A Brief History of American Socialism

MAY DAY: Wonderful time of the year. Brings to mind countless Russo-Sovietski troops parading through Red Square in the heart of beautiful downtown Moscow: Stalin�s Tanks, Kruschev�s Rockets, Yeltsin�s Vodka trucks, Putin�s KGB Cold Warriors. Must have been a splendid sight.

It was the first of these leaders than many on the Western Left Wing so admired in the thirties, forties, and even later. He was �The Man of Steel�, �Uncle Joe�, The one single individual who was able to summon up the mythical and historical force that united the vast land against invading Nazi hordes.

Back in the old days the left loved Stalin for the purity of his collectivism, and the vision of his particular brand of communism. His five year plans were heralded with all the elation of a gaggle of Baptists anticipating an immediate Second Coming. He was the living embodiment of that ideal society put forth by the late, great Karl Marx. Worship. Slobber. Drool.

These ideas were adopted in toto by many of our countrymen, some of whom spied for the Soviets for years spanning the decade before Pearl Harbor until well into the Cold War. Some of these were motivated by greed, pure and simple lust for money, but many were dupes of the propaganda which convinced them of the superiority of the Stalinist economic system or the moral authority of the �people� the idealism of Uncle Joe�s vast land. They saw in the Marxine messages of historical inevitability, socialistic equal distribution, rule of the proletariat, classless society, and eventual world-wide communism. They are still waiting.

American Marxo-stalinists, and their world-wide cousins in the extreme environmental cabal, have short memories. During the hay day of Russian Communism, that is, back in the Stalin era, �Uncle Joe�, a misanthrope who mistrusted everybody including his own mother, caused the death of twenty-three million of his own people. This he accomplished by massive executions, wholesale one way tickets to his Gulag, and using enforced, slave labor starved and worked to death to accomplish those all-important five year planning goals. His �purges� destroyed whole ethnic populations, re-bound the peasant class (�proteletariat�?) to collective farms, and killed off the cream of Russia�s intellectual, military, and government elite. Joe couldn�t abide competition, you see.

Add approximately twenty million more Russians, both military and civilian, dead during the Second World War, due in great part to Stalin�s blundering in the years prior to that conflict, and the total of deaths in that ravaged land directly attributed to this stupidly lauded �Architect of Modern Communism�, comes to something like forty three million. The true number will never be known. Staggering.

Many on today�s left are the spiritual descendants of these early American dupes of communism. They tend to see the world through the looking glass of a myopic idealism, a wold in which everything good for everybody can be legislated into a kind of harmonious existence.

Lots of these folk and their fractious descendants have landed within the all-inclusive ranks of the modern Democratic party. They are the very ones causing the familiar stench of intellectual decay.

How far the party has fallen from the good old days of Harry S. Truman and even FDR, whose picture is trotted out every four years in a kind of blind and dumb convention ritual designed to link past glory with current insanity!!

You know, I always thought the damned MAY POLE was a phallic symbol.

JOHN KERRY�S LATEST TWENTY-FIVE MILLION DOLLAR AD CAMPAIGN is designed to convince people that he is from Colorado. Won�t the residents of the Bay State be surprised? We kid you not. If he ever tells us that he shares our �Georgia values�, Zell Miller will be forced to bash him �upside� the head.

Mr. Kerry�s campaign people are seeking to redefine the Senator is a Centrist. Sure he is. Of course. Right. Good Old Middle of the Road John Kerry. Moderate. Not a liberal. Not the most radical member of the U.S. Senate. Nothing like that. Why, if he moves to the right any further, he is in serious danger of becoming a Republican.

And he isn�t a kept man, a gigolo, either. He married Theresa out of love; Platonic love, maybe, but love. Kerry is a guy who stands firmly on his own two pre-nups.

AN EMAIL TO JOHN GIBSON (THE BIG STORY) READS: Dean TV. Now Phil Donahue�s fans will have a place to go to�for a week and a half. Wonder how long it will take the ex-governor to implode as he did on the night of the Iowa Caucus. The main good to come out of this is that, should he land a contract with MSNBC, there will be no one watching.

THE TORTURE OF IRAQI POW�s IS INEXCUSABLE�and the guilty must be made to pay. My gut tells me there is more to this than meets the eye, though I don�t have a clue as to what.

I have never understood the mentality that allows an otherwise sane human being to (1) enter a �reality� TV show; (2) videotape his or her sexual performance; (3) take pictures of the kind of obscenities that are currently coming to us from Iraq.

And it has nothing to do with the fact that these American Servicepersons are rank amateurs when it comes to acts of torture in the shifting desert sands. If we claim to be better than that, then we had better be outraged by the pictures and do something about it.

One big concern, the immorality of such barbarism aside, is the effect the pictures are having upon the Arab world. There may be outrage in Europe, Asia, and Africa, but among Muslims the sight of a mere woman administering torture to a man is beyond all understanding. This is the nature of abomination, something so terrible that it offends these people and the core beliefs of their faith like nothing else. Pig, Jew, Woman, American: pretty much all the same.

