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Pithy! Sort of reminds me of that Kevin Spacey/Kate Winslett movie, “The Life of David Gale.” It left me scratching my head trying to figure out which side I thought I was on.

If “the enemy of my enemy is my friend,” then if you bilk capitalists of their money in the cause of socialism, wasn’t that a good day’s work?

or, as Dolly Parton once remarked in an interview on NPR years ago, “If I can make a lot of money by making a lot of people think I’m dumb, that’s pretty smart, don’t you think?” (that’s not the exact quote; I couldn’t locate it but it’s out there somewhere…)

SAD STORY

There was a gifted Mexican who came up here to paint,
And he very kindly did so for a while with no complaint.
He merely took some jobs away from all the local boys,
And he merely made some speeches full of sweaty talk and noise.

He frequently was heard to say he didn’t like the rich.
He said they all had Little Souls and hearts as black as pitch.
He thought HIS soul was good and true and also very large.
Well, maybe that explained the price he felt he had to charge.

He said he was a Worker, but he asked for kingly pay.
He got it, too. He painted for a hundred bucks a day.
He grew as fat as Henry Eighth, his wife looked like a queen.
He was the Wealthiest Worker New York has ever seen.

The other day some nervous men, who owned a spacious wall,
Requested him to let it be and paint some other hall.
They gave him—and he promptly took—a very handsome check,
But when they tried to say goodby they got it in the neck.

He said he wouldn’t say goodby, he wished to paint the wall;
It was a moral issue and they had so souls at all.
And now he says unless they let him open up his heart
Upon their wall, they plainly will assassinate his art.

Well, someone’s art’s assassinated almost every day,
It happens every time that any painter’s turned away.
So that even this pure spirit must have killed, without a sob,
The art of his competitors the day he got the job.

“We venture to expect
That what we recollect,
Though but a part of true High Art, will have its due effect.” —W.S.G.

“Peter, if anybody does marry you, it will be for the pleasure of hearing you talk piffle.”

Yes, Josiah, the astringency of citrus in general has many Political Implications. It is especially good for cleansing off the rotten fish taint of the petit-bourgeois from one’s skin.

But there is also a particular association of Trotsky with limes, is there not? For instance, it is generally assumed that in Pablo Nerudo’s poem “Drunk as Drunk”, the stanza which goes
Pinned by the sun between solstice
And equinox, drowsy and tangled together
We drifted for months and woke
With the bitter taste of land on our lips,
Eyelids all sticky, and we longed for lime

Neruda is speaking allegorically of the seduction of Capitalism, equating it here with sleep and drifting (although in other poems he refers to it appropriately as chocolate), and the “lime” he/we long for is the True Catharsis of Trotskyism.

Interestingly, the FCC Phnom Penh Bar (yes, in the infamous Phnom Penh Hotel ) sells a cocktail called the Trotsky for $4.50, consisting of gin, Cointreau, pineapple and of course lime. (see here at http://www.fcccambodia.com/phnom_penh/phnom_penh_bar.php?a=menu ) I wonder if the hotel restaurant sells the pie?

One sometimes hears rumors of a copy of the original Russian recipe showing up in either Siberia or Mongolia (including an extremely circumstantial tale from Tuva involving a pair of young lovers, an angry father, and a felt horse blanket), but none has stood up to close investigation. No credence should be given to Kim Jong-Il’s claim to have a copy hidden in a secret vault under a mountain a couple of hours outside Pyongyang. It’s well known to everyone outside North Korea that the only Korean copy was destroyed in a bombing raid in 1952.

Jana C.H.
Seattle, Soviet of Washington
Saith WSG: What’s the use in being half a fairy? My body can creep through a keyhole, but what’s the good of that when my legs are left kicking behind?