So, You Say You Want A Revolution

By Mike Marino

"Every Communist must grasp the truth. Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun."
Chairman Mao

"If you go carrying pictures of Chairman Mao...you aint gonna make it with anyone anyhow"
John Lennon

Little Red Books hungrily read by hordes of angry young reds. Got your Marx and Lenin confused with Groucho and John? ...right on! It happens in the best of families. And you say, you want a revolution...that’s all well and good, but, ask yourself, do they all work as the warranty suggests, or is the reality that they are a worse curse then what they've replaced?

As a political and social scientist, I register a negative-two, positively, or lower on the Richter scale, and yes, no social scientist degree, and yes, no -ologist attached anywhere in my name, cart or horse, fore and aft, so don't anticipate any salivatory revelations or orgasmic illuminations in this piece, this, this peek through the peephole of history at the paths followed in revolutionary orbit in a rebellious solar system of social issues and rights of the people. I am merely a dumpster diver in the overflowing trash bin of pop culture and clutter that has lived blissfully ignorant and comfortably numb on the Pacific Left Coast and the Peoples Republic of Ann Arbor.

Writers words aren't gospel, although some writers will claim they are the second coming of Jesus H. (Hemmingway) Christ, truth is...forget the words, and realize it is between the lines, between the sweaty sheets of literature, that you'll find the message, as well as the white space between the words...or what a writer doesn’t write but actually omits, that tells the story and pieces the puzzle together. The old one hand clapping Zen hipster zinger. Either way, that is the chance I take writing this, but, the worse chance you take in reading it. It will look at the power to the people mantra chanting and how revolution, in it's preliminary stages creates a coagulated solidarity, but somewhere, soon after overthrow and the mask of reform is ripped from the face, the revolution and it's leaders reveal themselves for what they are and the peoples message soon gets trampled by the very same crowds who not long before, stormed the Winter Palace..the fever of revolt is usually followed by the fervor of excess and executions, retaliation replacing revolution, and the diaharea of a demagogue’s diatribe turns into a commintern compost of (in the case of Russia) communist constipation. Revolution is an internal family affair...like incest its best kept hidden away in the closet of the trailer. It's a social fabric that has torn, and in time inbred, ready to come apart at the familial seams it seems. It's a case of weird Uncle Hector fucking his 13 year old first cousin dressed in a sheer see-through frock behind the barn, why? Because he can, and the resultant child is a mutant, born with three heads similar to a freak farm animal on display at some roadside rattlesnake farm in the Southwest. Revolution is not like war where the factions are delineated by a "border" and participants from outside the "family." Nope. Revolution is a good old fashioned down home brother sister fuck. Which brings me to my point about keeping a revolution hot and juicy and alive after it's initial success...it needs the social version of KY jelly to keep it aroused to achieve what it craves....a social orgasm of formidable change of epic proportions. Don't be confused either, nor mislead with the term "civil war" ... no war is civil and when two same family sides parry, it is rebellion...nothing more, nothing less....

Those who know me have referred to me as a Tom Joad Zen socialist, tinged by the effects of years of reefer madness and staring at Diego Rivera murals too long in the sun. I have no idea what the description actually means, but, is as close to the bulls eye as anyone has come yet. Could be my Motor City Detroit blue collar union/strikers childhood, and being kidnapped and raised in the rustbelt by a pack of Teamster wolves in the urban forest.

I do believe in an ongoing evolving heat seeking humanities socio-economic revolution of every society and every strata of a society, its arts, it's social programs, it's philosophy, and of course it's layers of literature. Anthropological archeology to be studied by the studious of the future. Actual armed revolt, you know, that serious takin' it to the streets kind of shit, revolutionary rigormortis sets in, despotic degeneration eats away at the flesh of the righteous rebellion. Revolution walks with the limp, and becomes a flesh eating George Romero zombie, cannibalistic, eating itself and choking, doesn't keep revolving as it should...a planet on it's axis, a planet around it's sun, the hands of clock moving to count off the hours of the day. It stops. The sign post ahead...The Twilight Zone.

