#communist party of canada

[if-you-fan-a-fire]

“REDS CONDUCT TWO MARTYRS TO GRAVE,” Montreal Star. April 29, 1930. Page 6. ---- Huge Demonstration Precedes Burial of Strike Agitators ---- STREETS ARE LINED --- Communist Army Out in Full Force at Port Arthur ---- PORT ARTHUR, Ont., April 29. (CP) - Determined to uphold to the last the theory that the two lumber strike agitators, Voutilaine and Resvall [sic: should be Rosvall and Voutilainen] had died martyrs to the cause. A Communist army yesterday paraded through the streets as the two bodies were borne to the cemetery.

Out in the thousands to view the eclipse of the Sun, Port Arthur residents watched the great procession move slowly through the darkened streets. Nearly 2,000 men, women and children marched, a display of Communist sentiment beyond any ever be fore seen in the two cities of Port Arthur and Fort William.

BOTH DISAPPEARED Last Fall two lumber worker organizers, sent out to organize the men in the camps for a strike, disappeared at Onion Lake. Provincial police investigated and reported they had probably met death by falling through the ice while attempting to cross the Iake against advice. The explanation was not accepted by the Reds and letters were written to the Department of Justice at both Toronto and Ottawa asking further inquiries.

This spring the bodies were found. The talk of foul play was renewed and sensational charges made public, given circulation in red-ink circulars spread about the two cities and in a Finnish paper published at Sudbury. Three surgeons instead of one as usual, attended the post-mortem examination preceding the inquest to assure those interested on the point of foul play. One was a nominee of the Communists. The Coroner's Jury found accidental death by drowning on the basis of the medical men's report. 

Yesterday the Reds paraded in strength through the streets, taking Rosvall to the cemetery, where interment was made without religious ceremony of any kind, in keeping with the cult. The army was assembled from Port Arthur, Fort William and West Fort. 

The cortege was headed by a brass band, playing funeral dirges. [AL: Very unsympathetic news report on the largest funeral in the history of what is Thunder Bay, Ontario, that repeatedly calls the Communist Party, very influential among the Finns of the Lakehead, a cult.  Rosvall and Voutilainen’s mysterious deaths were sensational stories then, and local legend held they had been murdered by thugs hired by the logging camp bosses. Read more here.]

[mioritic]

May Day in Queen’s Park, Toronto, 1937

Photo by John Boyd

[ireton]

What did trudo know about the communist party infiltrating the government of Canada ?

[connorthemaoist]

Written, Debated and Adopted in 2023.            Released January 31, 2024 | kites-journal.org

"The (New) Communist Party of Canada, (N)CPC, pursues two innately linked objectives:

a) Establish working-class rule in the economic and political spheres of Canada; and

b) Usher in a new, non-colonial, equal and fraternal type of relations between all nations which today remain forcefully and unequally united within the Canadian state.

Neither one of these goals is likely to be achieved in a lasting, meaningful way without the other. Working-class power without national liberation and national equality would have to be built on an illegitimate, coercive basis. National liberation without working-class power would mean a mere reform of Canadian law, or else create powerless statelets that would fall prey to any of the multiple imperialist powers contending for domination and survival in the world today.

The program of the (N)CPC aims to provide a sharp, scientific analysis of current conditions in Canada, a strong overview of the history of people’s struggles and communist party-building in this country and an illuminating way forward that can mobilize and unite all our class’s most dedicated, relentless fighters in the pursuit of a bright socialist future.

This program is a tool for building the future and a weapon for fighting the enemy. It should be taken up, studied, understood, sharpened and further improved by all those who share the two goals outlined above."

[panicinthestudio]

How Beijing targets Chinese Canadians through foreign influence operations, March 3, 2023

Alliance Canada Hong Kong executive director Cherie Wong joined Power & Politics Friday to discuss how Beijing targets Chinese Canadians. Akshay Singh and Dennis Molinaro, two experts in foreign influence operations in Canada, also weigh in on the scale and goals of foreign interference activities in Canada.

