Word: communistic
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Members of the American Communist Party, who never numbered more then one million, must have felt jilted by history. The beloved proletariat, so requiting during hard times, had, at first opportunity, run off with capitalism's traveling salesman. As the cold war closed in, Communists were once again looked on as the seducers of godless foreign power. "We ought to drop one of these automatic bombs on the Communists," said one Midwestern farmer during the early '50s. The prescription for homegrown Reds was McCarthyism, which threatened democracy more than the encapsulated cells of the American Communist Party...
Vivian Gornick takes a considerably more dramatic-indeed romantic-view of what she calls the "romance" of American Communism: "Marxism was for those who became Communists what Helen was for Paris. Once encountered, in the compelling persona of the Communist Party, the ideology set in motion the most intense longings." These, writes Gornick, became a consuming passion, "that was in its very essence both compellingly humanizing and then compellingly dehumanizing...
This is a fair example of the author's wafting prose style. Phrases like "an awesome move toward humanness" and such gauzy generalizations as Communists "were like everybody else, only more so" swell throughout her pages. Yet the book does have a vital core. Gornick, an essayist for New York's Village Voice, stages her psychopolitical Liebestod with a living chorus of former Communist activists whom she interviewed in various parts...
...former labor organizer and Spanish Civil War volunteer, who today is a folk hero to vacationing liberals. There are old Wobblies from Idaho, miners from West Virginia, women who left their families to go "underground," fiery daughters of dirt farmers, rebellious sons of the rich, and even an ex-Communist who now works for organized crime...
...there's no politics anymore. The years when I was a Communist, bar none, were the best of my life. The relation for me between the personal and the historical was intense, deeply felt, fully realized. Now, I live an entirely personal life, removed from the larger world. I feel no interest in anything beyond my work. I work hard, I'm proud of the work I do, I consider it an obligation to take as much responsibility for the medical profession as I can, but that's it. The world is smaller, colder, darker...