This patchwork piece is merely a reflection of revolutions, Communist revolutions primarily...although the French and the Americans had their own bout of exuberant excess in laying the foundation of popular emancipation. These, the communist’s editions of Revolution 101, were not necessarily successful in the long term, nor models to follow in the short term, but rather behemoths of unimaginable lumbering longevity.

Each revolution was camp followed immediately by the whores of paranoia, planning Prozac retaliation against those pesky isolation ward voices heard only in the head of the head of state that were interpreted as a street corner preacher preaching reaction. The walls of Jericho had nothing on the foundation these revolutions, as the process of the delirious deterioration of human rights began it's handling of snakes and speaking in tongues, which created the lack of ideological anchors that were designed to hold the ship of revolutionary state safely in the harbor of the societies reformation. In other words....it all went down the crapper.

Revolution takes a number, and gets in line. A 19th century peasant women with a babushka thing, you know, a rag scarf over her head, she has bad teeth and she needs a shave let alone a bikini wax, as she stands stoically in a Ukrainian bakery on a Saturday morning in random order of rebellion.The Russian Revolution is regarded as the undisputed World Series of revolutionary events as pastry...it is also the model of how things can go horribly wrong and it's guided missile of social reform can be misguided from it's inception immediately following a faltering overthrow.

The 20th century industrial age, no inhibited Hobbits inhabit, however it is a dream catcher of Wobblie workers of the world ready to ignite and unite. Revolution. Pinkos. Commies. Socialists. Bolsheviks. Anarchists. Menshaviks, Trotskyites. The Age of Aquarius it aint, nor was. Its roots were deep in the socialist soil of the prior pre-horseless carriage century of steam and turbines....The Red Revolt is the flashpoint where the Utopian garden of Marxian Eden turned into a compost pile of rotted leftist leafy matter left behind by Lenin's leaflets eventually mutating into the homicidal stain of Stalinism. Say what you will about Hitler, Stalin with 20,000,000 purged and killed, made Hitler look like Ghandi by comparison.

Tsarist Russia (Tsar? Czar?) was not just about priceless shining bejeweled chandeliers and fabulous eggs by a flamboyant Faberge...they were however two of the three-dimensional symbols of the growing tsunami that was swelling into a giant wave of resentment of the Rus people for the Rus leadership. The Tsar may have been the thorn in the side of the Russian people, but the people were about to become a royal pain in the ass to Royal Russia.

From the Steppes to the Tundra...it was a not so pleasant peasant land of ox carts, antique farm tools, modern day serfs, according to Bennett, abject poverty and subjective taxes..all tossed into a chipper shredder that was bleeding and crushing the populous like so many of Steinbeck’s grapes of wrath. The workers ate stale bread, stolen bread, when they could get even that, while the royal family, would fastidiously feast on wild beasts, wilder game and choice meats. They lived an openly opulent lifestyle, wrapped in obscene luxury, wanting for nothing, as the masses starved, wanting for just the basics. In this political setting, a blinded Tsar Nicolas could not see the forest of reform, for the trees of dissent. The land we know as Russia is well known for its Bolshoi, but at this juncture in the crossroads of time, the Bolsheviks were tired of the bullshit.

This was the also the age of the restless revolutionary pamphleteer. The graphic mimeo minions. The Bolsheviks cranked up the volume of a message of a socialist utopia and the words were pouring from the printed pages of proletarian produced pamphlets propelled by propaganda on Viagra that ran as thick, and as it turns out, as red, as a hemophiliacs blood. The proletarian psyche was now psyched, ripe as peaches to taste the fruit of revolt, they were in effect..."Hot to Trotsky"....Lenin raised the flag, led the charge and pitched battles broke out in the streets ...in the end, twists and turns later, a minor Civil War added as a punctuation mark, the Czar and his loyal royal family were rounded up and, no good way to put this,...disposed of, ok, killed, in revolutionary fashion..every revolutionary action is designed to prevent a reactionary reaction....the country had been at war in Europe for years, WWI, and they were shell shocked, the people had had enough and the result is that the incarcerated royal family was imprisoned and cell shot.

