The Public Burning 
by 

Robert Coover, 

 

William H. Gass (Introduction)

 

This Is a Job for Uncle Sam!

A very exciting way to write history, at least political history, which is simultaneously personal and public, psychological and strategic, irrationally rational and therefore so dense with meaning it defies conventional narrative. As Richard Nixon says in The Public Burning, “... just as a nation has neither friends nor enemies, only interests, so there are no enduring loyalties in politics except where they are tied up in personal interests.” And personal interests are about as complicated as it gets. They ensure that “Politics is the only game played with real blood.”

In American democratic politics “Issues are everything, even when they’re meaningless.” Trump has his Wall, Nixon had Reds Under Our Beds. Both are symbols of tribal affiliation rather than threats to the Republic. This is what democracy is built upon: emotive symbols. So, indeed, as Nixon knew so longingly, “isn’t that a hell of a thing—that the fate of a great country can depend on camera angles?” He eventually got his angles right when he shifted his focus from Commies to Black people as the main threat to the Nation. Trump has simply enlarged this anti-constituency by including Latinos and Muslims. He like Nixon is clearly ignorant; but in one sense “they have learned too much, have built up ways of looking at the world that block off natural human instincts.”

The Public Burning is a permanent reminder, a literary monument, to just how strange the political culture of the United States is. While its focus is the execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg in 1953 for the crime of treason, its subject is the pervasive and apparently permanent disfunction of American democracy. It is a chronicle only marginally of a likely injustice. More importantly it is an analysis of how America really works, which is largely on the basis of personalities, and the competition among these personalities in all aspects of American life. The Prologue makes it clear that there is a psychotic thread connecting George Washington to Donald Trump. This thread is a sentiment of persistent, radical resentment.

This resentment seems to be centred on the fact that there exists any government at all. Government is an inimical force in America because it is so political. And it is so political because it is so rightly mistrusted. Nixon again: “Here is a political truth: Deviousness wins votes. Dishonesty is often the best policy.” The Right wants the abolition of government; the Left its transformation into something else. This is the American Way. One’s opponents, therefore, are not only to be beaten but to be crushed - merely because they want to govern at all. Schadenfreude is the underlying emotion. No matter who loses, America wins. “Enlightenment or no, we still had our roots in the Dark Ages,” muses the President manqué.

There is a widespread calumny that America has the best politicians money can buy. Trump is proof that this is patent nonsense. There are many better politicians for sale in the USA than he. And it has probably always been so. Coover‘s take on Eisenhower, for example, shows how remarkably similar at least Republican Presidents have been in terms of brain power: “Uncle Sam [Eisenhower, as his contemporary incarnation] needed vacuity for an easy passage [to the presidency]... and as for reading, more than a page and he went blind.” Eisenhower’s (public) Puritanism is the flip-side of Trump’s (private) Hedonism on the political coin. It is not difficult to replace ‘Uncle Sam’ with Ford, Reagan, ‘W’ Bush, or Trump, not to mention Harding, Hoover, or Taft (well, maybe not him) for the passage to read as sensibly. The idea that the election of Trump and his obvious appeal to the American people is an aberration, a hiccup that will be corrected, is clearly a hopeful urban myth with no factual basis whatsoever.

Put another way: Donald Trump is neither an exception nor an error. He is, it is true, tasteless, openly mendacious, crude, vengeful, and capricious. But these are incidental personality traits. His fundamental character is a precise reflection of America: instinctively violent when resisted; suspicious of everything, especially its own people; self-deluding about its motivations; blasphemously self-assured about its role in the world; and willing to sacrifice itself for an ideology it is in fact inadequately educated to understand. The ‘checks and balances’ of the Constitution may be far less important to controlling American power than the competitive free for all on which the system is premised. So, for example, despite his rather more civilised behaviour than Trump, “Eisenhower’s relationship with Congressional Republicans was so fragile, we couldn’t afford to antagonize them in any way” It’s that old pioneer spirit that makes everyone so skittish, especially around friends.

America has always been this way. If, as the Evangelicals believe, Trump is an instrument of the divine despite his flaws, it can only be to hold a mirror up to the country, to reveal what they actually are. This is the real value of his tweets which have revealed fully for the first time the banality of the society he leads as well as that of the leader. Granted, the likelihood of such a revelatory recognition is low. But that’s where books like The Public Burning become important. Among other things, it documents the historical continuity of popular insanity in American democracy and its manipulation by government and business. 

Coover re-casts America’s Uncle Sam, that old Yankee Peddler, the eternal Spirit of One Nation Under God, as Slick Sam, the fast-talking huckster who sells nationalistic snake oil to a willing populace through the likes of Hearst and Luce and Fox. I think that’s just about right. Says Ike: “A lousy situation, but dese, as the man says, are de conditions dat prevail!”

Postscript: An academic sociological perspective ‘confirming’ Coover’s fiction as an interpretation of American politics can be found here: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...