CBC News

@allthecanadianpolitics

There is an important distinction being made here that the foreign interference from China seeks to be pervasive by co-opting individuals, institutions, and community groups. The interest and influence is party agnostic and sees us in the Chinese diaspora as an entry point: whether in support of certain electoral and policy outcomes, controlling what information gets propagated into the communities, appropriating issues like discrimination and increasing distrust in our own systems and institutions, or directly and indirectly targeting people of interest.

***

It has been strongly implied in the recent reporting about Chinese interference in Canada that it has been a failing (if not to the benefit) of the Liberal government and Trudeau, rather than systematic attempts to influence Canadian politics and economics for decades coupled with our country’s complete underestimation of China and the United Front.

In my own experience the Chinese-Canadian media and political consumption has undergone an extreme shift into partisanship with clear pro-China and anti-China camps rather than aligning into our political parties.

The faltering of Hong Kong-based press, media, political freedom, and  ties with Taiwan and the greater diaspora community has seriously depleted any sort of moderate and critical voices in English or Chinese coming directly from the region, with writers and journalists re-immigrating or retreating from public view. 

Cold War rhetoric and posturing over Taiwan, Tibet, Xinjiang, Hong Kong, as well as exposed espionage and foreign interference operations is opening new fault lines within and directed at diaspora while deepening the isolation of the domestic Chinese population. 

The pop cultural center has moved with the economic affluence into the Mainland, catered to and directly influenced by a network of state-run broadcasters and private corporations ultimately answerable to the Chinese government. It can be difficult to engage with any of it as entertainment let alone to keep up with news without expending a lot of energy consuming it critically.

Tangentially but also related, many of Hong Kong’s pro-democratic political figures (the Hong Kong 47) that interacted with the outside and independent press or engaged other countries in the aftermath of the 2019-2020 protests and subsequent political organizing have been effectively silenced, charged, and/or jailed. They are only now being formally sentenced under the highly controversial Hong Kong national security law.

The political reverberations led to a postponed and then uncontested election for their legislative and executive body without any substantive opposition, the closure of multiple news organizations, civic rights groups and unions, the local polling institute, and the effective silencing of editorial independence at their public broadcaster.

Self-censorship and the chilling affect is extremely strong by those regions directly affected as well as the diaspora communities, out of fear or apathetic hopelessness it is eroding our ability to speak, associate, or engage with these issues freely no matter where we are.

[ppcbug]

Jagmeet is a discord mod now 🤣

[enchantedsunflowerkat]

toronto people!!! this thursday!!! be there!!!

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[jovialbasementbouquetblr]

2024 VOA: Economist Mao Yushi in Vancouver, BC

Chinese economist Mao Yushi and his wife have moved permanently to their daughter’s home in Vancouver, B.C., Canada. Chinese economist Mao Yushi of the banned independent economic thinktank Unirule recently wrote a message for Chinese youth. Translation below. I am very old and won’t live much longer. The world of the future is for the young. You should be more anxious than I am about the kind…

[if-you-fan-a-fire]

“Reds Rain Snowballs On Police Battalion,” Toronto Star. January 20, 1931. Page 3. ---- Communist Meeting Broken Up in Montreal - Ten Arrests ---- Montreal, Jan. 20 - Communists who held a demonstration for which a permit had been refused by police, had their meeting roughly broken up by constables at the Labor Temple yesterday. Five men were arrested for making inflammatory speeches against the police department and five for obstructing the law. 

The request to hold the meeting was received some time ago, but like numerous others was refused by Chief of Police Langevin. He learned that the demonstration was to be held in any case, and plainclothesmen who visited he hall yesterday reported the speeches were made, urging a march on the city hall to demand work and better police treatment.

The 100 officers who had been held in readiness broke up the meeting and arrested the five speakers. As the officers were leaving the hall a crowd outside peppered them with snowballs. They charged the crowd, used their clubs freely, and made the five additional arrests.

