Public Burning by Robert Coover Page A

BUSINESS! BRING THIS CONFERENCE TO A CLOSE!, and handed it to Jim. Jim added in PLEASE and AS SOON AS POSSIBLE, passed it on to the General, who was just saying: “Of course we shouldn’t give that text to a Communist teacher and say, Now. Take your students off, and try to lead them astray any more than you would give them, let us say Al Capone’s book on how to be a crook!” Nobody knew any longer what text he was talking about.
    When the news conference was over and we’d cleared everybody out of there, Herb sprang the news.
    The President drew himself up—a tall man, after all, and strong—in fact, his countenance was already changing—and with jaw set and fists clenched, yet with perfect composure, perfect equanimity, said simply:
    â€œFriends, this is a job for Uncle Sam!”

2 .
    A Rash of Evil Doings
    A United States Supreme Court Justice—himself a controversial appointee from the Era of Compromise—thwarts the long-planned execution of the atom spies, disappears.
    Two ore tankers go aground in the mud of St. Clair, Canada.
    A coffee plot is uncovered in Brazil.
    Russian tanks tool up, roll toward East Berlin.
    From North Korea come horrific images of brainwashed GIs staring vapidly and twitching like zombies, while in the South, the port of the capital is bombed and underground rumors abound of trouble afoot, strange stirrings in the prisoner compounds.
    In Times Square, the “c” has vanished from the SILENCE sign tacked up over the stage door of the execution chamber mock-up, and the letters are scrambled to spell SENILE , a cross-eyed Uncle Sam chalked crudely on the wall above it. The electrical sign reading AMERICA THE HOPE OF THE WORLD has been altered to AMERICA THE DOPE OF THE WORLD , and now, metamorphosing a letter at a time right before the eyes of astonished passersby, becomes:
    AMERICA THE ROPE OF THE WORLD
AMERICA THE RAPE OF THE WORLD
    What’s happening?!?
    The men of Local 333 of the United Marine Division of the International Longshoreman’s Association strike the two boats that take sight-seers out to Bedloe’s Island, throwing up what The New York Times calls “an iron curtain around the Statue of Liberty!”
    Judge Irving Kaufman, now guarded day and night by FBI in mufti and twelve boys in blue at his Park Avenue home, receives two bomb threats against his life, and total strangers send him telegrams: “May your children become orphans!”
    British Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden, the heir-designate to Prime Minister Churchill, is struck down in London, taken to the hospital for a gall bladder operation, and fire breaks out in the key U.S. military port of Whittier, Alaska.
    AMERICA THE RAKE OF THE WORLD
AMERICA THE FAKE OF THE WORLD
    King Sihanouk of Cambodia, having fled to Thailand, takes encouragement from the sudden dissolution and demands from the French full independence for Cambodia. The French will to stand firm falters.
    The Phantomized Guatemalan regime seizes lands belonging to Uncle Sam’s United Fruit Company, redistributes them to greedy and incompetent peasants.
    Francis Cardinal Spellman’s tireless epistolary efforts to the contrary notwithstanding, Italy, without a government, slips to the left, just as the body of a twenty-year-old student in the Passionists’ seminary at Caravete is found in the woods, skull smashed by a stone. There have been fires in the convent library, two watchdogs have been poisoned, and all the Passionist brothers and pupils found potassium cyanide in their morning espresso one morning of late. The village’s small community of newly-converted Protestants is suspected; anti-American feeling grows apace.
    AMERICA THE FATE OF THE WORLD
AMERICA THE HATE OF THE WORLD
    Something passes like a cold unseasonal wind through Times Square, tipping over police barricades, blowing holes in the set, and stripping away all the white and blue bunting in the streets,