Public Burning (2 page)

Not that Americans are superstitious, of course. How could they be, citizens of this, the most rational nation (under God) on earth? They need no omens to pull a switch, turn a buck, or change the world, for these are the elected sons and daughters of Uncle Sam, né Sam Slick, that wily Yankee Peddler who, much like that ballsy Greek girl of long ago, popped virgin-born and fully constituted from the shattered seed-poll of the very Enlightenment—“slick,” as the Evangels put it, “as a snake out of a black skin!” Young Sam, “lank as a leafless elm,” already chin-whiskered and plug-hatted and all rigged out in his long-tailed blue and his striped pantaloons, his pockets stuffed with pitches, patents, and pyrotechnics, burst upon the withering Old World like a Fourth of July skyrocket, snorting and neighing like a wild horse: “Who—Whoo—
Whoop!
Who'll come gouge with me? Who'll come bite with me? Rowff—Yough—Snort—YAHOO! In the name of the great Jehovah and the Continental Congress, I have passed the Rubicon—swim or sink, live or die, survive or perish, I'm in fer a fight, I'll go my death on a fight, and with a firm reliance on the pertection of divine protestants, a fight I must have, or else I'll have to be salted down to save me from spilin'! You hear me over thar, you washed-up varmints? This is the hope of the world talkin' to you! I am Sam Slick the Yankee Peddler—I can ride on a flash of lightnin', catch a thunderbolt in my fist, swaller niggers whole, raw or cooked, slip without a scratch down a honey locust, whup my weight in wildcats and redcoats, squeeze blood out of a turnip and cold cash out of a parson, and out-inscrutabullize the heathen Chinee—so whar's that Johnny Bull to stomp his hoof or quiver his hindquarters at
my
Proklymation? Whoo-
oop!
we love our cuppa tea, boys, but we love our freedom more, so bow yore necks and spread, you Hottentots, it is vain to extenuate the matter, the kingdom of sorrow's a-comin' and the Child of Calamity with her, and may Great Britain rue the day her hostile bands come hither! Lo, I say unto you, I have put a crimp in a cat-a· mount with my bare hands, hugged a cinnamon b'ar to death, and made a grizzly sing ‘Jesus, Lover of My Soul' in a painful duet with his own arsehole—and
I have not yet begun to fight!
Yippee! I'm wild and woolly and fulla fleas, ain't never been curried below the knees, so if you wish to avoid foreign collision you had better abandon the ocean, women and children first! For we hold these truths to be self-evident: that God helps them what helps themselves, it's a mere matter of marchin'; that idleness is emptiness and he who lives on hope will die with his foot in his mouth; that no nation was ever ruint by trade; and that nothin' is sartin but death, taxes, God's glowin' Covenant, enlightened self-interest, certain unalienated rights, and woods, woods, woods, as far as the world extends!”

The American Autolycus, they called him in the Gospels, referring to his cunning powers of conjuration, transmutation, and magical consumption (he can play the shell game, not with a mere pea, but with whole tin mines, forests, oil fields, mountain ranges, and just before Thanksgiving this past year made an entire island disappear!), and it's been said that when he steps across the continent and sits down on Pike's Peak, and snorts in his handkerchief of red, white, and blue, the earth quakes and monarchs tremble on their thrones….