[mioritic]

Right: Police break up a meeting of the banned Communist Party at Queen’s Park, Toronto, 1929

Left: Toronto police take a suspect into custody after a Communist Party demonstration at City Hall, 1930

Photos by John Boyd

Part of “A Century Caught on Camera”, a retrospective of 100 years of Globe & Mail staff photographers

[connorthemaoist]

A New Party is Born

Founding Announcement of the (New) Communist Party of Canada

January 31, 2024 | kites-journal.org

To all those toiling and struggling in Canada who suffer and anger at the worsening of conditions among the people broadly; and

To all those who have no illusions remaining about the supposed benevolence of the Canadian state, who have come to see the naked reality of the monopoly-capitalist ruling class that controls it, and the imperialist state that it has long been and become in order to serve that ruling class; and

To all those who have come to understand and stand in opposition to bankrupt liberalism and the monsters it breeds around the world;1

And finally, to all the rest who are in search of a real way forward out of the misery and decay of the present world, which is the world imposed by capitalism and imperialism,

We say: Don’t despair! Because a new period has commenced, a new party of the proletariat has been forged!

Today, we announce the formation of the (New) Communist Party of Canada (the (N)CPC), the succesful completion of its Founding Congress, and the public release of its Political Program.

The new Party is announced today, but it was not born today. The (N)CPC was born in clandestinity over two years ago, in 2021, after the protracted Unity-Struggle Process of 2020-21 succeeded in rallying communist revolutionaries from across Canada, old and new, with many veterans of what we have come to calling the “third,” and even some from what we are calling the “second,” communist party-building movements in Canada, alongside a great many newer, younger proletarian revolutionaries who were only too ready to carry forward the torch of proletarian revolution in the world today.

The (N)CPC was born in clandestinity because our Party—which is guided by what we consider to be the highest stage of revolutionary proletarian theory at this point in history, Marxism-Leninism-Maoism—knows only too well that proletarian revolution is neither a peaceful “civil” act nor a Parliamentary affair. Rather, it is a protracted political process of accumulating revolutionary forces, building the organs of proletarian political power and escalating confrontations with the ruling class and its agents that can and eventually must lead to open civil war between the antagonistically opposed classes. We know full well that the capitalist-imperialist state and ruling class will not hesitate to vilify and repress the communist vanguard party and the proletarian revolutionary movement the moment it apppears as a threat to the bourgeoisie. Thus, our Party builds the proletarian revolution accordingly, in clandestinity. After all, a real (i.e., revolutionary)communist party is the only existential threat that the bourgeoisie faces. The dictatorship of the bourgeoisie knows this, while many Leftists,“Marxists,” “Maoists, ” etc. donot. Serious communist revolutionaries like ourselves, however, do, and thus act accordingly in our mission to bring the proletariat into power.

The (N)CPC now counts over two years of party-building activity since its constitution in 2021. These two years have consisted of intensive and extensive political activity that has included:

a continuation of the process of regrouping communist revolutionaries in Canada through unity and struggle;

advancing the process of summing up the experience and rectifying the errors of the preceding (third) party-building movement;

building the infrastructure of the new party;

developing new mass work in the working class and other sections of the proletariat with refined methods and in ways that break with the limitations of the preceding movement;

developing and struggling over the Party Program and its revolutionary strategy; and finally,

convening and successfully concluding both the Founding Conference (2021) and Founding Congress (2023) of the (N)CPC.

Prior to the Party’s consolidation in 2021 as a democratic centralist communist vanguard party, well over a year of serious effort was directed into the Unity-Struggle Process of 2020-21. This process succeeded in uniting (through struggle) most remaining fragments of the third party-building movement and the vast majority (but not all) of the participants of the various groupings represented in the unity-struggle process, namely: Unité Maoiste, Proletarian Revolutionary Organization (coming out of one strand of the former Revolutionary Initiative, or RI), a separate group “RI-Canada,” and what remained of the “Pan-Canadian” section of the PCR-RCP. In fact, all the members of the first three groupings in this list were won to the new party, as well as the majority of the latter grouping.

