On learning communism.

I grew up in a communist country, behind the Iron Curtain, years ago. At the time Romania only had one legal political party, the ruling Romanian Communist Partyⁱ, as well as only one sort of ice creamⁱⁱ, one kind of butter, one type of toilet paper, one type of hot guy, one life track for women, two kinds of cars, three sorts of mineral water of which you could find exactly one depending on which part of the country you went looking for it and exactly one type of electronic appliance per application. This was the ipod of the time :

My parents never discussed politics with me, to any degree or in any perspective. I suppose this on account of my father being a chickenshit, because who knows what I might say where and then what if they deport him or whatever. Then again my parents never discussed sex with me - not ever, not at all, not to any degree. Neither of these seem to have had any impact whatsoever : I've been a staunch anticommunist since about the age of five, and I've meanwhile topped more women than either of them ever metⁱⁱⁱ. Over the years I discovered other parents in Romania went into elaborate, complex detail on political matters with their kids, just as other parents in the Anglified West went into ellaborate, complex detail on fucking with their kids. I guess the proliferation of pinkos and faggots^iv has to be explained somehow after all.

During my first four years of school I had a single teacher, that being the habit of the time and place. Her name was Cornelia Jaca, she always wore the same hat and she was a staunch communist.

She practically never spoke of it. Unlike all the lowlifes everywhere in that time and place, screaming their pretense loudly and grossly, thickly and disgustedly, in the hollow hope of deriving some sort of material advantage to patch over the gaping void of their own identity (as the entire exercise is usually put in motion by an overwhelming quest for external approval stemming from a complete disgust with the self - which is why it never works to ask one of these scummy fucks if they have no shame : yes they do, and plenty of it, and it's already working overtime) she practically never spoke of it. She was a classical mind, and even though she didn't know very much she knew it very very well. I knew more than her by the time I was about ten, and yet she always enjoyed my respect. Seeing how I respect ability and accomplishment and nothing else, this puts an anonymous invatatoare in quite the league. None of this is surprising, I guess, the promise of the classics as well as the point of the classical mind is exactly this : to make it into humanity with the means available, such as they are.

Anyway, we were close, she was invited and came to the birthday parties my burgeois-communist family was throwing, I was very fond of her and never became a communist. Because you can't learn communism and you can't teach communism any more than you can learn or teach being stupid. Communism is what idiots are born with. Some wash the shit off their faces, some never do. The more perverse go about the town "teaching" people about how going about with shit on your face is "better" anyway.

None of this has any bearing. You don't become a communist, you're born one. Hopefully you die something better than that, which is to say anything else.

1. Ex "Worker's", back when the country was a "popular" republic as opposed to a socialist one. The differences moreover translate alignment pre- and post- Stalin rather than anything substantive. A nazi is a nazi and a commie is a commie and they're both exactly the same stupid thing. [↩]
2. Fram [↩]
3. On analysis, than my father ever met. My mother has worked her entire life as a teacher trainer, and in this country teachers are mostly women still. [↩]
4. Yes, sexuality is a learned behaviour, yes being gay is in plenty of cases a failure rather than something to be proud of. [↩]