Do I Look Like a Communist To You?

I have to believe that thoughtful people who happen to prefer McCain know that this socialist and "un-American" talk is crap. But I am reminded of yet another classic family story to share with you.

My Uncle Joe and my Grandpa Sam, as I have said, came to America from Vilnius, Lithuania (which they called then Vilna), which was, among other things, a center of Jewish learning in Europe, and a city in which leatherworking was a big trade. Both Joe and Sam were trained to some degree to work with shoes or leather gloves, and when Joe came to America, he actually came with some friends his own age from Vilna, also leatherworkers; they all ended up in an upstate New York town called Gloversville. You can guess what the chief industry there was.

One of the friends who came over with Joe was a guy who took the American name Morris Miller. Here's the backstory on Morris: when he was a very little baby, he and his mother and father lived in a little village -- a shtetl -- in Belarus, near Minsk. Morris' father was a good looking, dashing, literate fellow named Joseph, who did not, at this point in time, take his marriage vows all that seriously. Joseph became quite taken with a young beauty who was visiting relatives in the shtetl, and before long, he had divorced his wife, married the young beauty, and they had a child. (The exact order of these events is not all that clear.) What is clear is that Morris and his half-sister Becky were less than two years apart in age. Which was irrelevant at that time, because Morris's divorced mother picked him up and moved to Vilna, where she had family, where she remarried a widower with a young daughter, and where Morris ended up growing up alongside Joe, and going with him to America.

Now, Morris was ... oh, how shall I put it ... a cranky man. He was a cranky young man, he was a cranky old man, and he was a pain in the ass to virtually anyone who knew him. He had an opinion about every damn thing, and made it clear. He was a pussycat, actually, to his wife, Helen, who had been his step-sister in the old country, and he was Joe's good buddy. The other odd thing that he did was when his various half-brothers and sisters, whom he had never met, started making their way to America, he took them in, one at a time, and got them a start. Within a few years of his arrival, first Becky showed up, and then two more sisters (Rose and Ida); years later, the youngest two of all of the eleven of them made their way over and were taken in and raised by their older sisters. But Morris got them all started. He even introduced his beautiful younger sister Ida to his friend Joe's brother Sam, and my Grandma Ida was married from her brother Morris' home.

I knew Morris when he was old, and he scared the crap out of me, as he had scared my mother all her childhood. He was a dignified, good looking man of about five foot three, with a brushy mustache, and never a kind word for anyone, except Aunt Helen. He lived in the same apartment he had moved to when they all came from Gloversville to New York City around 1916. Joe and his wife Sarah lived on the same block, because he and Morris were buddies, worked together, hung out together. Talked politics together. A lot.

Morris, true to his contrary nature, had started toying with the idea of communism being a good thing. (This was before news of Stalin's atrocities got out to the west.) Joe, who loved, adored, worshipped everything about the U.S. and its way of life and everything it had done for him, was disgusted. Even so, they continued to debate it, until one day, it escalated to the point where Joe asked Morris, Well, if someone gave you your own little store to run, would you still be a communist? Oh no, said Morris, then he would happily embrace capitalism if it meant a personal profit.

Joe was so disgusted at what he saw as an unwillingess to support even his own beliefs -- in essence, someone who had no belief system at all -- that he stopped talking to Morris, and never did again. And vice versa. I remember going into the city to visit family a couple of times as a kid, and everything had to be orchestrated so that we would visit them both -- they lived on the same damn block after all -- but that they wouldn't see each other. You couldn't sit out on Joe's front stoop because Morris might pass by. (And make his sister's life a living hell because we had also visited Joe.)

Anyway. My point, if I have one, is that you need to believe in what you believe in, and you need not to say things that might be hurtful if they're crap and you don't believe in them anyway. Morris never was a communist, he just liked to argue with Joe, but for Joe, America was real and special. Morris liked to see people squirm. He was Not A Nice Man.

According to Kurt Vonnegut, We are what we pretend to be. So we'd better be careful about what we pretend to be.

John McCain, Sarah Palin, Rush Limbaugh: take notice. Be careful. (Although I don't think Limbaugh is pretending.)


WATCHING GOD SAID HA! :: ENTRY #1886
READING: Don't Know Much About History by Kenneth C. Davis