Our Gang (Vintage International) by Philip Roth

Author:Philip Roth [Roth, Philip]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2009-08-14T16:00:00+00:00

Surely the great majority of Americans will agree that it is a tragedy in every sense of the word when the brave fighting men of our Army are called upon to risk their lives in the streets of Washington, D.C, instead of in a foreign country. But that is what happened here in the nation’s capital, when, through a long day and a long night, our brave soldiers, armed only with loaded rifles, fixed bayonets, tear-gas canisters and gas masks, faced a mob of Boy Scouts, numbering nearly ten thousand.

I am sure you all know by now the nature of the chants and the songs that these ten thousand Boy Scouts were singing in the streets of the nation’s capital. I am sure you are familiar with the kind of placards they were waving before the television cameras. I do not intend to repeat to you the wording of those posters. It should suffice to say that they did justice to the language and interests of Charles Curtis Flood, whose favorite city, according to his own writings, is Copenhagen, Denmark, the pornography capital of the world.

The posters are presently in the hands of the FBI, whose laboratories have already begun the painstaking job of fingerprinting each and every poster, and submitting them to blood tests so as to determine the correlation between the obscenity printed on an individual poster and the blood type of the Boy Scout bearing the poster containing those objectionable words. If such correlations can be established with a reasonable degree of accuracy—and we think they can—it will of course be of great assistance to our law enforcement agencies. Under our program of “preventive detention,” we will be able to round up those with suspect blood types before such demonstrations as this even get under way, thus preventing them from violating community standards of decency, and the ordinary everyday rules of courtesy, decorum and good taste that are sacred to the great majority of Americans.

As you all know from the headlines, of the approximately ten thousand Boy Scouts who assembled here in Washington during the two-day uprising to threaten the lives of our brave fighting men, it was necessary to kill only three in order to maintain law and order. That breaks down to one and one-half Scouts dead per diem, while nine thousand nine hundred and ninety-eight and a half Scouts continued to live full and active lives the first day, and nine thousand, nine hundred and ninety-seven the second.

Now I would think that by anyone’s standards, a mortality rate in a crisis of this kind of .0003 is a wonderful tribute to the very great restraint with which we were able to confront what could have been a terrible tragedy for our soldiers. Certainly it should give solace to all of those who detest bloodshed as much as I do, and put the lie once and for all to the vicious charge that it was the military and not the Scouts who were responsible for the violence.

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