Bookshelf Battle

Gather around, 3.5 readers.

Either you’re all getting too young or I’m getting too old.

I’m a tail end Gen-Xer, which means I’m old enough to have watched Rocky IV in the movie theater and see all of America’s anti-Communism fears take the form of Ivan Drago, the killing machine boxer whose Soviet government was willing to expend untold amounts of government resources on whilst Russian peasants were starving.

OK.  I know Drago wasn’t real but the analogy, i.e. that the Soviets would gladly let scores of their own toil away and live on scraps just to fund the Soviet ambition for world conquest was some scary shit.

I mean, I was a kid so I didn’t worry that much about it but looking back, yeah, the adults were a little scared by it.

I’m also young enough that I never saw the 1950s, where US kids underwent drills in schools where they’d hide under their desks, as if that was somehow going to protect from a nuclear blast.

I’m also young enough I didn’t live through the fear in the 1960s when Castro’s Cuba allowed Russia to place nuclear missiles in Cuba that could have reached US shore easily.

And I’m old enough that I was a teenager in the 1990s, a time when the U.S. and Russia enjoyed a post-Cold War peace that made it seem like the world was on the right path.

In other words, I’m not old enough to remember the worst of Communism, but just old enough to have known adults who lived through those hard times.

Read some history books.  Stories of how Soviet Russia killed millions of its own people.  China did so as well.  I recall one book about how it was common in 1950s China for the Army to go into villages, find that the villagers hadn’t met their farm production quotas, and kill villagers as a warning.  Either that, or sometimes they’d lie to their superiors, tell them the villages have enough food (they didn’t want to admit to their bosses they had failed) and villagers would starve when it would have been easy to have had food sent to them.  So many people died, just over fears of communicating failure to a hostile government that didn’t take failure well.

Want to know how old I am?  When I was a kid, if you didn’t eat your dinner, an old ass elderly person would inevitably say, like clockwork, “What a shame to waste that food, there are starving children in China who would love to have that.”

Then I’d inevitably say well take my dinner and put it in a box and mail it to the starving Chinese kids, you wrinkly old fuck.  OK I wouldn’t say that but still.  See how clueless all you young people are?  You never met an old person who told you that your failure to eat your whole dinner was causing a Chinese kid’s death by starvation.

It scares me when I see so many young people who are all into socialism, which I don’t like on its own and also I don’t like because it’s just a stone’s throw away from communism.  Whenever I see a young person in a Che Guevara shirt watching a superhero movie on his stupid iphone, it’s hard for me to not tell this kid how dumb he is.

Think about it.  Smart phones.  Movies.  TV.  Internet.  All born out of America.  Freedom of speech makes us an entertainment capitol, while capitalism makes all of these inventions possible.

You like all those Marvel superhero movies?  Cool.  Do you think Chris Evans is going to stand around for 14 hours a day in a blue spandex suit that rides up his ass, pretending to yell at CGI monsters if a hefty fee isn’t going into his bank account?  Do you think he’ll do it for the same box of rationed government cheese that everyone else would get in a Commie world?

Does Steve Jobs spend his whole life, ignoring and being shitty to his family, in the hopes of being memorialized for all time as a computer genius if all he gets is a few rolls of toilet paper?  I think not.

Apple computers didn’t start in Russia.  Marvel Comics didn’t start in Russia.  You might point out that a lot of the products you love are manufactured overseas but OK, they didn’t get to you without an underlying profit motive.

This is the way humans are.   Since our prehistoric days, humans have been naturally selfish and self-centered.  Cavemen would build piles of rocks and only give you a rock if you traded them a twig.  There weren’t any cavemen giving out rocks for free.  And if you wanted the primo cavewoman pussy, you had to have yourself a fat ass pile of the best rocks.

There weren’t any cavemen tribes who were sharing the rocks.  You think that a caveman is going to push himself to get 50 rocks when the guy who brings back 1 rock gets the same rock portion?  Screw that.

Communism failed and led to so many deaths because the government had to force people to go against their own instincts – work hard for Jack and don’t complain or its the gulag for you.

Is Capitalism perfect?  No.  I get it.  We all don’t start with the same advantages.  A bad turn of luck can weigh you down forever, keep you from getting a great job and so on.  But I don’t think a better economic system has been invented yet and socialism and communism aren’t it.

So, end of speech.  Sorry I got political.  It concerns me that, “Please don’t become a socialist or a communist” is considered political now.  When I was a kid, not being a communist was just like, not wanted the sky to turn purple.  Just an obvious thing no one wanted, but alas, the old get older and the young never hear about any of the bad shit and are duped into thinking good shit so…this little fart in the wind of a post is my part in keeping communism at bay and asking you youngsters to read some damn history books.

Thank you.  Wow.  This could have been an Uncle Hardass column.