Word: communed
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They are a widely varied crowd, according to these useful, firsthand accounts of the commune movement. Some of the members are rather younger at heart than in years, like Moishe, an energetic 60-year-old participant in a group-marriage experiment outside San Francisco. Some of the new communalists were disillusioned radical antiwar protesters. Others were drug culturists seeking freedom from legal hassles, or flower children trying to recapture the euphoria of San Francisco's brief "summer of love." Still others were intellectual Utopians out to build non-nuclear families along the lines of B.F. Skinner's Walden...
...first communes to rise and fall, Author Houriet reports, was Oz, a fantasy-ridden experiment near Meadville, Pa., which featured daily readings from Dr. Seuss, Winnie the Pooh and (naturally) The Wizard of Oz. Meadville's citizens, at first tolerant, gradually turned against Oz, largely because of the commune's lack of concern with flush toilets and regular baths. Once, Houriet reports, an Ozite named Patty-Pooh tried to "vibe away" unfriendly visitors by "performing a nude dance on the farmhouse roof. Of course," he adds, "it had the opposite effect...
...Though China's press may carry only a few lines [about the announcement of Nixon's visit], the whole subject today is undoubtedly being cautiously discussed and explained down to the commune level. Only one thing may have surprised the Chinese: Mr. Kissinger's success in keeping his visit secret. Experience with American diplomats during World War II had convinced Chinese leaders that Americans could not keep secrets...
...American tourists start shuttling across the Hong Kong border to begin the already standard Canton-Shanghai-Peking run. But the prospects for future tours are mind-bending: "Swim the Yangtze in Chairman Mao's wake," for example; or perhaps "Join the Harvest at the Sino-Albanian Friendship Commune." For the present, however, the few Americans allowed into China in the sneakered steps of the U.S. table tennis team have accumulated sufficient experiences to allow construction of a half-Baedeker...
Favorable Winds. Provincial radio stations are forever scolding errant Chinese for a variety of venal sins. One recent broadcast complained that "class enemies" at a commune in Kwangtung province "have whipped up a sinister capitalist wind of 'going it alone' in sideline production." Translation: some miscreants are spending too little time down on the commune and too much tending the few vegetables, pigs and chickens they are allowed to raise and sell for cash...