“Oh, we must fight! I repeat it, sir, I am feelin' awesome wolfy about the head and shoulders and I must have a fight, those who expects to reap the blessings of freedom must, like men, undergo the fatigue of twistin' noses and scrougin' eyeballs and rib-brakin' and massacreein'! So carry the flag, you sons a Liberty, hang on to yer balls and keep step to the music of the Union, our brethren are already in the field, why stand we here idle? Time is money! No pent-up Utica contracts our powers, but the whole boundless continent is ours, it's as much a law of nature as that the Mississippi should flow to the sea or that trade follers the flag!
Fear
is the fundament of most guvvamints, so let's get the boot in, boys, and listen to 'em scream, let us anny-mate and encourage each other—
whoo-PEE!
—and show the whole world that a Freeman, contendin' for Liberty on his own ground, can out-run, out-dance, out-jump, chaw more tobacky and spit less, out-drink, out-holler, out-finagle and out-lick any yaller, brown, red, black, or white thing in the shape of human that's ever set his unfortunate kickers on Yankee soil! It is our manifest dust-in-yer-eye to overspread the continent allotted by Providence for the free development of our yearly multiplyin' millions, so damn the torpedoes and full steam ahead, fellow ripstavers, we cannot escape history! Boliterate 'em we must, for our cause it is just what the doctor ordered, logic is logic, that's all I say, and remember, if you will not hear Reason, she will surely rap yore knuckles! I tell you, we want
elbow-room
—the continent—the
whole
continent—and nothin'
but
the continent! And—by gum!—we will
have
it!”

And thus it was that the mighty Sam Slick, star-spangled Superhero and knuckle-rapping Yankee Peddler, lit upon the Western World in all his rugged strength and radiant beauty, expounding what the Disciple Rufus Choate called “the glittering and sounding generalities of natural right which make up the Declaration of Independence,” sharpening his wits on the hard flint of war and property speculation, and honing his first principles by skinning the savages and backwoods scavengers and picking the pockets of the thieving princes of Europe. He's been committed ever since to propagating the Doctrine of Self-Determination and Free Will and bringing the Light of Reason to the benighted and superstitious nations of the earth, still groping clumsily out of the Dark Ages like breech births from a mother turned to stone, so neither he nor his kith can be easily overawed by this or that putative portent.

Nevertheless, as General George Washington himself—who as the Primordial Incarnation had led the nation in its escape from what he called “a gloomy age of ignorance and superstition”—once put it: “No people can be bound to acknowledge and adore the invisible hand which conducts the affairs of men more than the people of the United States. Every step, by which they have advanced to the character of an independent nation, seems to have been distinguished by some token of providential agency!” This was true then, it is true now. Throughout the solemn unfolding of the American miracle, men have noticed this remarkable phenomenon: what at the moment seems to be nothing more than the random rise and fall of men and ideas, false starts and sudden brainstorms, erratic bursts of passion and apathy, brief setbacks and partial victories, is later discovered to be—in the light of America's gradual unveiling as the New Athens, New Rome, and New Jerusalem all in one—a necessary and inevitable sequence of interlocking events, a divine code, as it were, bringing the Glad Tidings of America's election, and fulfilling the oracles of every tout from John the Seer and Nostradamus to Joseph and Adam Smith. The American Prophet S. D. Baldwin summed it up in a nutshell in the title of his 1854 classic:
Armageddon: or the Overthrow of Romanism and Monarchy; the Existence of the United States Foretold in the Bible, Its Future Greatness; Invasion by Allied Europe; Annihilation of Monarchy; Expansion into the Millennial Republic, and Its Dominion over the Whole World
. All Incarnations of Uncle Sam have noticed this and been humbled by it, and Dwight Eisenhower, the newest, is no exception. Speaking in Abilene just last fall, the Man of Destiny revealed his own brush with Illuminating Grace: “This day eight years ago, I made the most agonizing decision of my life. I had to decide to postpone by at least twenty-four hours the most formidable array of fighting ships and of fighting men that was ever launched across the sea against a hostile shore. The consequences of that decision at that moment could not have been foreseen by anyone. If there were nothing else in my life to prove the existence of an almighty and merciful God, the events of the next twenty-four hours did it…. The greatest break in a terrible outlay of weather occurred the next day and allowed that great invasion to proceed, with losses far below those we had anticipated!” No, friends, America has not arisen:
it has been called forth!
It's like the Divine Hawthorne once said: “There is a fatality, a feeling so irresistible and inevitable that it has the force of doom…!”