Yet nobody complained much when Saddam�s torture chambers and mass graves were discovered. Nobody in the Arab world condemned the brutal dictator and his sons for two decades of ethnic cleansing, torture, rape, and murder of Iraqi citizens. Sad.

We can only hope that appropriate action is taken by all in authority. And fast.

CHEATING AMONG HIGH SCHOOL COLLEGE STUDENTS GOES HIGH-TECH. I came home from work early one day last week to watch an ABC special on cheating among students. It was an eye opener.

Most of what I saw was new to me. Oh, yeah, I knew about buying papers online, and use a cell phone to communicate answers on a test, but most of it was unfamiliar territory.

It may be the kind of college I attend. There isn�t really a huge amount of pressure to get superior grades. Most of the students seem to do the assigned work which is simply not that demanding. I have seen enough guys flunk out to appreciate the fact that night-after-night in a bar is not the way to become successful unless you own the bar.

When I was little, I cheated as often as possible, both on homework and on tests, Even wrote about it once upon a time way back when. But shortly after I moved into my new Dad�s two things were made clear: (1) I didn�t need to and (2) Pop�s Neanderthal parenting methods were the perfect cure for a wise little guy who had fallen through society�s wider cracks for the previous twelve years or so.

Throughout high school, we all were aware of periodic eruptions of cheating. But it never seemed pervasive. Most kids talked against it, although any number would have tried it if they thought they just might get away with it. But in that particular school, there was an honor code and we generally took it seriously.

In college, it is about the same. Now the teachers in whose courses I am currently enrolled do not use short answer tests to any great degree. They tend to go for the long or short essay. Lots of reliance is placed on term papers. My ego won�t allow any other writer to screw up my prose. Sorry. I may not get all the facts right, but I guarantee something entertaining in every thesis. Of course, most of my teachers are very liberal and, therefore, tend to be lacking in the sense of humor department.

Apparently cheating is epidemic on many campi, including those of the Ivy League. Say, didn�t both Kerry and Bush graduate from Yale at about the same time?

Here�s an idea. Came to me when I was quite young�even heard it re-iterated on the ABC Cheating special. It goes something like this. Most adults cheat. That�s a given. They cheat on their income taxes, cheat on their spouses, cheat in business, and tell lies much of this time. Sometimes this is simply their way of being '�sharp'� Sometimes it is justified by saying that cheating and lying are necessary to keep up in the business world. But they cheat.

Now when a kid gets caught cheating and if it gets reported to the parents a little bit of hell erupts. He might get whacked around a bit by an irate daddy, but more likely is made to suffer an endless lecture on the evilness of his ways, gets grounded for eternity, and maybe is made to apologize to his clueless teacher. In a nutshell, the child is being punished by the same parents who cheat on one another, their taxes, and their business associates.

THEREFORE�when a boy or girl is caught cheating, instead of being punished by the authority figures in his life, he should be rewarded. Why? Because he is showing that he has the maturity and savvy to act just like a grown-up. And getting our children to become adults is most definitely one of the biological prime directives, isn�t it?

Who needs ethics?

CINCO DE MAYO: At DOS COJONES, the Restaurant where I cook and wash bottles is today. We have a band coming in after dinner. They will play till close. It is not your average lotsatrumpets South of the Border, Juan Guitar outfit. This is a good old Country Western Band from Boondocks, North Carolina which will serve up almost four hours of booty shakin�, boot-scooting, tears-in-your-ears music designed to make you dance, sweat, weep, indulge in simulated sex, and drink. And after nine, that�s what I will be doing: pouring beer, lugging kegs, serving, and generally sucking up to the senior bartenders so that they will generously share their tips with their favorite, their one and only eighteen-year-old bar back (No�not a misprint �BAR� BACK). Our staff party won�t begin until the customers are shooed out. Might make it home by the dawn�s early light. Have already told my professors that Luke will not be in Thursday morning. Wonder what the Old Man will say.

Don�t anybody wait up for this kid.

THAT�S IT FOR NOW I was going to write a segment about Mr. Kerry�s campaign showing signs of tanking, but that will wait. Just leave you with this thought: the Senator�s entire political life has been based on a truncated few months in Viet Nam and what he did when he got home. The man is trapped in a time warp. So is his campaign for president.

When you go to our very on TABLE OF CONTENTS located at http://members.aol.com/luciusson/contents.html way out there in the infinity of hyperspace, you will notice that the latest five entries are now located near the top which saves one hell of a lot of scrolling. You�re welcome.

Ciao,

Luke Angelo
Macon, Georgia
Where the mayor seems to be imploding. News at Eleven.

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Luke Angelo, Cyberbrat Out Of Hell, lives in Macon, GA, where he regularly causes trouble and proves that the pen is far mightier than the Mayor