Good Golly Miss Gulag! The Gulags dot the landscape in the 1920's and 1930's, so many houses and hotels on a Monopoly game board. Arrests and trials, propelled by patent paranoia, the jails filled quickly like a backed up sewer with imaginary enemies, real enemies, socialists, trade union leaders, clergy, military, and plain old peasantry arrested capriciously and filling the cells to capacity. Eventually Stalin turns from the Man of Steel to worm food and does the world a favor by dying, and the Soviet Union gets Kruschevfied on a communist cold war cross and eventually Gorbachev'd into a Russian version of "democracy."

The Cold War, replaced the Hot War. Nuclear annihilation seemed a reality, looming darkly on a mushroom shaped hopeless, helpless horizon. America was doing the math and the domino effect of multiplying communism was adding up in Korea, China, Vietnam and of course on our very doorstep, 90 miles off shore in Cuba. All of this kept America in a state of holocaustic anxiety, and the film Dr. Strangelove, strangely enough, doctor Kubrick, summed up all our fears in one cinematic package that still stands on it's own black and white merits today.

The Iron Curtain came down hard on the stage of the Eastern European theater at the close of the war, the Big One, Number Two, one of many wars to end all wars. Eastern Europe had traded in fascism for communism, and soon, revolts within the revolt erupted as Hungary was hungry for democratic reform and the freedom fighters of Czechoslovakia where Chzechmated with a show of force and tanks.

The race for space, nuclear arms superiority, spheres of political influence, Two bully nations set out to carve up the world like an overcooked Thanksgiving turkey, but the Soviets were out rumbled and out rubled in the Texas Death Match of national defense, but mostly, the revolution failed due to decades of military paranoia, political purges and racial pogroms.There were too many Five Year Plans that extended into ten years; too many Politburo and Dumas fat cats setting themselves up as revolutionary royalty, creating a worse class system then the one they had replaced. The communist cure, became the cancer instead, but by the 1980's paranoia paved the way to perestroika. The Gulag system crashed to the ground like the Twin Towers to a rubble of glasnost and Gorbachev, and the Berlin Wall came tumbling down at Checkpoint Charlie like a truckload of tinker toys and East could finally meet West.

Cuba. When it comes to government overthrows..this one is the sexy tits and ass floor show of revolutions....and proved that in on a third world island nation, when it comes to revolution...there is no business like show business...Cuba...a most sexy and sensuous Soviet satellite. A Caribbean island paradise of carnal pleasures, where pussy and politics go hand in hand along with the rum soaked bacchanals since the United States hijacked it during the Spanish-American War in 1898. An outlandishly flamboyant island nation of sexy, curvaceous and long leggedy African heritaged females, dressed as plumed dancers on brightly lit casino stages, next door to premium grade heavenly whorehouses in decadent old Havana with a stable full of sex floor shows involving everything from one on one on one lesbianism to Hi Yo Silver beastiality....giddyup! It was the private American play land of brothels, good times, and bad gangsters, like Lucky Luciano and Meyer Lansky, and Third World American hand picked hand puppet leaders, like Juan Bautista, who was America's Howdy Doody on a string and a devoted fetishista for a fashionable form of facism.

The mob made Cuba an offer it couldn't refuse in the 1950's. The rich got richer, and the poor once again, got poorer. The country was as ripe as a field of sugar cane for revolution, when cabana's would give way to Companero's and beach bums would make way for beach bombs. It was time for the Mafioso to make room for the Marxists and Lansky to surrender to Lenin. It had been a long struggle, but on New Years Eve, 1959.....the island nation of Cuba began it's long trek on the Kremlin Brick Road to take it's place 90 miles off shore to become the Soviet suppository poised to ram up the ideological ass of the Ugly American.

Revolucion had been brewing slowly for years in the hands of the Cuban maestros of the masses ...Fidel Castro, his brother Raoul and there brother in arms, former South American doctor, Ernesto Guevara...or Che as he is commonly referred to on t-shirts in head shops around the world right next to the bong pipes. Together, they managed to orchestrate the overthrow of the Bautista regime to a raging hot, hot, hot calypso beat. The beat was loud, ten plus decibels at least, as the record spun, one revolution at a time at a speed of 33 revolutions per minute, and Castros message was crystal clear, and pure High Fidel-ity.

