AMERICA THE NITE OF THE WORLD
it was a quiet rainy night in
prisoner of war camp number nine
under the brow of a green hill in
pusan
at 2:30 a.m.
pfc willie buhan was reading
a book in the “maximum security”
compound (for prisoners who had broken
minor rules)
he wasn’t
worried much though vaguely aware
that his two rok buddies on guard
duty had been acting sort of
“funny”
the next thing
he knew he was looking down
the barrels of two carbines
one garand rifle and one pistol
all in the hands of
rok guards…
They’re gone: some twenty-five thousand of them. Dashing out into open fields, remote villages, the alleyways of Pusan: Rhee, the obstreperous old bastard, has pulled the straw mat out from under Uncle Sam’s feet and let his prisoners go.
By Thursday, peace hopes have been dashed in Korea, the East German freedom fighters have been crushed, and all preparations for the great atom-spy pageant have been thrown into utter confusion. The wires have been pulled on the electric chair and a manikin has been strapped into the seat, dressed up to look like Uncle Sam with a Hitler moustache. Bombastic handbills, instruction sheets for clemency vigils, tattered bunting, and dirty pictures showing President Eisenhower and all his Cabinet in compromising positions litter the streets.
The fire in Alaska is quenched at last, after millions of dollars of damage to military installations and supplies, but simultaneously the new $3,000,000 U.S. Embassy in Rio de Janeiro bursts into flames. Smaller fires break out in a random pattern across New York City — on Fourth Avenue, West Thirteenth, Eldridge, and East Forty-ninth in Manhattan, Fulton and West Eighth in Brooklyn — and during a demonstration at Fort Dix, a mortar shell explodes, injuring sixteen American GIs and killing Private Frank X. Zirnheld, 20, of Buffalo. Adlai Stevenson travels all the way to Turkey to praise the Turkish troops fighting in Korea, but his words are drowned out by earthquakes that rock Adrianople; he sighs, remarks on his usual luck, and goes for a hopeful swim in the Bosporus.
Three Israelis are slain by a Jordanian patrol, three Home Guards by terrorists in Malaya. The Red Chinese crack down on the last of the Roman Catholic missions, arresting eleven priests in Shanghai, ten in Tientsin, more in Canton, as “well-known spies.” Indonesian terrorists kill 60 villagers and burn 800 homes in a raid on 4 villages south of Jakarta, leaving 3500 homeless. U.S. casualties in Korea shoot up to 136,029, while at home 305 new polio cases are reported for the week, bringing the year’s total to 3124. These numbers rattle through the streets like apocalyptic codes, signals of some numerological conundrum, resolving itself toward catastrophe. Broadway bookies now give the Rosenbergs a fifty-fifty chance of survival, which is better than they’re giving the best horse running that day. The local boatmen, holding out for another thirty-five cents, still refuse to take pilgrims over to Miss Liberty on Bedloe’s Island. Clemency floats containing photographic blow-ups of new documents brazenly stolen from the office of the Green-glasses’ lawyer, purporting to prove that major prosecution witnesses lied against the Rosenbergs, roll into Times Square. Enraged loyalists try to smash up the floats and fights ensue. AMERICA THE BITE OF THE WORLD, the sign reads. BILE. PILE. PULE. PUKE. JUKE. What kind of game IS this?
AMERICA THE JOKE OF THE WORLD!
There seems no stopping the Phantom in his blasphemy. It’s almost as if he has been playing dead all this time, like those inscrutable Japs used to do in all the World War II movies, lying in ambush, flat out, with a pile of hand grenades tucked under their yellow bellies. It’s not even clear who Uncle Sam’s friends are. The French, facing the most serious crisis in the dismal history of the Fourth Republic, are losing their nerve in Indochina, and everybody from President Auriol on down is protesting the Rosenberg executions. So are the Scandinavians, and the Pope is not exactly standing up and cheering for the Sons of Light. Churchill has talked about withdrawing British troops from Korea, where only 40,000 outside forces now support the 460,000 ROKs and 250,000 American GIs in this so-called United Nations action as it is. “United Nations, my ass!” Uncle Sam is heard to mutter, trying to find a toehold along Finger Ridge. “Hal-lucy-nations, more like it! In-subordy-nations!” India and Switzerland actually threaten to quit the commission to supervise repatriation of war prisoners in Korea, confirming Uncle Sam’s mistrust of “neutralism,” and there are suggestions — even at home in the Americas! — that Red China be admitted to the United Nations. TIME say: “SHADOW OF THE RED DRAGON!”
Not only are the North Korean hostages out of the prison camps and living like the golden boys of Pusan, heroes of the local dongs, but women and children are out in the streets, screaming insults at the Americans for failing to unify the nation, and mutilated veterans are staging a very unappealing lie-down strike on Pusan’s main drag. Syngman Rhee smiles at Uncle Sam’s discomfiture. Says a soldier-friend of TIME: “We came over here to help him, and now he’s kicked us in the face.”
It’s a scandal, just like the strikes, the rising prices, the legal shenanigans, the erratic weather, the clemency appeals. The Red Puppets of Poland insolently offer political asylum for the Rosenbergs. France’s Le Monde says Uncle Sam is “disturbed” and accuses him of planning a “ritual murder.” “More and more,” says Le Monde, “the Rosenbergs seem to us like the expiatory victims of the cold war…”
Many of America’s own atomic scientists, led by Nobel Prize-winner Harold Urey, seem to be siding openly with the spies, claiming that there is no secret to the atom bomb in the first place (but this is a lie — Harry Truman said there was a secret, and so did J. Edgar Hoover), and now the granddaddy of them all, Albert Einstein, writes to a teacher just fired by the City Board of Education for refusing to answer questions about his connections with the Phantom: “The reactionary politicians have managed to instill suspicion of all intellectual efforts into the public by dangling before their eyes a danger from without…. They are now proceeding to suppress the freedom of teaching and to deprive of their positions all those who do not prove submissive. What ought the minority of intellectuals to do against this evil? Frankly, I can only see the revolutionary way of non-cooperation….” New apostates are being won and the letters keep coming in. From Netherlands Women, British Railwaymen, French Lawyers, and the Uruguayan Chamber of Deputies. Clerics, novelists, schoolteachers, and 2200 Melbourne ladies. The British Electrical Union! All writing to the President, all urging clemency for the atom spies. Even their sons — which prompts President Eisenhower to complain in a sputtering rage that “they have even stooped to dragging in young and innocent children in order to serve their own purpose!”
If he is offended by the boys’ appeals, he is even more outraged when Ethel Rosenberg’s latest letter to her two sons is flashed on the moving electric sign on the Times Tower: Christ on the mountain! he can just feel the damned Phantom’s power radiate through the spellbound crowds in the Square…
My Dearest Darlings,
This is the process known as “sweating it out,” and it’s tough, that’s for sure. At the same time, we can’t let a lot of chickens that go about their business without panic, even when something’s frightening them — we can’t let them put us to shame, can we…?
What’s that about chickens? The people duck their heads and peer nervously up at the sky. Is this it, then?