The Unity-Struggle Process of 2020-21 can claim success in having unified most of the existing proletarian revolutionary groupings in Canada who had managed to find and expand their political initiative preceding, during, and following the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic, despite the absence of the guiding hand of a larger democratic centralist communist organization behind them. It was a remarkable achievement that these forces in 2020-21 managed to accomplish in just about a year’s time what the two organizations of the third party-building movement (RI and PCR-RCP) were not able to achieve in 15 years, i.e., unifying virtually all groupings of communist revolutionaries into a single revolutionary communist vanguard party.2 However, it was by learning from the experiences that came before us that we’ve made these advances and forged the new party.

As its first public act, the (N)CPC brings forward its Program for socialist revolution in Canada, a document struggled over for many months, and based in many more months of research and theoretical work, and finally, debated, refined, and adopted at the Founding Congress of the (New) Communist Party of Canada in 2023. We expect this document to be a great point of debate for some years to come as we build the Party into a formidable force and take the next steps in the proletarian revolutionary process in this country. We wholeheartedly invite the discussion, debate, and further struggle for unity with all other proletarian revolutionaries who we will soon encounter and the many more who we have yet to forge.

The (N)CPC upholds, seeks to build upon, and will sum up to the best of our abilities, the experience of its revolutionary predecessors, including: the first and once revolutionary (but no longer) Communist Party of Canada of the 1920s and ’30s, what we call the first party-building movement in Canada; followed by the Marxist-Leninist anti-revisionist movement that arose from the 1960s onward, leading to the second party-building movement throughout the 1970s, especially the Workers’ Communist Party of Canada and In Struggle!; and finally, the two organizations of the third party-building movement in Canada whose experiences range from the early-to-mid 2000s right up to the end of the 2010s, namely the Revolutionary Communist Party of Canada (PCR-RCP) and Revolutionary Initiative (RI). These last organizations have provided much of experience and force out of which our party has been forged. The (N)CPC, through the contributions of a great number of participants of the third party-building movement, is now nearing the completion of summations of the overall experience of the third party-building movement, consisting of distinct summations of both PCR-RCP and RI, as well as a separate and briefer overview of the “third wave” as a whole. These summations will clarify what we have learned, what we uphold, and what we have needed to make a break from the third party-building movement. As for the main short-comings of our forerunner organizations, our Party Program summarizes:

In the case of the PCR-RCP these shortcomings were mainly the consequence of dogmatism and poor application of democratic centralism, leading to stagnation and a series of splits. For Rev­olutionary Initiative, a foundational failure to grasp party building as the principal task of communist revolutionaries opened room for a syndicalist deviation to take hold in the organization, leading to a process of liquidation.

Our Party and its cadre will soon bring forward our full summations of these organizations, which we believe will amount to the most comprehensive overview to date concerning the PCR-RCP and RI experiences. Our Party has studied these experiences to a great extent (which many of us were a part of), and we are well underway in the course of rectifying the errors of our predecessors.

It is also our aim to see similarly comprehensive summations made of the first and second waves of communist party-building in Canada. However, given that our existing movement is much further removed in time and personal connection from those earlier periods of the proletarian revolution in Canada, we must find distinct approaches to summing those up. We are still in the process of investigating parts of the second wave of party-building, which comes to us largely by way of discussions and interviews with the revolutionary elders and veterans still kicking around from that period. Parts of this work will be published in the not-too-distant future in kites. We also intend to initiative a comprehensive summation of the first Communist Party of Canada in its revolutionary days. However, that period will likely only be accessible to us through academic tracts and older anti-revisionist literature, and not first-hand participants (considering the fact that that party has been off the revolutionary road for more than seventy years now!). This summation work is just a small part of the theoretical and ideological work that we are now assuming, and that work is just a small part of the much greater ideological, political, and organizational work that lays ahead of us.

