TOTALLY DELUDED BOLSHEVIK WHORES

I had a dream last night that the Bolsheviks were at it again. Perhaps the dream was having me, but what's really important is that, in the dream at least, a bunch of professional revolutionaries from the pre-Soviet era had been flash-frozen in some sort of primitive cryogenic process. Where my narrative picks up--you know, where I come in--actually takes place after I've gone to sleep.

Of course, dreamwise, we were all awakening together. The biggest difference between myself and those succubi and incubi is that I am really real, and they are really dreams. However, aside from the astonishing remarkability our 21st Century liberal-democratic life in America seemed to reflect in the eyes and consciousness of the Bolsheviks, they were still intent upon labeling the entire liberal-democratic tradition "capitalism" and overthrowing it. Why? Just because.

After all, it didn't matter to those Bolsheviks that life in 21st Century America had transmogrified into something so totally alien to Marx, Engles, Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin as to be unrecognizible. What mattered to them was the revolution, and that's pretty much where I somehow slipped in and got to watch some of the stuff that went on.

In the dream, I still had my conscious memory and continually recalled a biography of Lenin I'd read once--especially the parts where the professional revolutionaries went about raising money for the revolution. Shoot, they'd do anything: prostitution, embezzlement, theft, extortion, fraud, robbery and, of course, murder. Stalin himself was involved in an armed robbery in which the automobile he rode in wrecked and almost killed him. More interesting than that, though, involved situations in which beautiful Bolshevik women and handsome and witty Bolshevik men attached themselves and then married elderly, crippled, homely and embittered rich people. The spouses, of course, were quickly dispatched and, since the Bolsheviks were the sole inheritors, the money could go straight towards buying guns, arms and coal.

That last part really made sense: Because you're a Bolshevik, you're trying to help the powerless, and helping the powerless is a good thing. But because certain powerless people (lonely, infirm, sick in the head, on death's doorstep, in physical pain, etc, etc) have money, well, why not go ahead and rape them and rape them good? After all, isn't gaining power actually gaining power in the name of peace? And isn't peace a refusal to do physical violence? Emotional, psychological, economic, social violence and coercion--they don't count. As long as you don't physically hurt somebody, it's peace, dude. So there was a contradiction in just about everything the revolutionaries were doing. They were hurting and really working over powerless people and they were doing physical violence, as well as calling all the multifarious levels of violence they were utilizing...peace.

So in the dream, I had my eye out for all that stuff.

But there was a strange twist in my dream. For some reason, all the shenanigans and plots engendered by these so-called professional revolutionaries from Bolshevik Russia rang hollow and vain. Most of them were trying to gain control of really important things like poetry readings, art galleries and tabloid television news exclusives. Since they were trying to build a movement, they used the old carrot and stick method: reward "propitious" behavior; punish "ambiguous" or "non-revolutionary" behavior.

Of course, in 21st Century America, most of the recipients of this dumb, carrot-and-stick methodology hadn't the faintest idea what was going on. They'd simply be minding their own business when WHAM! Somebody would fuck them over. Somebody would impose on their lives. Somebody would "get" them.

Often, all this maneuvering and counter-maneuvering would take place amongst the revolutionaries themselves. They'd attack each other all the time as if they were a bunch of scorpions in a jar. In fact, the entire mission of the Bolshevik transplants looked like the demolition derby at the State Fair of Texas. Not with real cars. Bumper cars.

Imagine what that would look like: Kids everywhere, slamming into each other. What was being accomplished? Who really knows? One thing would be certain: The kids in the bumper cars would sure look happy. This demolition derby would look like the most positive and fulfilling activity on earth.

Us parents would look on at the goings on in the skating rink and chuckle to ourselves. Lookie there! That one's slamming the other! Isn't that cute?

Meanwhile, inside the rink, kids would be imagining all sorts of grandiose things: When I smash into that kid, I will have eliminated a major threat to my movement; when I let that kid go by, I will be offering him/her a place of honor within my branch of the movement or, at the very least, some sort of alliance.

In reality (at least in this dream I was having), most of the big activities were taking place in bars--where people are too drunk to be rational. Talk about a cluster-fuck. All sorts of games, and all in the name of the big revolution. Trying to pull someone into the "movement," girls would offer sex. If the "target" refused to budge or veer in the "politically correct" direction, the stick would be administered: rejection, harsh rejection. Which would be all fine and dandy except these Bolshevik bimbos were doing it to each other!

I remember telling one dream figure something I mentioned to friends in real life: "Hey. The Soviets only killed 100 million of their own people. Come on, let's give 'em another chance."

The Commie people were using all sorts of really transparent code to communicate. In fact, anyone who managed to pass English 101 in college could decipher it in a matter of minutes. But it was fun pretending with the Commie people. Some of them, for example, actually believed that like-minded people were part of some sort of Commie people hive mind. Because of the Commie people hive mind illusion--something Mark Twain coined "The Grand Illusion"--many of the Bolsheviks garnered a deluded sense of invulnerability. And that was something I wanted to promote.

"I'm an anarcho-syndicalist," one said.

"Is that so?" I replied. "I totally respect you, dude."

"We use the anarchists to tear down capitalist perversions of the truth and clear the way for us to move in," said another.

"Right on, right on," I said.

"We use the unversal language, the international language," another cried.

"Uh, like, what's this, then?" I said, shooting him the finger. "Sorry, dude. Just kidding."

What it all boiled down to in the dream is that the Bolshevik Commie people ultimately succumbed to the gaping maw of co-optation that occurs whenever the prerequisites for revolution are completely absent. Even in the dream, we didn't have a whole lot of bread lines. We didn't have secret police shooting people en masse. We didn't have big spectacles for one czar or another. And, ultimately, all the revolutionary prattle was pretty meaningless.

In fact, I got the impression that most of these so-called revolutionaries were doing it because they were bored. Some, of course, had low self-esteem and acting out like a revolutionary made them feel important, part of something important. Others, however, saw themselves standing square in the center of world events. In the dream, I took a group of Bolsheviks to the Kroger down the street. Seeing all that food, all the fresh vegetables and fruit, seeing red meat and all kinds of canned and prepackaged foods, several of the Commie people fell onto the floor and began to weep. I gave each one of them a "Rush Limbaugh" bumper sticker to take back with them in the time machine.

Then my alarm rang. I was back in the real world.
Looking around the room, I noticed no Bolsheviks or Commie people anywhere. Maybe they'd already gone back into history. Of course, they were from the early 20th Century, weren't they? What really stuck in my mind, though, was the conversation I'd had with one:

"We believe in natural law," he said.

"Which is...?"

"It's, like, when people learn to see the truth and, like, figure out that we're all together and stuff. It's like a dance, man."

"What if some dancers are better dancers than other dancers?"

"Sorry. Don't get your drift."

I said, "If some dancers are better than others, they'll eventually end up at the top of the heap. Then what? Another revolution?"