tacos and the five year plan
Seattle's Lenin Statue and Political Insanity in Massachusetts.
I discovered this during my recent trip out West:
I have mixed feelings about this. On one hand, this is truly the level of respect a man like Vladimir Lenin deserves - a decorative curiosity surrounded by the trappings of the ideology that proved to be more compelling, dynamic, and successful than his. We looked at this statue like the oddity it was, and I took a few photos. Had my camera not been stolen in the USSR when I visited in 1987, I might have been able to compare and contrast the statue photos I took there with this one. In any event, this statue (which I believe once stood in Hungary) was treated by the tourists like me, and the locals too I imagine, like just one more oddity in one of Seattle's quirkier neighborhoods.
Look at the photo again, though. Picture a statue of Hitler there, instead of Lenin. Or even Deng Xiaoping, who was much more democratically minded than Lenin, even after he slaughtered and imprisoned his way through Tian An Men Square. Not so quirky now, is it? I'm not sure why Lenin gets a pass. Maybe if Hitler's successor had been even more villainous that he (as was the case with Lenin), and maybe if we had never actually gone to war against Germany, people would look back on Adolf as a pathetic relic in the dustbin of history - the way we look back upon Lenin.
Or maybe not. Maybe it's just because Lenin had that really cool cap.
Ripped from this weekend's headlines: "Quincy (Massachusetts) Students Suspended for Offensive Manifesto." Here's the gist of it: six middle school students banded together to write an eighteen page "constitution" for their group/club/gang/collective(?) that reputedly contained sexually explicit references to either two or three of their female classmates (big surprise for middle school boys) and racial slurs. Assuming this is true, the offending document was found when another student accidentally brought home the wrong backpack and found the item inside.
Amidst the cries of ridiculous school officials talking about "the wake of Columbine" and "the dangers of TV and the Internet on today's youth" these six kids have been kicked out of school for 10 days (sounds like a reward, not a punishment) and must undergo "counseling." Punishment and headlines because six kids wrote down what was on their minds! Keep in mind that not only did these kids not threaten anyone, they didn't even write about threatening anyone, and yet they are probably getting what the Quincy School District considers its strongest punishment short of kicking them out of school entirely. They really should be punishing the kid who's not even bright enough to identify his own knapsack. Of course, it sounds like going to school in Quincy is punishment enough.
08.02.2000 © ljr