“ [Julius Rosenberg] presents himself diligently at Page One every morning at ten o’clock, pressing his nose against the great slabs, frowning through his wire-rimmed spectacles at all this irrelevant history, weeping softly to himself to see such monumental dignity conferred on a world so mad… Often enough, through his tears, he has discovered himself here on these slabs, or someone they said was himself (“the accused,” they call him, but the words keep melting and blurring on him, and what he sees there is “the accursed”), but he has not recognized his own image, grown gigantesque, eviscerated, unseeing: it’s like looking into some weird funhouse mirror that stretches one’s shape so thin you can see right through it. He used to think that if he could just find his way onto these tablets everything would be all right, but now he knows this is impossible: nothing living ever appears here at all, only presumptions, newly fleshed out from day to day, keeping intact that vast, intricate, yet static tableau —The New York Times’s finest creation— within which a reasonable and orderly picture of life can unfold. No matter how crazy it is.
Robert Coover, The Public Burning 1977.
If you haven’t guessed already, I’m currently quite obsessed with 1953 (mostly due to this incredible book) and just absolutely awestruck at how much the last eight minutes of American propaganda appear to be no more than Hollywood-style regurgitations of that year’s (domestically) successful perception management campaigns.