REP. GORDON SCHERER, OHIO: Among those two thousand ministers were, however, some just idealists and pacifists, were there not?
JOE ZACK KORNFEDER: I do not think so. I think that those two thousand were pretty close to the machine.
Demonstrators, moving past the White House this morning toward the Supreme Court, are actually carrying blown-up posters of the Son of God Himself, with the text:
REWARD
— for information leading to the apprehension of Jesus Christ…
Wanted — for Sedition, Criminal Anarchy, Vagrancy, and Conspiracy to overthrow the established Government…
Dresses poorly…has visionary ideas, associates with common working people, the unemployed and bums… Alien — believed to be a Jew… Red Beard, marks on hands and feet, the result of injuries inflicted by an angry mob led by respectable citizens and legal authorities.
“One of the most sacrilegious propaganda pieces ever used by the Communists!” scream the Early Warning Sentinels, still much agitated by their overnight dreams and eager for some kind of consummating encounter. “The Communists did not need the churches in past years; they had ample other channels of subversion,” G-man Philbrick warns, coughing up a little early-morning phlegm: “They do need the churches now; they will fight savagely for your church!”
And for anything else they can get: Uncle Sam has been whipping about his vast domains all morning, struggling against crooks, Commies, and crawfishing backsliders. He has just been called to Coney Island to investigate a report of a monster said to be tangled in the roller coaster there, but this turns out to be a metaphorical alarm. Not so phantasmal is the corpse of Steve Franse, former owner of the Howdy Club down in the Village, found brutally beaten, face down, on the rear floor of his automobile just south of Times Square, nor the cynical overnight robbery of the Muscular Dystrophy Association on Broadway: at least nine grand missing, only the Phantom could do such a thing. “Just thinkin’ about it,” quips Uncle Sam, “takes the starch right outa me!” And then a call comes in from further up the street: a thief has just jammed a pistol in the back of a Greystone Hotel secretary and seized a $3600 payroll. Uncle Sam draws himself up, gazing austerely in the direction of this newest outrage, his blue eyes glinting in the morning sunlight, his famous top hat cocked forward on his brow in manly defiance, shoulders squared, lean jaw rippling with suppressed fury, exhibiting all that “rugged strength and radiant beauty” so admired by the great American Prophetess Sarah Hale, ready as ever for his “humble toil and heavenward duty,” but clearly pretty pissed off at the same time. He looks like Grover Cleveland confronting the election returns of 1888.
“Do not delay!” the people cry, gathered apprehensively about their Superhero in front of the sacked Muscular Dystrophy offices, “the golden moments fly!”
Uncle Sam turns and gazes compassionately down upon all these common people whom the Lord and careless fucking have made so many of, and gripping his lapels like Abe Lincoln, declares “Yes, friends, the fack can’t be no longer disgised that a Krysis is onto us. But, hey, politics ain’t beanbag, folks, and repose is not the destiny of man! The ripest peach is often highest on the tree in the boisterous sea of liberty! Yea, the credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose map is marred with sweat and dust and bloody bung-balls, so shoot if you must this old gray head, for the manners of women are the surest criterion by which to fool all of the people some of the time! If destruction is to be our lot in order to insure domestic tranquillity, a new frontier, and a full dinner pail, we must ourselves be its author and finish the work we are in until every drop of blood shall be sunk in this sea of upturned faces!” It seems like no one can hold back from celebrating the Poets and Prophets this morning, least of all the American Superhero, who speaks by custom with the grandeur of a nation of runesmiths, from Davy Crockett to Longfellow, the Carnegies and Cranes to Hank Williams and the Whittier Poets: “The tree in which the sap is stagnant, my friends, is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration, so like that sweaty old nigger piss-fire Ira Aldridge used to say, ‘The bow is bent, the arrow flies, / The winged shaft of fate!’” And off he flashes — WHOOSH! — up Broadway to the north.
On his way, Uncle Sam stops off in Times Square to inspect the cleanup operations and reconstruction of the Death House set, finds the electricians despondent over the condition of the electric chair, uprooted and half-wrecked, lying in the gutter, draped with the broken Uncle Sam manikin with its Hitler moustache. Workmen are painting over a sign on the south face of the Hotel Claridge that says THE TRADITION OF ALL PAST GENERATIONS WEIGHS LIKE A NIGHTMARE UPON THE BRAIN OF THE LIVING. Uncle Sam strips the manikin of its wig, Uncle Sam suit, and moustache, and what he discovers under all that is not a replica of himself — that stern puritanical visage and lithe powerful frame — but a figure that looks like a cross between Bishop Fulton Sheen, Everett Dirksen, and Our Miss Brooks, and as sexless as Christine Jorgensen. Just a little lump down there, a shiny bulge, like a tumor, and smooth as Ike’s bald pate. Uncle Sam turns it over his knee as though to spank it, but actually to inscribe on it Henry Adams’s dictum: “Modern politics is, at bottom, a struggle not of men but of forces,” and he orders that the manikin, what’s left of it, be hung from the nearest flagpole as a kind of old-time Broadway parable on the nature of reality and illusion.
More of a problem is what to do about the electric chair: it’s really in bad shape. Wiring all ripped out, legs busted, bolts threaded, leather straps shredded, electrodes swiped. The auxiliary generator has been taken apart and the pieces carried off: nothing left but the concrete base and a protective wire fence. The rheostats and voltmeters are gone, too, and up on the stage, somebody has taken a sledgehammer to the switch panel. Warden Denno, Cecil B. De Mille, Executioner Francel, Electric Charlie Wilson, Rube Goldberg, and others gathered in the Square to put things back together again, are deeply distressed. These electric chairs are relatively rare, no chance to get a new one made this late in the game, and this one seems clearly beyond repair—
But not so! They watch, astounded, as with one fluid movement, Uncle Sam lifts from the gutter the wrecked chair, light as a matchbox for him, squeezes the splintered wood whole again, and bolts it down on the concrete part of the stage with hammer blows of his powerful fists! Wow! A commanding figure, Uncle Sam; crowds have gathered in the Square to ogle him, root for him, worship him even, discovering in their Superhero all that’s best in themselves. He now studies, tugging thoughtfully on his white goatee, the ripped-out wiring and sabotaged switch, and one is reminded of Tom Jefferson, rugged and tall, poring over his designs for the White House or struggling with his quirky polygraph machine, or perhaps of Handsome Frank Pierce, puzzling over the metaphysical obscurities in the books of his friend Nat Hawthorne. Just as, yesterday, as he fought back against the Phantom’s reckless spree, one saw glimpses of Old Hickory galloping up on Horseshoe Bend, T. R. throwing steers in the Badlands, Abe Lincoln splitting rails, or as now one seems to see George Washington crossing the Delaware or Franklin Roosevelt projecting the Four Freedoms in the simple way in which Uncle Sam instructs the workmen on the repair of the electrical system and sends them off to get the parts they need from Pitt Machine Products Company Incorporated, over by the synagogue on East Houston Street.