Let the Fire Fall

Today the Works of Man Museum unveiled its newest acquisition amidst a stormy protest of the nation’s most eminent art critics, who revile the statue with one voice. Palizzo’s nude, entitled, St. Diane, they say is pornographic, vile, hideous, has no redeeming merits, is crassly commercial, a return to the stultifying conformism the early Catholic Church demanded of artists over a thousand years ago. The statue is that of a nude woman straddling a relief map of the United States. One of her hands clutches her genital area, the other is pressed against her breast, and while improbably long hair obscures both hands, the rapture on her face and the pose in general ore suggestive….

An uneasy silence lies aver the Works of Man Museum tonight following the worst riots witnessed in New York City in over a decade. Slowly the pieces are starting to fall into places as the laborious task of sorting rumor from fact continues. Dr. Wilford Depuy, Director of the Bureau for Maintaining Serenity and Peaceful Coexistence among the. inhabitants of the city, states that the cause of the riots now appears to be rooted in the effect of the “miracle” that three women claimed to have witnessed at the “shrine” of St. Diane. The women claim that they were visited by St. Diane in the spirit as they neared the statue, after waiting in line for over six hours. The visitation afflicted them with hysterical catatonia. As with most hysterical manifestations, this was contagious, and people started to collapse in the museum, then in the street as they waited to gain entrance. The rumor spread rapidly then that the MSPC forces were using riot gas on the people without cause, and there was panic that spread throughout the night and into the following day….

Replicas of St. Diane are being offered throughout the city, throughout the nation in all sizes, for all prices. Some of them are gold-plated, others cast in the crudest plaster, but all are selling. Again and again “miracles” are being reported by the owners of the statuettes, and in churches where large copies have been installed, doctors are on round-the-clock duty to minister to the stricken….

Italian longshoremen continue to picket the docks here and violence mounts as the nine-day-old strike spreads. Leaving their jobs today were the public transportation unions, the telephone company employees, and the garbage collectors. It is an open secret in Rome that the strikers are being encouraged by the Vatican, and nightly long lines form at various churches and cathedrals where the workers are fed, and receive allotments of food to take home to their families. It is rumored that martial law will be declared within two days if the workers refuse to return to their jobs. The dock area is already a malodorous health hazard, officials report, and with the garbage collection halted, and the worsening conditions brought on by the prolonged drought and summer heat, all Rome will be endangered by disease and fire.

The strike originated when it was learned that aboard the U.S.S. Conover there were fifteen million replicas of the infamous Palizzo, St. Diane….