Something like that force seems to have been at work all over the world these past few weeks: everything tumbling irresistibly into place. Not without a bit of push and shove from Uncle Sam, of course: red-and-white striped hat cocked jauntily, blue cutaway coattails fluttering behind him like a wartorn battle flag, he's been advancing on all fronts, sweeping away the hostile shadows of the world, stemming the Red Tide, producing miracles with gamma globulin, chlorophyll, and laminated iron duck underpants for American Marines to keep their balls safe from flying mortar fragments, securing the resources of poor nations from the Phantom's greed, sprinkling the spirit of truth and plutocracy on the world like a purifying fallout. But some days it seems to work and some it doesn't, and right now it's working. That force. He has overseen the patient extermination by saturation bombing of a thousand Mau Mau terrorists, a movement described by the British Colonial Secretary as “perverted nationalism and a sort of nostalgia for barbarism,” and then back home has flown out to that wide open country that he loves, and crying out, “
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!
”, has struck the match that set off the most powerful A-bomb of all time: a frame house ten miles away collapses, acres of Joshua trees and sagebrush burst into flames, the flash is observed a thousand miles away in Canada and Mexico, and residents of Southern California feel the shock twenty minutes after the blast. Atomic Energy Commissioner Gordon Dean, admiring the 40,000-foot-high cloud of radioactive dust, reflects on the infancy of Hiroshima's “Little Boy” and says that this year will see Atomic Power come of age. In Korea Uncle Sam has broken the intransigence of the Reds, bringing them to the conference table if not to their knees, while further down the coast pro-French candidates have won all localities except Hanoi in the first real democratic election those little yellow people of Indochina have ever known. Not far away, the fifth year of the Red War in Malaya ends symbolically with the extermination of five guerrillas, British High Commissioner General Sir Gerald Templer expressing “satisfaction” over the kill and declaring: “The struggle goes on and it will go on until we have eliminated all traces of militant Communism from this country!”

No less a struggle is being waged in America. Police juvenile officers warn teen-age clubs in Columbus, Ohio, to be suspicious of “any new member of a group whose background is not an open book,” and in Birmingham, Alabama, the city fathers push through an ordinance banishing from the city “anyone caught talking to a Communist in a ‘non-public place,' or anyone who passed out literature that could be traced, even remotely, to a Communist hand.” The home of the State Secretary of the Communist Party in Houston, Texas, is stoned, and outside a plant in Los Angeles, surprised workers get the piss beat out of them by a gang of aroused patriots calling themselves “Crusade Against Communism.” There's been an abortive effort to muzzle Senator Joe McCarthy, but the Fighting Marine has hit back, seeing to it that the worst of his enemies are kicked out of Congress by the people and, if possible, ruined for life, and now his metaphors grip the national imagination utterly. Rare is that politician who fails to pay at least passing homage to the “crimson clique,” “left-wing bleeding hearts of the press,” “front men for traitors,” and “stained with the blood of our boys in Korea.” Joe launches a whole series of new investigations into heresy in high places, becoming one of the most celebrated orators in the nation. Some people believe he might even be the secret Incarnation of Uncle Sam—a heresy in itself perhaps, but one long tolerated in the democratic tradition. He is hailed by J. Edgar Hoover for his “Americanism,” cheered on by his colleagues, and awarded a “National Americanism Award” by the Marine Corps League for his heroic actions in “rousing the nation to the menace of bad security risks in our government.” The American Civil Liberties Union reports that twenty-six of the forty-eight states now have laws designed to bar Reds from running for public office, twenty-eight have laws denying them state or local civil-service jobs, thirty-two require loyalty oaths from their teachers, and across the country, suspected Comsymps are prevented from living in federally aided low-income housing projects, getting passports, holding office in labor unions, or in some states, drawing unemployment compensation. Congressman James Van Zandt of Pennsylvania asks for swift deportation to the Soviet Union of all alien Communists and fellow travelers, in or out of government. Private travel into Phantom-land is simultaneously banned and infiltration from abroad is blocked, J. Edgar Hoover's budget is increased, and Senator Harley Kilgore of West Virginia drafts a bill to “grant the FBI war emergency powers to throw all Communists into concentration camps!”

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 T
IME
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!