, and as the crowds rush anxiously on toward the White House, uncertain even of the loyalty and backbone of the town’s leading citizens, they can hear Alvin’s angry words ringing in their ears…

I am wondering how it feels to aid and abet Communism and help kill freedom-loving people? I am wondering if this Congress has any heart or conscience?

And so, as they gather on the White House lawn, mingling with the last of the sightseers just emerging from their guided tour, there is a tremendous excitement, a sensation of being overswept by something larger than oneself, something divine and magnificent, beyond history even, roaring this way like the noon train. The people glance at each other, nervously, excitedly, smile at each other in recognition, their hearts beating in pride and anxiety to some half-heard drumroll, the clickety-clack of train wheels, galloping hooves — yes, it’s as though the frontier is doubling back on the center, bringing wildness and danger, the threat and tumult of the wide open spaces, disrupting system with luck, law with the wild card. As they shuffle about under the White House balcony, they feel like they’re back in Arizona with Wesley Ruggles, joining up with Roy Rogers’s posse in Bells of Rosarita , marching down western streets with Barbara Pepper and Patsy Montana to vote for Sheriff Autry, riding The Big Trail with John Wayne. Something great is happening. Yes, they all feel it. It’s like being with Sam Houston at the San Jacinto or with old Rough-and-Ready at Resaca de la Palma. Drinking buffalo blood with the free trappers along the Snake, fighting with Sam Brannon’s vigilantes, massacring Comanches at Plum Creek, Kiowas in Palo Duro Canyon, Pueblos in the mission church at Taos. A great day for America, something out of the past to revive the future, fired with risk and destiny. But then again, perhaps a terrible day…

It’s all up to Ike.

And what about the President? Is he still the man they say he is, or has he too been Phantomized like the rest of them, Truman and Acheson and Alger Hiss, all those people the Vice President himself has described as supporters and defenders of the Communist conspiracy? Senator Joe McCarthy has said: “Freedom-loving people throughout the world should applaud the action of Syngman Rhee!” Then why isn’t the President applauding it? Why does he want to give money to that spic Tito? On the other hand, can one finally trust two characters as dark and grizzly as Joe McCarthy and Dick Nixon? Do they give you the feeling of being around Buck. Jones or Sunset Carson? Hardly. The President is no mere Marine rowdy, after all, no Navy shyster — this is a foot soldier, a gunslinger, a tall, handsome, blue-eyed Westerner who looks a lot like Bill Boyd. Harry Carey. Randolph Scott in The Frontier Marshall . This is the man who said in Indianapolis: “No American can stand to one side while his country becomes the prey of fear-mongers, quack doctors, and barefaced looters! He doesn’t twiddle his thumbs while his garden is wrecked by a crowd of vandals and his house is invaded by a gang of robbers! He goes into action!” You can hear those swinging doors slap and flutter. “Neither a wise man nor a brave man,” he told them in Cincinnati, “lies down on the tracks of history to wait for the train of the future to run over him!”

He is the Man Who Won the War, but he is also a man of the people, born and reared on the lonesome prairie, a man who knows what it’s like to sleep out under the stars, listening to the howling of coyotes and the lowing of little dogies, a man who can ride and shoot and use his fists, a man who’s walked through acres of dead men and kept his chin up to fight another day. “We live,” he was saying just last week in Minneapolis, “not in an instant of peril but in an age of peril — a time of tension and of watchfulness,” and his answer to the Phantom is strength: “The hand of the aggressor is stayed by strength — and strength alone!” As a boy, he learned how to lick the bullies of Abilene, saw a shootout in the dusty streets of that cowtown, got a pistol in his own ribs in St. Louis. An old trapper-guide named Bob Davis, whiskery as Chill Wills, taught him how to shoot two ducks at once with a double-barreled shotgun, feather a flatboat paddle, win at poker, trap a musk-rat…

“Eh bub, how do ye catch a muskrat?”

“I don’t know, Bob…”

“Well, I’ll tell ye, ye go and look fer his slides, and then ye put yer trap on a short chain, see, so’s he’ll drown…”

“Gee, Bob…”

He packed up his one good suit and went off to West Point, where he got assigned to the Awkward Squad and Beast Barracks, clumsy as old Coop himself. He clowned around, got in trouble, gawky fun-loving Western boy amid fancypants Southern dudes. His injured knee was ruined in monkey drill, his grades fell off, he took to rolling Bull Durham and sowing wild oats for miles around, he got busted from sergeant to private and would have been dismissed had it not been for Major Poopy Bell’s timely intervention, not unlike the good works of Wallace Beery on his better days. He was getting as reckless as Doc Holliday and might have gone that handsome scoundrel’s route had they booted him out of there. He was already laying plans to go ride herd on the Argentine pampas, when his commission in the Infantry came through after all and he got sent out to join General Pershing and the Carranzistas on the Mexican border in Superchief Wilson’s “Punitive Expedition,” a little moral exercise to keep everybody busy until a real war came along.

Well, he was a full-grown man by then, but you wouldn’t know it, he was still the same old irrepressible Ike, a cocky shavetail with the proverbial wild hair up his ass, hungry for any kind of excitement and screw the consequences — but then, in ole San Antone, he met Mamie Doud, in those days still as saucy and sober a Belle as the West had seen since Blanche Sweet. No more crap games, no more restless whoring, no more barroom brawls, it was like the conversions of badguy Bill Hart as he first gazed on Eva Novak or Clara Williams or Bessie Love: “One who is evil,” the captions would read as the lovesick villain melted saintward, “looking for the first time on that which is good.” Not that either Bill Hart or Ike Eisenhower were ever really evil, of course — no, you might as well say that America itself was evil. What they both experienced was rather that exemplary transcendence, through action and beauty, of the strong man’s wild streak, which, in effect, is what the West is all about. On Valentine Day in 1916 Ike gave Mamie his class ring and a year later he got struck by lightning.