Another birthday today
But I hope to keep going to 75, which is exactly the number of candles this great Texan outlaw extinguished last week. By the way, the choice of today's video was not influenced by any kind of morbid thoughts. It's actually funny in a noirish kind of way. And our blog motif, runs through it, too: "Gravedigger, when you dig my grave / Could you make it shallow? So that I can feel the rain."
To mark the birthday, I am planning to go to Highgate Cemetery on Sunday morning and upon reaching the grave of Karl Marx a minute of silence will be observed for all those who have perished in the name of his evil notion that the choice is between capitalism and Communism. The episode will end with a pint in The Flask and a discussion of this futuristic scenario:
One hundred years from now, Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev are resuscitated from their cryptogenically frozen state. Gorbachev logs on to the Economist and bursts out laughing.
"Why are you laughing?" asks Reagan.
"Because it says here that United States is now a socialist federation," Gorbachev explains.
Reagan calls up the Financial Times and laughs even harder. "Why are YOU laughing?" asks Gorbachev.
Reagan explains: "It says that everything is quiet on the border between Poland and China."
Comments
When I stood with a friend at Marx's grave years ago, I told him (and others there) that I could never think of Marx without thinking of Peter Fechter.
Peter Fechter (Jan 14, 1944 –Aug 17, 1962) was a bricklayer from East Berlin, who at age 18 became one of the first victims of the Berlin Wall's border guards. He was shot going over the wall and bled to death in the no-man zone beneath the wall as the guards looked on.
That a worker should die like that personifies what Marx did for the "Workers of the World."
Posted by: Henry Barth | May 9, 2008 5:14 AM