To our comrades, revolutionary-minded people, and all struggling and exploited people in Canada who are sick of the world and this country in its present form and who are ready to consider a future under the leadership of the proletariat: we urge you to study and struggle with the new Program of the (N)CPC, make yourself fit and ready to join the communist vanguard party, and take a step into the enormous task of making the proletariat a protagonist in the future course of history once again.

To our comrades internationally, the would-be and the actual revolutionary leaders of the international proletariat:

Let’s hasten the work of reconstructing revolutionary communist parties everywhere where they do not exist!

Let’s rebuild the proletarian revolutionary movement, especially in the imperialist countries!

Let’s link arms with all those communist-led people’s wars and other communist revolutionary forces who have kept the torch of Marx, Lenin, and Mao lit and burning bright through the darkest hours of the international proletarian revolution, and rebuild the revolutionary international communist movement!

Central Committee of the (N)CPC

January 31, 2024

[inthedayswhenlandswerefew]

1968 [Chapter 6: Athena, Goddess Of Wisdom]

Series Summary: Aemond is embroiled in a fierce battle to secure the Democratic Party nomination and defeat his archnemesis, Richard Nixon, in the presidential election. You are his wife of two years and wholeheartedly indoctrinated into the Targaryen political dynasty. But you have an archnemesis of your own: Aemond’s chronically delinquent brother Aegon.

Series Warnings: Language, sexual content (18+ readers only), violence, bodily injury, character deaths, New Jersey, age-gap relationships, drinking, smoking, drugs, pregnancy and childbirth, kids with weird Greek names, historical topics including war and discrimination, math.

Word Count: 5.2k

Let me know if you’d like to be tagged! 🥰

💜 All of my writing can be found HERE! 💜

Here at the midway point in our journey—like Dante stumbling upon the gates of the Inferno—would it be the right moment to review what’s at stake? Let’s begin.

It’s the end of August. The delegates of the Democratic National Convention in Chicago officially vote to name Aemond the party’s presidential candidate. His ascension is aided by 10,000 antiwar demonstrators who flood into the city and threaten to set it ablaze if Hubert Humphrey is chosen instead. At the end—in his death rattle—Humphrey begs to be Aemond’s running mate, one last humiliation he cannot resist. Humphrey is denied. Eugene McCarthy, dignity intact, boards a commercial flight to his home state of Minnesota without looking back.

Aemond selects U.S. Ambassador to France, Sargent Shriver, to be his vice president. Shriver is a Kennedy by marriage—his wife, JFK’s younger sister Eunice, just founded the Special Olympics—and has previously headed the Office of Economic Opportunity, the Peace Corps, and the Chicago Board of Education. He also served as the architect of the president’s “War on Poverty” before distancing himself from the imploding Johnson administration. Shriver is not a concession to fence-sitting moderates or Southern Dixiecrats, but an embodiment of Aemond’s commitment to unapologetic progressivism. Richard Nixon spends the weekend campaigning in his native California, a gold vein of votes like the mines settlers rushed to in 1848. George Wallace announces that he will run as an Independent. Racists everywhere rejoice.

Phase III of the Tet Offensive is underway in Vietnam; 700 American soldiers have been killed this month alone. Riots break out in military prisons where the U.S. Army is keeping their deserters. The North Vietnamese refuse to allow Pope Paul VI to visit Hanoi on a peace mission. President Johnson calls both Aemond and Nixon to personally inform them of this latest evidence of the communists’ unwillingness to negotiate in good faith. Daeron and John McCain remain in Hỏa Lò Prison. The draft swallows men like the titan Cronus devoured his own children.

