Wednesday, September 17, 2003

 
Soccer Momzers
Or: Mercader projection
Or: Getting the Trotskys in the Land of the Aztec Two-Step

"Time me hearties for a hearty, 'Ahoy, matey, welcome aboard, ye auld sod!' to that fine gentlemen of letters, Andrew Sullivan. 'Tis plain as the pox on me face that he told a tale of a soccer match between communists and anarchists and also bespoke of the lads of Monty Python after he be reading them words that ye see below on the 12th of September."
Ahem, LJS may have delusions of grandeur or "ideas of reference," given that it is about as likely that AS has visited this site as it is that Johnny Cash decided to fade to black after readin' the post of Sept. 5. -Not that I understand LJS that well anyway; can't figure out why sometimes he be dropping 'is "H's." And besides, me favorite pirate be Ayn Rand's "Ragnar Danneskjold" who attacked socialist shipping.
That character was the inspiration for the middle name of my younger son.
Gotta drop the talk like a pirate stuff.
It's too much to hope for say, a soccer match between a team with the personal integrity to call itself "The Stalinists" and one named "The Trotskys." Fans of the former(who would inevitably be derided as "The Useful Idiots")could get it on with an Atlanta Brave-like "pickaxe chop" and have as their game specific mascot, "Ramon Mercader."(The abuse of the U.S. Soccer Team and its supporters by Mexicans and Mexican-Americans in the Coliseum of Los Angeles in 1998 was, sad to say, not conjectural) Ramon's proletarian instrument penetrated the consciousness of the old hero of the Red Army but didn't get around to offing his wife Natalia who had also been granted asylum in Mexico.
Leon's given surname btw., was "Bronstein" as noted in a piece by Jerry Z. Muller, published in *Commentary*magazine. Muller repeats a story (possibly apocryphal according to a reader's letter) that the "chief rabbi of Moscow" was alarmed that an anti-semitic backlash resulting from the acts of highly visible Jewish communists could harm all Jews, (even though only a small minority of them were, in fact, communists, as observed by Muller). It was, I think, sometime during Rudy Boschitz's second unsuccessful campaign for the U.S. Senate against Paul "Pol Pot" Wellstone, that I embelished the rabbi's(?) famous(?) warning: "The Trotskys and Wellstones make the revolutions and the Bronsteins and Boschwitzes pay the bills." Needless to say, that bon moron wasn't picked up by Rudy's team, although it couldn't have hurt his campaign as much as his infamous late in the campaign direct mail letter criticizing Wellstone because he had a non-Jewish wife and so on. -Guess ol' "Plywood kopf" Rudy didn't have my, er, gift for tact and sober commentary.
And speaking of "projection,"(also a little geography pun in one of the above titles) it could have been added to the previous post that while Siggy Freud has been largely replaced by anti-depressant and anti-psychotic meds, it seems plausible that he got something right with respect to what might be a heritable (and probably universal)tendency for projection.
Oh, and of "Momzer": it has had a number of different meanings, and the sense used is how I would guess an old yiddish theater might have adapted one of the lines of "Breaker Morant": "Shoot straight, you Momzers!"