Public Burning (26 page)

We live in a time of peril.

This is one of those times in the affairs of nations

when the gravest choices must be made—a moment

when man's power to achieve good or to inflict evil

surpasses the brightest hopes and the sharpest fears

of all ages.

The worst to be feared

and the best to be expected can be simply stated:

the worst is atomic war…the best:

a life of perpetual fear and tension.

We must act from a lesson learned at terrible cost:

to serve our reasoned hope for the best,

we must be ready steadfastly to meet the worst.

The world, at least, need be divided no longer

in its clear knowledge of who has condemned

humankind to this fate—we all know something

of the long record of deliberately planned Communist aggression!

It has been coldly calculated by the Soviet leaders,

for by their military threat they have hoped

to force upon America and the free world

an unbearable security burden leading to

economic disaster!

They have plainly said

that free people cannot preserve their way of life

and at the same time provide enormous military establishments

—Communist guns, in this sense,

have been aiming at an economic target

no less than a military target: prolonged inflation

could be as destructive of a truly free economy

as could a chemical attack against an army in the field!

It is, friends, a spiritual struggle.

And at such a time in history, we who are free

must proclaim anew our faith; we are called as a people

to give testimony in the sight of the world

to our faith that the future shall belong to the free!

History does not long entrust

the care of freedom to the weak or the timid—

we must be ready to dare all for our country!

Human liberty and national liberty

must survive against Communist aggression

which tramples on human dignity;

upon all our peoples and nations

there rests a responsibility to serve worthily

the faith we hold and the freedom we cherish

—which means essentially a free economy.

I don't like the word “compulsory”;

I am against the word “socialized”;

everything about such words seems to me

to be a step toward the thing

that we are spending so many billions to prevent—

the overwhelming of this country by any force,

power, or idea that leads us to forsake

our traditional system of free enterprise.

Private investment has been the major stimulus

for economic development throughout this hemisphere;

this is the true way of the Americas—the free way—

by which people are bound together for the common good.

But to be free and stay free,

we must be strong—and we must stay strong!

It is necessary

that we earnestly
seek out and uproot

any traces of Communism at any place

where it can affect our national life,

that all of us by our combined dedication and devotion

may merit the great blessings

that the Almighty has brought to this land of ours!

It is up to every American to realize

that he has a definite personal responsibility

in the protection of these resources—they belong

to the people who have been created in His image:

they must, at any cost, remain armed, strong,

and ready for the risk of war!

In that way only, can we permanently aspire

to remain a free, independent, and powerful people,

living humbly under our God—

in the final choice, a soldier's pack

is not so heavy a burden as a prisoner's chains.

Security must spring

from the hearts and minds of free men—

our defense, our only defense,

is in our own spirit and our own will!

If we ponder this a moment,

we all know that this really means the defense

of those spiritual values and moral ideals

cherished by generations of Americans

—the true treasure of our people;

this treasure of the spirit

must be defended above all

with weapons of the spirit:

our patriotism,

our devotion,

our readiness to sacrifice.

Whatever America hopes to bring to pass in the world

must first come to pass in the heart of America;

the true way to uproot Communism in this country

is to understand what freedom means,

and thus develop such an impregnable wall

that no thought of Communism can enter;

and we must seek

in our churches,

our schools,

our homes and

our daily lives,

the clearness of mind and strongness of heart

to guard the chance to live in freedom.

We have begun in our grasp

of that basis of understanding,

which is that all free government is firmly founded

in a deeply felt religious faith;

if we understand, then we won't have Communism.

That, it seems to me,

is the prayer that all of us have today:

that we shall remain free, never to be proven guilty

of the one capital offense against freedom,

a lack of staunch faith.

God bless you
.

PART TWO: FRIDAY MORNING

8
.

What a Glorious Morning for America!

reads the sign being erected on the Roof of the Astor Hotel overlooking Times Square. The sun is rising, sending its prophylactic shafts deep into the city canyons, dispersing not only the Phantom and all his legions, but all thought of them as well. Although the Supreme Court will not reconvene for hours, there is already, with the first hazy glimmer of sunlight, a new certainty in the air, a confidence, bookies refuse to take more bets, the electrocutions seem a sure thing, preparations resume. Traffic is once more blocked off, carpenters and electricians busy themselves about the sabotaged stage, the Phantom's filthy litter is swept away by Sanitation Department crews. There is a resurgence of pride, even the taxi drivers leave off their complaints as traffic snarls around the edges. The temperature is already in the seventies and rising, the humidity is falling, it's going to be a beautiful day. It feels good to wake up, get out on the streets.

Except for the Sanitation crews maybe—the Phantom has laid a formidable task on them this morning. The stage is wrecked, the props lie smashed and strewn for blocks around, wires have been ripped out and knotted, the bunting hangs in shreds, and the litter of pornography and propaganda is worse than a midwinter snowfall. Sanitation is no small task in New York City any day of the year: there are about 6000 miles of streets to clean, flush, and service, with more than 24,000 tons of refuse to collect and dispose of every single day, over 12,000,000 pigeon bowel movements to cope with, 5000 tons of daily dogshit, so the cleanup crews are hardly fans of the leafletting and wreckage-strewing Phantom. Given the arduous mission, they are joined in Times Square this morning by volunteer teams from the Fire Department and the New York City Transit Authority, as well as a good many of the city's 19,000 cops and most of its 200,000 pigeons.

The area's capacity to absorb these multitudes is but one of its many and renowned magical properties. It is actually
home
for over 50,000 people, and thousands more of transients from all classes sleep here—now stirring, scratching, yawning, blinking out on all this bright activity, watching tow trucks haul away parked cars, overalled workers sweep up the gutter flyers and scrape the clemency snipes off the
NO
PARKING
signs and hooded traffic lights, scrub the graffiti off the tall chalk-white statues on the Bond clothing store. Some 357,750 commuters begin to pour into the center, soon to be followed by tens of thousands of shoppers, sharks, and eager sightseers.

Including the previous Incarnation and his First Lady: Harry and Bess Truman, now what the press calls just another couple of ordinary American tourists, have arisen before dawn this morning back home in Independence, Missouri, birthplace of the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints and likely site of the New Jerusalem, and have set out in a brand-new automobile to come to the big city to see the show and visit their daughter Margaret. Just what Harry thinks about these ceremonies he hasn't said, but it was his own Attorney General who pushed for them in the first place, and when Harry had his own chance to act on a clemency appeal from the Rosenbergs last January, he simply passed it on, without comment, to his successor, granting amnesty and full pardon instead to his old crony J. Parnell Thomas, the HUAC Early Warning Sentinel who'd been jailed for taking salary kickbacks from his office staff. Some say he passed the buck on the Rosenberg appeal just to complicate the new President's life. Others that it was an act of modesty and generosity, typical of Harry Truman: let the new man have the headlines. Many, though, believe he'd simply lost touch with Uncle Sam by then and didn't want to take any chances.

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?