Public Burning Read Free Page B

Trujillo (“an illustrious ruler,” the young Vice President Richard Nixon has called him) sends a priest as delegate to the United Nations, explaining that his country intends to use “the arms of faith and Christian charity to combat the poisonous Communist doctrine in the international organization,” and on television the Reverend Billy Graham backs him up: “Communism is a fanatical religion,” he declares, “a great sinister anti-Christian movement masterminded by Satan, that has declared war upon the Christian God! Only as millions of Americans turn to Jesus Christ can the nation be spared the onslaught of a demon-possessed Communism!” Yes, Daniel Webster expressed it long ago: “Whatever makes men good Christians, makes them good citizens!” A survey by the Catholic Digest shows that 89 percent of all Americans, including Jews, believe in the Blessed Trinity, and 99 percent believe in God—get rid of that one percent, it’s said, and the Phantom’s had it!
    Not even the innermost precincts of the Phantomized world have been immune. In the Soviet Union Josef Stalin’s heart “has stopped beating,” and his presumptive heirs—Beria, Molotov, Malenkov, and Khrushchev—are said to be at each other’s throats. As though in sympathy, Czech Puppet Klement Gottwald has “died of a cold,” and strikes and riots have crippled the country. And now, overnight, with the Rosenberg executions just a day away, the big breakthrough comes: the East Germans, who until now have been fleeing Westward at the rate of nearly fifty thousand a month, suddenly stop, as though on cue, turn back, and confront their masters…
    barehanded they gathered in the grey
morning rain—masons in white
carpenters in black day laborers
and factory hands in hobnailed
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â boots and raveled suits
    in mumbling columns that suggested
disconnected centipede legs groping
for a body they streamed from all
directions toward the center where
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â the communist proconsuls rule
    shopkeepers clanged down shutters peered
through the slits children on bicycles
circled in front trucks twisted through
the crowd nose to tail like a team
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â of prodding sheep dogs
    an east german perched shakily
on an idle cement mixer
pointed with a sneer at a tall vopo
“hello long one!” he cried “your
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â pants are open!”
    anger scudded in like a rain cloud
“freedom” they chanted thousands
began chanting the forbidden anthem
deutschland deutschland über alles
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â  über alles in der welt!
    on both sides of the iron curtain
the world heard with a thrill
of east berlin’s
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â rebellion in the rain…
    â€œThe Rebellion in the Rain”: no wonder T IME’S been inspired! This uprising in Berlin, which soon spreads to Magdeburg, Jena, Chemnitz, Rathenow, Leipzig, Halle—in Brandenburg, workers maul the Red D.A. to death on top of a police car and rip the ear off a “people’s judge,” while Czechs are pissing in Pilsen on portraits of dead Puppet Gottwald—is Uncle Sam’s crowning touch to over two years of stagecraft, prayer, and arm-to-arm Injun rassling with the Phantom’s ubiquitous agents.
    But it has not always been easy, not even for America’s mighty Superhero. The tag end of the 1940s, which began so well, has seen the Red Tide swallow up half of Europe, sweep through Cathay and threaten all of South Asia, batter at the shores of Africa, Byzantium, and Latin America.
    How did it happen?
    The score in the middle of the decade is 1,625,000,000 people for Uncle Sam, only 180,000,000 for the Phantom, and most of them in declining