In Eastern Europe, the Russians are crushing pro-democracy protests in the largest military operation since World War II as half a million troops roll into Czechoslovakia. In Caswell County, North Carolina, the last remaining segregated school district in the nation is ordered by a federal judge to integrate after years of stalling. On the Fangataufa Atoll in the South Pacific, France becomes the fifth nation to successfully explode a hydrogen bomb. In Mexico City, 300,000 students gather to protest the authoritarian regime of President Diaz Ordaz. In Guatemala, American ambassador John Gordon Mein is murdered by a Marxist guerilla organization called the Rebel Armed Forces. In Columbus, Ohio, nine guards are held hostage during a prison riot; after 30 hours, they’re rescued by a SWAT team.

The latest issue of Life magazine brings worldwide attention to catastrophic industrial pollution in the Great Lakes. The first successful multiorgan transplant is carried out at Houston Methodist Hospital. The Beatles release Hey Jude, the best-selling single of 1968 in the U.S., U.K., Australia, and Canada. NASA’s Apollo lunar landing program plans to launch a crewed shuttle next year, just in time to fulfill John F. Kennedy’s 1962 promise to put a man on the moon “before the end of the decade.” If this is successful, the United States will win the Space Race and prove the superiority of capitalism. If it fails, the martyred astronauts will join all the other ghosts of this apocalyptic age, an epoch born under bad stars.

The night sky glows with the ancient debris of the Aurigid meteor shower. From down here on Earth, Jupiter is a radiant white gleam, visible with the naked eye and admired since humans were making cave paintings and Stonehenge. But Io is a mystery. With a telescope, she becomes a dust mote entrapped by Jupiter’s gravity; to the casual observer, she doesn’t exist at all.

~~~~~~~~~~

What was it like, that very first time? It’s strange to remember. You’re both different people now.

It’s May, 1966. You and Aemond are engaged, due to be married in three short weeks, and if you get pregnant then it’s no harm, no foul. In reality, it will end up taking you over a year to conceive, but no one knows that yet; you are living in the liminal space between what you imagine your life will be and the cold blade of the truth. Aemond has brought you to Asteria for the weekend, an increasingly common occurrence. The Targaryens—minus one, that holdout prodigal son, always glowering from behind swigs of rum and clouds of smoke—have already begun to treat you like a member of the family. The flock of Alopekis yap excitedly and lick your shins. Eudoxia learns your favorite snacks so she can have them ready when you arrive.

One night Aemond takes your hand and leads you to Helaena’s garden, darkness turned to twilight in the artificial luminance of the main house. You can hear distant voices, chatter and laughter, and the Beatles’ Rubber Soul spinning on the record player in the living room like a black hole, gravity that not even light can escape when it is wrenched over the event horizon.

You’re giggling as Aemond pulls you along, faster and faster, weaving through pathways lined with roses and sunflowers and butterfly bushes. Your high heels sink into soft, fertile earth; the air in your lungs is cool and infinite. “Where are we going?”

And Aemond grins back at you as he replies: “To Olympus.”

In the circle of hedges guarded by thirteen gods of stone, Aemond unzips your modest pink sundress and slips your heels off your feet, kneeling like he’s proposing to you again. When you are bare and secretless, he draws you down onto the grass and opens you, claims you, fills you to the brim as the crystalline water of the fountain patters and Zeus hurls his lightning bolts, an eternal storm, unending war. It’s intense in a way it never was with your first boyfriend, a sweet polite boy who talked about feminist theory and followed his enlightened conscience all the way to Vietnam. This isn’t just a pleasant way to pass a Friday night, something to look forward to between differential equations textbooks and calculus proofs. With Aemond it’s a ritual; it’s something so overpowering it almost scares you.

“Aphrodite,” Aemond murmurs against your throat, and when you try to get on top he stops you, pins you to the ground, thrusts hard and deep, and you try not to moan too loudly as you surrender, his weight on you like a prophesy. This is how he wants you. This is where you belong.

Has someone ever stitched you to their side, pushing the needle through your skin again and again as the fabric latticework takes shape, until their blood spills into your veins and your antibodies can no longer tell the difference? He makes you think you’ve forgotten who you were before. He makes you want to believe in things the world taught you were myths.

But that was over two years ago. Now Aemond is not your spellbinding almost-stranger of a fiancé—shrouded in just the right amount of mystery—but your husband, the father of your dead child, the presidential candidate. You miss when he was a mirage. You miss what it felt like to get high on the idea of him, each taste a hit, each touch a rush of toxins to the bloodstream.

Seven weeks after your emergency c-section, you are healing. Your belly no longer aches, your bleeding stops, you can rejoin the living in this last gasp of summer. Ludwika takes you shopping and you pick out new swimsuits; you’ve gone up a size since the baby, and it shows no signs of vanishing. In the fitting room, Ludwika chain-smokes Camel cigarettes and claps when you show her each outfit, ordering you to spin around, telling you that there’s nothing like Oleg Cassini back in Poland. You plan to buy three swimsuits. Ludwika insists you get five. She pays with Otto’s American Express.

That afternoon at home in your blue bedroom, you get changed to join the rest of the family down by the pool, your first swim since Ari was born. You choose Ludwika’s favorite: a dreamy turquoise two-piece with flowing transparent fabric that drapes your midsection. You can still see the dark vertical line of where the doctors stitched you closed. Now you and Aemond match; he got his scar on the floor of the Breakers Hotel in Palm Beach, you earned yours at Mount Sinai Hospital in Manhattan. There are gold chains on your wrist and looped around your neck. Warm sunlight and ocean wind pours in through the open windows.

Aemond appears in the doorway and you turn to show him, proud of how you’ve pulled yourself together, how this past year hasn’t put you in an asylum. His right eye catches on your scar and stays there for a long time. Then at last he says: “You don’t have something else to wear?”

