23.10.11
I'm reading a good book called "One-storied America" by a pair of soviet journalists Ilf and Petrov. Those two might be better known for a novel called "The 12 chairs," after which a number of movies were made, among others one in Hollywood, I think directed by Mel Brooks. The latter is a comedy about the search for a certain chair that's supposed to have a fortune's worth of diamonds hidden inside the cushions. The book I'm reading now isn't so much a comedy as a sort of historical novel. I never have been too interested in history. I've joked with my students, whenever the topic of discussion allows for a digression into education, that history is completely worthless, we'd do well to spend the time studying math instead.
Nevertheless I find this book very interesting. It's about the authors' excursion in America around the year 1936, during the great depression and before the start of the second world war. It's very interesting to see America at a different time and from a foreigner's point of view. A foreign eye sees things that a native doesn't ever notice. It's also interesting to get to know the people they met on their journey. They wrote about a lot of communist sympathizers, including Henry Ford, who they met on their way through Detroit. They mentioned a baptist who hitched a ride with them from Utah further west, who preached the same cheerful song I've heard many a time in my own life, and not just from baptists, that all of us who don't convert are going to burn for eternity. This was ammusing for the communist authors, whose country had officially prohibited collective practice of any religion - perhaps to no avail, for though they had no God, they had Lenin and Stalin. They also spent some time on a Navajo Indian reservation in New Mexico. They said the Navajo despised anything associated with the white man, but that there was one white man who had gone to live on the reservation to convert the savages to christianity, and ended up becoming an Indian himself. This was a very interesting character: respectful of the earth, satisfied with the life of a livestock farmer; not surprisingly also a communist.
A few times while reading I've wanted to look up a few things in a Russian history textbook that I left behind in Vladimir. The 'five year plan' which had just come to an end in Russia was described by a layman in the book as a plan by which everyone in Russia worked, and in return received food and shelter from the government. I understand that the Russians were then working out a new five year plan that would be much like the first, which allegedly worked out rather well. But where does all the terror that people in the west heard about fit into play? Were things really going well at that time, or were millions of Russians starving and being thrown into the gulags? What would Ilf and Petrov have to say about this?
There was another hitchhiker, incidentally unemployed, who said that the richest Americans should be allowed to have no more than five million dollars. That's an interesting idea, one you don't hear much today. Today raising taxes the slightest amount on the richest two percent of Americans is as antipatriotic as some of the more radical ideas back then. But opposing either idea, raising taxes, or capping the wealth at so many millions of dollars begs the question: how many yachts do you need? I can't get past this question. Ayn Rand, though she helped me sympathize with some insanely rich people, couldn't convert me completely. Actually, I might have made a good communist.