“Very well,” says Uncle Sam, and he picks up Betty Crocker’s fallen dentures and bites Manny in the nose with them.
Bloch screams and falls from the stage. “What kind of animals am I dealing with?” he rages. “The actions of the Government of the United States in this case reveal to the entire world that the people who are running the Government are much more barbaric than the Nazis when they had power in Germany! I feel ashamed that I am an American today!”
The Square is rocked with hooting and hissing: the people are finding their way back now, getting the feel of things again. “I place the murder of the Rosenbergs at the door of President Eisenhower, Attorney General Brownell, and J. Edgar Hoover!” shrieks Bloch insanely, and the Union County American Legion in hasty assembly demands his disbarment. Bloch is dragged away, his new suit rumpled and his career in ruins, sobbing huskily: “Please tell them I did the best I could for them! Tell them I respect and admire them! Tell them I love them…!”
But his words are drowned out by boos, his own histrionics, and sudden laughter, for just as Manny is being stuffed into the Whale’s belly, somebody else — looking as miserable as an abused dog in his crushed homburg and dirty socks — is being led out like Jonah by a stiff-backed old lady in prim rimless specs! Who is it? Smokey Bear? The Atomic Bum? No, it’s Vice President Richard (Dick) Nixon and his late great Grandma Milhous!
“Everybody’s tryin’ ta git inta da act!” snorts Uncle Sam, hands on hips, winking down over his nose at the old woman. “Awright, Granny, send that onregenerit bluebellied tatereater up here where I can take a swat at him with the flat side a the dictates a reason and justice should it come to the raskil’s imperdint mind to discomboberate us with any more surjestshuns, prayers, or other dierbolical sass!” The old lady returns Uncle Sam’s wink and gives the Vice President a whacking high-buttoned boot in his henchbone, sending him flapping forward through the untangling pack-up like a clipped goose trying to take flight. People add their own toes to his general forward endeavor, holding their noses and hollering taunts at him like “Little Dick, he was so quick,” and
“Oh you dirty beggar,
Oh you dirty crumb!
Ain’t you ashamed
To show your dirty bum!”
Uncle Sam watches these procedures with a rueful smile, then turns his attention to his kayoed Mistress of Ceremonies, Betty Crocker. He stuffs the false teeth back into her soft gaping jaws and revives her with a splash of six fluid ounces of Tennessee sour mash, observing as he throws that the old girl has taken quite a beating and is probably going to need a face lift once all this is over. Betty rears up, shakes her head, grabs up her rolling pin, smoothes down her skirt, wipes off her jowls with a swipe of her sleeve, snaps her choppers once just to test her grip on them, and then proceeds to lay into every dubious character in sight — not even the bureaucrats are safe, and some Congressmen are seen diving under their chairs. “Hoo-hah!” laughs Uncle Sam, watching her swing away. “I wish the Phantom could see that!”
He cracks his bullwhip over Betty’s head, snatching a couple dozen silver stars off the shirts of patrolmen and state troopers, then a couple dozen more, converts the whip into a Louisville Slugger and, tossing the badges up in the air, swats them out into the night sky (they seem to stick up there and glitter like something out of a fabulous movie they’ve all seen but can’t quite remember. Graceful is his form, and slender, and his eyes are deep and tender, as with a smile that is childlike and bland, he next turns the whip/bat into a Remington and commences to shoot the stars all down again, knocking them off like clay pigeons—crack! pop! — and splattering the heavens with glittering sprays of light like bombs bursting in air! The Singing Saints, their Mormon decorum recovered, zip up and step forward to accompany Uncle Sam’s act with their own rendition of “Land of Hope and Glory,” but before they can even get as far as the “wider still and wider shall,” Uncle Sam — glancing anxiously up at the clock, whose hands have been sliding inexorably up toward eight o’clock — cuts them off: “Whoa thar, fella patriots! Enough a this high-minded bullshit, it is rather for us to be here deddycated to the great task remainin’ before us — thunder is good, thunder is impressive, but it is lightnin’ what does the work — or as old Ben would say, when there’s a great heat on the land in a partickyular region and a passel a clouds comes by full of electrical fire — LOOK OUT BELOW! Yea, it is nigh onto Zero Hour, friends and neighbors! We got a pair of misdemeanin’ poachers back there at the settin’-off end of the Last Mile who gotta take their farewell trip to that promised land, gotta pay, as we say, the debt of nature, slip the cable and cock up their toes — and toot sweet! So an end to this foolish hurrahin’, the tea party’s over! It is time to make room on earth for a little warmth, a little zap of love’s bestowin:’ then nighty-night to them scallywags, cuz it’s rubber tire buggy, rubber tire hack, they gotta walk that lonesome valley, and they ain’t a—“
Suddenly, there is a sharp whirr-CLICK!, like gears meshing toward some final connection, and then — BONG! BONG! BONG…! — all the clocks in New York City, all the clocks in the nation, in the world, strike the fateful hour, making people gasp and bite their fingernails: it is eight o’clock! From the belly of the Whale comes a woman’s scream: “In memory of the Rosenbergs!”—and the Whale begins to rumble and tremble as though with a fearsome indigestion, an indigestion that sounds like a lot of hysterical amateurs trying to sing “Go Down, Moses!” The people shrink back—
“Hey, no flinchin’ out there!” booms Uncle Sam. “Soft-heartedness, in times like these, shows sof’ness in the upper story!” He snaps his finger and jabs it at Police Commissioner Monaghan, and George sends his Deputy Patrick Kirley scrambling in to the Whale like a gun-toting antacid to quiet things down in there: one belch and it’s over. “Come on, you doddrabited whey faced no-good varmints! Now is the hour! With firmness in the right as God gives us to see to the right, we are gonna drop the handkerchief and light a candle of understandin’ in these traitors’ hearts which shall not be put out till they’ve sizzled like a wet cat flung into a kittil of bilin’ fat! Huu-u-u WEE! Whilst the stars and stirrups floats in the breezus whar, whar in the name a Jeezus is that miserbul termatis-nosed skaley-heeled rapscallious skonk who will not, with pomp and parade, with shows, games, sports, guns, bells, bonfires, and skeer-provokin’ loomynations, lay hold — from one end a this continent t’ uther — the hangin’ rope!? EH?? Do you hear me, o ye that love mankind? It is time, I say, to loose the fateful lightnin to reach a fiery rod, and on Death’s fearful forehead write the autygraph a God so’s any squinty-eyed inimy can read it without his spectacles! So let the burn begin! All I got, and all that I yam, and all that I hope, in this life, I’m now ready to stake on it!” He takes a final deep puff on his corncob pipe and — precisely at one minute after the hour — produces his zinger: a huge smoke ring that rises slowly, scaling the cloudy summits of the Times Tower, hovers momentarily up there over its tip, then sinks down over it, unrolling like a condom — he blows at it and it bursts into a spectacular fireworks display, in the center of which, halfway up the tower, is the blazing message: