Public Burning Read Free

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