Castro, enamored with American sports, baseball, hotdogs and all things America, wanted to play ball with the "free" world, and I use that term loosely, so he went to New York to speak to the United Nations, and to countries including the United States for some sort of cooperative agreement to work together with the new Peoples Republic. That very term, A Peoples Republic is repulsive and repugnant to the likes of Uncle Sam (of the people, for the people and by the people)...but if Big Brother can call the shots, that is a different story, but Castro wasn't about to let them extend the control they used to enjoy over his new country, so the U.S. began it's bully tactics to back Castro down.

So, Castro goes next door to the Soviet Union to borrow a cup of political sugar and the Kremlin was only too happy to accommodate him. To America, Cuba was a piss ant third world county, but to those cagey KGB types in Russia, they envisioned a giant erector set of armed nuclear missiles strategically aimed at America Thus began the arduous Cuban Missile Crisis and an untold number of bungled CIA led assassination attempts against Castro, and the conspiracy theories only multiply from there like rabbits. Just ask Oliver Stone.

The Soviet Union collapsed under its own weight in the Mid 1980's and the economic umbilical chord to Cuba was severely severed. Cuba's economy faltered, and that damned American embargo is still imbecilic ally in place. Vacationing Canadians and economics minded Europeans on business trips go there all the time, but Americans are still banned from visiting or doing business in this land of 20,000,000 potential consumers. Which is the type of halted reasoning that marks the time when the clock stopped, as America heads into the future with geriatric politics 50 years old, proving that a democracy with Alzheimer’s doesn't always work either when there are no term limits...America....no country for old men.

So, in theory the Cuban Revolution worked, although held together today with economic duct tape lo these many years later. It has become the Rolling Stones of revolution. Today, Cuba is struggling, but getting by, and the political climate is changing. The rest of the world has thrown open it's doors and windows, and although Kennedy was cut down, and all the other presidents dead or retired...Fidel marches on like a Timex watch...he takes a licking but keeps on ticking...he is also president of a country that, thanks to a slow economy and the need to hold onto everything and waste not, want not, things like old cars abound. Chevy's, Buicks, Nomads, Woody's, ponderously ply the ornamental balcony'd streets of hood ornament Havana and internal combustion Cuba has become one massive V-8 under the hood, power to the people classic car show on wheels! Hot cars Hav-an-a blast!

The Sleeping Red Giant of China. More than mere Mao. It's a melting pot of proletarian posturing on everything from Taiwan to the Manchurian Candidates vacation hot spot of North Korea (yes, another revolution/Civil War that is holding America at bay to this day..the Forgotten War. Stalemate.) The I-ching Chiang Nationalists had to partner with the Maoists to fight the Japanese...lets face it, it takes three to tango in the Sino-Japanese war.

Once the common enemy, Japan was defeated, by the Nationalist and Communist forces of the Chinese schizo-political two headed Medusa....America backed Chiang...until it got bored and eventually pulled the rug out from under the defeat feet of Mr. and Mrs. Spare Change Chiang. At this point, Papa Ooh Mao Mao moved into the driver’s seat of power...while the Chiangs thumbed a ride to tie one on in Taiwan.

Little Red Guards, Little Red Books, Little Red Stars (looking strangely today like a Macy's Christmas ad)...and an atrocious taste in clothing that would never be seen on Project Runway...spare, sparse and utilitarian...Chinese revolutionary clothing are the epitome of what is found at a clearance sale in the basement of a Salvation Army Mission in downtown Gary, Indiana...that is about as low on the skid row fashion scale as you can go,.... red-rags for the rag-tags. That is part of the reason that America only gives lip service to human rights violations in China, as opposed to attacking them as we like to do to other countries...You can't fight a war with imperialism effectively if you're not accessorized properly. Capitalists like a nattily dressed adversary to spar with.

Now if you go carrying pictures of Chairman Mao...take that Little Red Book...it ain't Steinbeck, it aint Hemmingway, but it's a best seller in China and outsells the bible by billions in the Mao-belt. The Counter Revolution, the Cultural Revolution, c'mon, how many revolutions within a revolution do you need? Or to put it differently, how many revolutions does it take to screw in a light bulb?