~~~~~~~~~~

It’s Labor Day, and Asteria has been descended upon by guests invited to celebrate Aemond’s nomination. The dining room table is overflowing with champagne, Agiorgitiko wine, platters of mini spanakopitas, lamb gyros, pita bread with hummus and tzatziki, feta cheese and cured meats, grilled octopus, baklava, and kourabiethes. Eudoxia is rushing around sweeping up crumbs and shooing tipsy visitors away from antique vases shipped here from Greece. Aemond’s celebrity endorsers include Sammy Davis Jr., Sonny and Cher, Andy Williams, Bobby Darin, Warren Beatty, Shirley MacLaine, Claudine Longet, and a number of politicians; but the most notable attendee is President Lyndon Baines Johnson, shadowed by Secret Service agents. He won’t be making any surprise appearances on the campaign trail for Aemond—in the present political climate, he would be more of a liability than an asset—but he has travelled to Long Beach Island tonight to offer his well-wishes. From the record player thrums Jimi Hendrix’s All Along The Watchtower.

When you finish getting ready and arrive downstairs, you spot Aegon: slouching in a velvet chair over a century old, hair shagging in his eyes, sipping something out of a chipped mug he clasps with both hands, flirting with a bubbly early-twenties campaign staffer. Aegon smiles and waves when he sees you. You wave back. And you think: When did he become the person I look for when I walk into a room?

Now Aemond is beside you in a blue suit—beaming, confident, his glass eye in place, a hand resting on your waist—and Aegon isn’t smiling anymore. He takes a gulp of what is almost certainly straight rum from his mug and returns his attention to the campaign staffer, his lady of the hour. You picture him undressing her on his shag carpet and feel disorienting, violent envy like a bullet.

Viserys is already fast asleep upstairs, but the rest of the family is out en masse to charm the invitees and pose for photographs. Alicent, Helaena, and Mimi—trying very hard to act sober, blinking too often—are chit-chatting with the other political wives. Otto is complaining about something to Criston; Criston is pretending to listen as he stares at Alicent. Ludwika is smoking her Camels and talking to several young journalists who are ogling her, enraptured. