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Raul Castro to Company: Your Idea Stinks
Fragrance finito. The news from Havana: Labiofam was forced on Friday to put a stopper in the “Hugo” and “Che” colognes it uncorked on Thursday. We had said that these power-to-the-people perfumes, named for Che Guevara and Hugo Chavez, were put on the market. It appears we were in error. They were prototypes. After 24 short…
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Perfuming the Culture Red
This site has been relying on a visual metaphor for cultural emanations of communism. We never thought of the sense of smell. We’re thinking again, what with the products that a Cuban company called Labiofam has just brought out, in hopes that the wafting aroma of Marxist-Leninist heroes will attract the cologne-buying public. Bottles of…
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Steinbeck’s Synthetic Grapes
One of the major social justice novels of the Depression era, The Grapes of Wrath, just turned 75. National Public Radio commemorated this milestone. John Steinbeck’s 1939 Dust Bowl epic about the Joad family was based on articles he wrote for the San Francisco News and the Nation on the plight of agricultural workers migrating from…
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Agnieszka Holland on the Prague Spring
In 1968, over 150,000 Red Army troops entered Czechoslovakia to reverse the political liberalization known as the Prague Spring. Agnieszka Holland’s new movie Burning Bush, about the Soviet invasion and its aftermath, aired originally on HBO in Europe. The work of Holland, a Pole educated in Prague, is familiar to American audiences. Her long list…
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July Feature: A Response
Taken to Task. “What’s Going on Here?” by B. O. Goodbody rebuts what your editor wrote about “the great American folk scare.” It’s at the top left, the Pages list, in the Guest Essay Archive.
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“There Are Intellectuals Who Say Anticommunism Is Somehow Uncool.”
A book has just been published by the University Press of Kentucky on The Lives of Others, the landmark drama about the East German secret police. This Oscar-winning movie from 2006, mentioned previously on the site, is examined from just about every angle in Totalitarianism on Screen: The Art and Politics of “The Lives of Others” edited…
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Was Joseph Schumpeter a Communist?
Most unlikely. But having just read the Communist Manifesto of 1848, I was struck by this highly Schumpeterian passage: “The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionising the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society. . . . Constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social…
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Painting the Culture Black
As in, The Black Notebooks. This site, as you know, is dedicated to mapping left-totalitarianism’s attractions for artists and intellectuals. We would be remiss if we did not do the same for right-totalitarianism. The influence that enthusiasts of the Third Reich have had on philosophy and literary theory has long been known. However, new details…
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Last Word on “Llewyn”
O Brother! Why Bother? The latest issue of the Claremont Review of Books has a masterful essay by the critic Martha Bayles. It’s framed by discussion of the Coen Brothers movie so often mentioned on this site. But this is more than a movie review. Bayles covers allied subjects—1930s folk music, 1960s folk music, figures like…
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Painting the Culture Red 