The Communist Manifesto and Ron Swanson

One of the things that really frightens me about myself is that, had I been born in 1865 instead of 1965, I may well have been a Communist.  Communism must have really appealed to the scientists and the rationalists of the time.  I mean, all around them were these antiquated kingdoms ruled by incestuous, divinely-appointed, occasionally insane, monarchs, or the predatory robber barons using the poor like cordwood to fire the Industrial revolution. And here's this obviously intelligent fellow, Karl Marx, with this newly devised, perfectly rational form of government where you throw everything into the pot and then divvy it up according to need.  Compared to prostrating myself before Lords or getting black lung at 30 in some Yorkshire coal mine, I would have been all over the Communist thing. 

And that was how it was marketed at the time.  Communism was a new form of government, born out of man's enlightenment, now that societies had cost of the yoke of the church.  It was the next evolutionary step. 

Well it turned out, of course, that the Communists were great at getting everyone to throw everything into the pot, but there was a little bit of a problem with the divvying up part.  Turns out the people doing the divvying had a nasty tendency to deal themselves twice.  Or three times.  Or a hundred times.  And once people got into the higher echelons of the Party, there was no getting rid of them.  Not to mention that the first thing Stalin did was basically shoot all the wooly-headed intellectuals who put him in power.  Revolutionaries are natural shit-disturbers, he figured.  They had served their purpose, and he did not want them stirring up more trouble down the road.

The lesson:  

Luckily, I learned that lesson from history, as opposed to being stood up against some barn wall and summarily shot by Stalin's henchmen, while pleading "But guys, I was on your side." 

Perhaps in response, I've rebounded too far in the other direction.  I am a strong individualist.  I'm suspicious of government.  Although I work for the government.  Go figure.  I'm a bit like Ron Swanson, I guess, from the TV show, Parks and Recreation.  Here he is in all his mustachey glory:

"Aren't you scared to eat here?"

Some Swansonisms:

"I’ve been quite open about this around the office: I don’t want this parks department to build any parks, because I don’t believe in government."

"I work hard to make sure my department is as small and as ineffective as possible."

"My idea of a perfect government is one guy who sits in a small room at a desk, and the only thing he’s allowed to decide is who to nuke. The man is chosen based on some kind of IQ test, and maybe also a physical tournament, like a decathlon. And women are brought to him, maybe ... when he desires them."

So, as an individualist, it goes without saying that I'm not a big fan of the Mommy State.  You know the Nanny state motto:

I just can't keep up with all the bans at the local, provincial and federal levels.  My old East Coast Celtic band, Skystone, used to play at the Atlantic Trap and Gill downtown.  We had to stop playing every time someone started to dance.  Dancing is illegal in restaurants in Vancouver.  At least that "class" of restaurants.   It's also illegal to sing in Stanley Park.  It's illegal, in Vancouver, to give someone  slice of orange in a public area.  You have to give them the whole orange.  You need a permit to play in a park.  If you live on Grand Boulevard in North Vancouver, I have it on reliable authority that you have to ask the government for permission to paint your house.   I think with the smokers, we'll have them caged in Government Smoking Areas and we can all toss rotten fruit at them.

I guess we've all gotten used to three or more levels of government breathing down our necks.  These things don’t seem to bother anyone but me.  Or maybe not.  There was a popular backlash in BC against the idea of having cameras, instead of cops, issue speeding tickets.  I believe that's how ex-Premier Gordon Campbell got into office the first time--by promising to scrap the program.  Maybe people just got fed up with "experts" in the media telling us that speed cameras were for our own good. 

Maybe we can thank George Orwell for the backlash against speeding cameras.  The 1984 meme used to be so ingrained in our cultural psyche that people just had a visceral negative reaction to the idea of government cameras watching us.  But that idea is quaint these days.  Cameras are everywhere now, not to mention the digital footprint you leave wherever you go, with your credit cards or access cards.  Or even sitting at home surfing the web.  Google and Facebook want to know where you've been and what you’ve been up to.  Not for any nefarious purpose, I'm sure; just because they can make more money that way.