China today has gotten orgasmic and has taken to a body politic of copulation between communism and capitalism in a big way, fiduciary fornication, marketing and selling and manufacturing just about anything and everything you can find in home or office. It's a definite Yin-Yang thang. China no longer says "phooey," to Hong Kong, chop suey economics, is embracing its import/export foreign trade fornication superiority over the United States. I received a American Flag pin recently from some misguided VFW post for a journalistic piece I did on their Voice of Democracy program, I still don't know why, .anyway...I unwrapped it from it's plastic and looked at the back...yep, Made in China! Irony for Imperialism, eh? It's like getting raped without a rubber. Of course, even the rubber would be made in China.

China is mucho mysterioso and today its money markets and the stock exchange have replaced its Great Wall. Confucius made room for capitalist confusion and economic dichotomy in its public square psyche...Tiananmen Square...American outrage ...the outcome? Business as usual...America doesn't see red in China anymore...it sees green and that drives the machine.

This is one Communist led revolution that has been a success under the circumstances..ecomonically, militarily, and diplomatically with the so called "free world"....Cuba too, for it's sheer staying power and longevity and muy gigante Castro cajones in holding off the Beast for decades, and then...there is Vietnam....and it's one, two, three, what are we fighting for? 50,000 dead ... an American crime against itself. We were told "go fuck ourselves" and being who we are, we did just that.

Those feisty Vietnamese ricers beat the crap out of the Japaneses, flambeaued French imperialism into French toast at Dien Bien Phu and then Giap wholloped the heavy weight contender, the Ugly America with a resounding knock out victory and a final score of 53,000 Americans dead, needlessly. If nothing else, the conflict of conscription led to demonstrations back in the states, mistrust of the government, rioting, Black Panthers, SDS...it ignited a revolution in the Sixties. Women’s rights, human rights, civil rights, gay rights. No, it didn't result in the overthrow of anything except a collective human conciseness., Lets face it, the other side had more guns but we had more flowers, and we learned never take a gardenia to a gun fight. The French Student Revolts of the Sixties however are modern day models of proletarian efficiency and that is because they took less flowers to the barricades. Next time...leave the flowers in the garden.

It did change our concienseness and spawned a new and improved generation of Tom Joad inspired Tom Hayden types...politicians who over time, ripened, and softened, turning into just plain old liberal Democrats, (dogs without teeth) no longer street fighting activists. So in essence, Vietnams own revolution infected it's violator, it's rapist, America, with a revolutionary spirit, and gave America a dose of political clap, it's side effect, residual effects, made it the most influential revolt of all time.....a comedian at the time regarding democracy said..."Why are we trying to ram democracy down the throats of Vietnam at the point of a bayonet. In my neighborhood, if something is that good, they steal it..."

There will be no such outcry today in draft-free America over Iraq or Afghanistan. The thinking is that it's only volunteers whose asses are on the line, along with the civilians of those countries, so the world doesn't really rally or stand up loud and proud and take notice, except the families of the dead, and a few quietly, passive activists, reserved and resigned to the fact that their "warriors" died for a good cause, whether or not it is, or was, or will be. Not mine to judge. Most wars are stupidity of the highest order anyway. But...as with all revolutions, eventually, the walls come tumbling down.

In the past, America has managed to back its own future enemies along with dictators who ruled their countries with an iron fist, and we backed them as long as it was in our best interests. Examples: Batista in Cuba, the Shah of Iran, Chiang Kai Shek, Joseph Stalin, ...hell we even backed to the hilt Saddam Hussein (he was keeping Iran at bay for us) and leave us not forget that at one point we gladly armed and supported and in effect created our own enemy in Osama Bin Laden in his peoples revolt against the Soviet Union. America backed the Brits in India against Ghandi in post WWII, and the British claims to Palestine.

A good rule of thumb...if America is backing a world leader...chances are that leader is destined for the political guillotine, and will be overthrown by their own angry populace, or at some point that backed leader will turn on it's Master becoming it's sworn enemy, such as Bin Laden...in America we're lucky, unlike the old Soviet Union, you can disagree with this countries policies...as long as it's not too loud, too proud and too far left of Pennsylvania Avenue.

..So..you say you want a revolution..."the revolution will be televised."