My Mama the Communist
Raise less corn, more hell!
And so this week is May Day. We can have – or heave! – a cocktail for the working man. We can put on our marching shoes, like we did two years ago, millions and millions of immigrants and those who love them in the streets. We can do lots and loads of things. But me, I’m missing mi mamacita communista. Oh, she didn’t die or anything. She just retired and moved back to Oklahoma, where I’m sure as hell not going anytime soon for a visit.
These are the things my mother taught me:
*Contra Barbara Ehrenreich, it is perfectly acceptable to pay a lady to clean your house. You just have to pay her three times the going rate, and you may not use the sort of slave agency that can afford to advertise in the Yellow Pages. You must find a lady via reference or supermarket bulletin board.
*The dog can drink out of the pool.
*It’s best if the babies are naked.
*Protesting is fun! Marching is better!
*It is our patriotic duty to cuss loud and creatively. Lenny Bruce wants us to stick it to the squares. For America. And the children.
*Good names for America’s pets and children include Rosie, Emma, Fidel and Diego, and any of her children who don’t comply will have their kids’ and pets’ names changed unilaterally. Rodents should be named after baked goods.
*The best name for getting arrested under while demonstrating is Emma Goldman.
*Good places to get arrested are the Nevada Test Site, Diablo Canyon, and the mean streets of Thousand Oaks circa Gulf War I.
*Bad places to get arrested are on warrants for failure to appear.
*All the words to “Union Maid.”
*C-Span is a joy and a privilege.
*UNION!
*Do not stand around doing nothing if someone else is working. This applies equally to camp-outs and the lady cleaning your house.
*High levels of wealth may be forgiven if they are spent on cliff-side or canyon Modernist homes.
*How to make freeway off-ramp banners out of bed sheets and shelf liners.
*How to choose a losing candidate.
*The names of a high proportion of local flowers and trees.
*The “Hail Mary” and “Our Father”
*Liberation theology.
*All 15 stanzas in the poem The Cremation of Sam McGee.
*There’s no need to hold a grudge for more than a couple of hours, unless your friend is 100 percent right and you are 100 percent wrong, in which case you may stay angry for the next 15 years.
*Blame America first.
*Un pueblo unido … can never be divided!
*I should not wear whore shoes. Actually, she finally gave up on that.
*Good places to pick fights are at parties and in line at the grocery store.
*There is never an inappropriate time to talk politics.
*Do not fail to appear.
*Ronald Wilson Reagan = 666.
*George H.W. Bush wasn’t much better.
*Also, April Glaspie totally told Saddam we didn’t care if he went into Kuwait.
*Seriously, that whole war was LIES!
*Hey, guess what? So’s this one too!
*I would regret my Nader vote like she regretted hers for Eldridge Cleaver.
*Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good.
*No, really, I am not allowed to vote for Ralph Nader.
*WHAT DID SHE TELL ME???
*UNION!
*Read Catch-22. A good place to do this is on the sand at Hermosa Beach in 1966.
*Read Let’s Eat Right to Keep Fit.
*Read Mother Jones and the Utne Reader.
*Read A Prayer for Owen Meany.
*Read Evelyn Waugh and the sainted Miss Ivins.
*Erma Bombeck was funny too. Really, she was.
*Read Eda LaShawn, and take her childrearing tips to heart: Forgive yourself if you snap and smack your kid, but it’s a lot better to do it because you’re out of control than if it’s in-control and premeditated. Also, kiss your husband or wife before your kids when you get home from work, because the best thing you could possibly give them is parents who are happy and in love.
*Read e.e. cummings, Bukowski and Thompson. The best way to do this is out loud at the dinner table. Also, the scene in Tracks where someone takes a shit on Louise Erdrich’s pillow.
*Reading trashy romance novels is giving me a skewed vision of life, and I will never marry and will always be sad.
*I should marry an ugly guy. He will love me.
*I should do my son’s homework for him, but make him watch. Eventually he’ll pick it up by osmosis. I know you’re appalled, but she was an inner city schoolteacher for nearly 20 years, and her kids’ test scores went up 70 percentage points after they had her. Seriously. But yeah, it still sounds like awful advice.
*It is better to have a kid who cusses than the kind of little prig who goes, “Ooooh, I’m telllllling!” when someone else does.
*If you don’t take your kids to parties and restaurants and concerts and galleries and other social and cultural events, you are loosing an idiot upon the world.
*That entails making them behave. Princes and princesses reflect badly. On YOU.
*A little violence never hurt anybody, so there’s no reason not to take a three-year-old to see Lethal Weapon 4.
*Weed will save you from alcoholism.
*There will come a day when I no longer look cute on a barstool.
*How to make a martini.
*How to clean a kitchen.
*How to do all her phone-treeing for the Democratic Club meeting.
*How to use chopsticks.
*Water is life.
*My plants are screaming in anguish.
*If I don’t water my plants, she is going to take them away, because I do not deserve to own plants.
*Also, my dog.
*And my son.
