Word: communed
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...PEASANT. A worker at the Ma Chang Commune in Honan will rise at dawn, come rain or shine. Before a breakfast of corn dumpling soup and tea, he will spend two hours plowing the stony earth while his wife cleans their two-room hut, then joins him in the fields. A member of a 300-man production team-one of six on the commune-he will then have to face three hours in the field before a brief lunch of millet, sorghum and tea. Then it is back to the fields until sundown. Before supper-occasionally it may include meat...
...this particular commune, the pay of a peasant is 30 yuan a month -roughly $12. But the farmer pays only 1 yuan a month in rent, 60 to 80 for cigarettes and, as likely as not, nothing at all for books or magazines; despite the massive literacy campaigns, the majority of peasants are still functionally illiterate. The farmer's children, though, attend the commune school, where elementary math is taught in concrete, even ominous terms. A typical question: "How many guns have four militiamen each armed with two guns...
...basic foodstuffs-rice, noodles and breadstuffs-are obtained by the peasant as his share of the production of his commune, which is run by a revolutionary committee. Medical care is free, thanks to the "barefoot doctors" -medical technicians who are assigned to all communes. Television on the commune is, of course, unheard-of. Many families have radios, though, and from time to time entertainment is provided by touring companies of actors and musicians...
There is a dulling sameness to the peasant's life. Still, most commune dwellers are grateful to have seen the end of the bad old days before the revolution. Then there was an eternal debt that could never be paid, abuse from a landlord whose word was law, wandering soldiers who stole and confiscated...
...died when the celebration stopped, when artists began consciously thinking of themselves as critics, not as exalters. of the established order. The mood was set a century ago when Gustave Courbet, one of the fathers of modern art, helped to topple the Vendome column during the Paris Commune of 1871. Modern democracy has flattened the myth of the hero, and there are still no good monuments to Churchill or Roosevelt; to imagine an equestrian bronze of Nixon or Pompidou on some future Capitol is to enter the realm of farce...