In Canada, the federal government wants to pass legislation to give enforcement agencies the power to compel internet service providers (ISPs) to provide certain information on its subscribers without a warrant under the proposed Protecting Children from Internet Predators Act.  It also compels ISPs to install equipment to make it easier to track the movements of web users.  Everyone wants to protect kids from predators, but the mistake the Minister of Public Safety, Vic Toews, made was declaring in the House of Commons that folks "either stand with us or with the child pornographers."  Even for laid back Canada, that was a bit much, and there's been a furious response, including poor Mr. Toews rather unsavory divorce proceedings being released by certain unprincipled individuals who may or may not be working for opposition parties.  It's a real bunfight now, with both sides trying to out-outrage each other.

I just don’t think, when all these thousands of laws and regulations are passed, that there is an advocate for your average Joe Blow.  Between the hand-wringing special interest groups and government agencies lined up all the way down the hall with new regulations, where is the voice for the guy who just wants to be left alone? 

I'm not an anarchist or a tea-partier.  Thomas Paine said "The government is best which governs least."  I'm more in line with him and Henry David Thoreau.  Oh, and Ron Swanson.

The Stasi: An Inverse Narcissus Myth

"I said, you are not unemployed!  You are seeking work!" and then, almost hysterically, "There is no unemployment in the German Democratic Republic."

          Stasiland:  Stories from Behind the Berlin Wall , Anna Funder

The Ministerium für Staatssichherheit, or Stasi, were the state security agency for the former German Democratic Republic (aka East Germany).  They're widely held as one of the most invasive internal security agencies ever.  At their height, the Stasi had some 90,000 agents--far more, on a per capita basis, than the KGB or the Gestapo.  Including inofizielle Mitarbeiter (unofficial collaborators) they reckon that up to one in seven East Germans worked for the Stasi.

When the Stasi invited you in for a visit they would sit you on an uncomfortable stool chair with a little drop-cloth on it. Following the interrogation --which would, I imagine, be quite stressful--they would take the cloth and put it in a sealed   glass jar with your name on it.

Sealed-in Freshness: The smell of sweaty buttocks.

In case they ever needed to find you, they had a scent to give the dogs.  In my mind, I envisioned--deep in a subterranean chamber of the Stasi HQ in a suburb of East Berlin--these endless rows of shelves stacked floor to ceiling with plain glass jars, arranged in alphabetical order.

As Funder points out in her excellent book, despite the Orwellian invasiveness of the Stasi and the  staggering cost to the state to maintain them, they completely and utterly failed to predict the fall of the regime in 1989.  In the final analysis, they were useless.  Actually, it's even worse than that. Protestors early on in the revolution were few, but their numbers were greatly bolstered by the huge number of Stasi agents and informers among them pretending to be protestors.  This made the protests look a lot bigger than they actually were, which emboldened others to come out. 

The Stasi produced nothing themselves and exploited the proletariat of the socialist state far more than the Kapitalismus they detested.  What's the opposite of wrinkly?  Riiiight.  Irony.

Narcissus is the tragic figure of Greek myth who was so beautiful that he fell in love with his reflection in a pool, could not look away, and died.  The GDR were like a negative Narcissus. They looked at themselves, through the Stasi, and were as mesmerized by their repugnance, as Narcissus was by his beauty.  They could not look away.  The Stasi only found decay and rot; threats skulking in corners, plans hatching in windowless cellars.  They became so fascinated studying their own ugliness that when the end came, marching to the deafening blast of an oom-pah band, they didn't even hear it.

I thought this was rather a profound insight a first, but realized that this is an old metaphor.  See for example, a young Peter Falk as the General of  an anonymous Latin American coup in a Twilight Zone episode called The Mirror, broadcast 50 years ago yesterday, in fact.  Or underrated visionary director Terry Gilliam's scientists in his 1995 film 12 Monkeys. 

Peter Falk in "The Mirror"

12 Monkeys

Bono was wrong.  Every time you look in the mirror, you will find exactly what you're looking for.

Anyway, I'm going to write a story about the Stasi.  But since I only like writing horror and science fiction stories, I'll have to work Cthulhu or time machines in there somehow.  

In the meantime, I highly recommend Funder's excellent book, Stasiland.