You want to know how bad things are for leftists right now? In Berkeley, leftists are so despondent over the Trump Tyranny that they’re even giving up on the Soviet Union. Today, strolling through the streets of Berkeley after my mid-day class ended, I picked up this book on a free book table near a lefty bookstore—free!:
Just imagine how bad things must be that you’d part with such a treasure, after all these years of keeping hope alive. Trump really has broken them.
It does makes for enlightening reading. Right on the front page, His Eyebrowness reassures us:
I do not doubt that the majority of Americans want neither a shooting war between our countries nor the nerve-racking dangerous tensions of a “cold war.” At the same time I can grant that some of my American readers may have been conditioned into having doubts and even apprehensions regarding the “real” intentions of the Soviet Union. These doubts and apprehensions certainly do not arise from their own experiences. Their only source is belief in the biased statements of journalists, of persons reputed to be “experts” in this field, and even of particular official figures.
Gosh. Old Caterpillar Eyes was onto “fake news” 40 years before Donald Trump! If there were hashtags back then, we’d call it #RealFakeNews. (By the way, the opening section is headed: “To my American reader.” Reader? I think he could have been more optimistic than that. I suspect there were at least two.)
It sent my mind back to John Lofton’s classic article in The American Spectator about another Brezhnev propaganda book from 1978, “Leonid, We Hardly Knew Ye.” (Hard to find on the internet, but a version is available here.) It has such pitch-perfect gems as:
Have you ever been in a heated debate about Leonid’s life and found yourself stumped and humiliated when your opponent put his nose against yours, asking as a sneer rippled across his upper lip: “Okay, wise-guy: if you’re so smart, can you tell me when Brezhnev was elected First Secretary of the Zaporozhye Regional Party Committee, when he was elected First Secretary of the Dnepropetrovosk Regional Party Committee, and when he was elected First and Second Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Kazakhstan?”
If your answer to this question is “yes,” then this book is for you.
Given that I can find pretty much the same book given away in Berkeley today, it looks like even despondent, never-say-die leftists don’t care any more. As some famous person might say, #Sad!
Notice: All comments are subject to moderation. Our comments are intended to be a forum for civil discourse bearing on the subject under discussion. Commenters who stray beyond the bounds of civility or employ what we deem gratuitous vulgarity in a comment — including, but not limited to, “s***,” “f***,” “a*******,” or one of their many variants — will be banned without further notice in the sole discretion of the site moderator.