*Whom she will rename Fidel.
*Both of them.
*If people start their overwrought bitching about Stalin! and 20 million dead! don’t bother to respond about the Butcher of Santiago making Chile safe for capitalism, and our complicity in his Disappeared, or about any of our other complicities (even Iraq). Just point and laugh.
*The Contras really shouldn’t have raped those nuns.
*Roberto D’Aubuisson really shouldn’t have assassinated Archbishop Romero and Che.
*Ronald Reagan really shouldn’t have committed treason by sending George Bush pere to Paris before he was elected to promise the Iranians missiles should they be so kind as to keep the hostages just a little bit longer.
*No, Ollie North did not look “sexy” in his uniform.
*Viva Sandino!
*Viva Chavez!
*Viva Fidel!
*Jimmy Carter was the best president.
*Too bad about Ronald Reagan’s treason and all.
*How to pronounce “primer” as in a schoolbook (short i).
*How to pronounce “mauve” (long o).
*There are UFOs in Topanga.
*Just because you are driving a crappy old Geo Metro does not mean you are friendless, as the crabby cop who kicks your 57-year-old schoolteacher ass will learn to his dismay when the former head of Amnesty International and the legal director of the ACLU takes your case.
*The Southern California ACLU got its start in San Pedro, after Upton Sinclair got arrested for reading the First Amendment out loud on Liberty Hill.
*UNION!
*Serious people don’t care if a boycott’s “over” or “doesn’t exist.”
*Brown rice, not white.
*All the words to the 1930s lullaby “Lilac Trees,” including the spoken coda: “And then the little pickaninny boy got sick and died, and all the little white children were sorry they didn’t play with him.”
*If you love Martin Luther King in 1961 Oklahoma, boys in your high school will threaten to “make you dead.”
*Down with Whitey.
*And The Man.
*And most women, too.
*If we’re going to be so un-American as to actually love the Constitution, that means the Second Amendment too.
*But not the Eighteenth!
*Because it was repealed!
*When your kid has to write an essay on What the Flag Means to Him, and you are writing it for him just like she told you to, be sure to include “The Right to Burn It.”
*Why are you leaving out the best part?
*She knew you were going to leave out the best part.
*Idiot.
*Love your mother.
Published: 04/30/2008
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Comments
May Day -- someone remembered....
Justice is a constant struggle.
The guys at the docks remembered - all the west coast ports are SHUT DOWN. Their union says it's a protest against the war.
While your mama taught you mostly good things, her statement that "Jimmy Carter was the best president" was not saying a hell of a lot.
I voted for Carter, but then read (and researched) some very nasty things about him.
Your mom needs to do a bit of fact-checking, and perhaps you do too.
Carter, through Zbigniew Brzezinski, initiated the funding of the Mujahideen back in 1979, to instigate the Russian invasion of Afghanistan as to embroil them in their own version of a Vietnam quagmire.
In fact, Mr. Brzezinski bragged about it in a 1998 interview with Le Nouvel Observateur .
this is from the interview
Q: ".....do you regret having supported the Taliban, and having
given arms and advice to future terrorists?
Brzezinski: "What is most important to the history of the world? The
Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet empire? Some stirred-up
Moslems or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the cold
war?"
Zbigniew Brzezinski would have fit well into the Bush administration. He sounds about as profound as Rumsfeld when he predicted the Iraq war wouldn't last 6 months.
Carter also initiated the funding of the Contras, those lovely people that Reagan called "Freedom Fighters", who tortured innocent villagers in Nicaragua.
On a minor note, as far as:
"I should marry an ugly guy. He will love me."
That's an insecure statement, and not necessarily true. One can find both qualities in the same person.
I have, and so have many others.
Other than that, enjoyed the article.
Commie Girl. Not what she seems.
http://www.google.com/custom?domains=the...
http://www.theorangejuice.com/2008/04/pa...
http://www.theorangejuice.com/2008/04/ha...
SMS
After reading about Commie Mom near weekly for 11 years, I did not think it was possible to love her any more than I already did. But now I love her more. Becca, too.
Viva Topanga!
Ah, mein schvester.......you are so cool!!! You've even got a creepy methhead wannabe-goth lesbo stalker, who even imitates (tries to) your prose style, which is unique. And rawks, the most. I love you!!!
There is nothing like a mother's wisdom.
I would add the Autobiography of Malcolm X to the list.
I also want to know who took my handle?
ocdemmother
Who cares? Now *here's* a story:
http://thecentristoc.com/?p=124
Rebecca Schoenkopf: The long lost daughter of Archie Bunker? A total fraud to the LGBT community? You decide.
SMS
Hi Rebecca,
<i>*A little violence never hurt anybody, so there’s no reason not to take a three-year-old to see </i>Lethal Weapon 4.
I would agree totally, and you can add sexual material to that very same thought. (Insert your favorite erotic title here.)
Derrick ;-)
Commie mom is my new hero!
i LOVEDLOVEDLOVED this story.
signed (proudly),
her mom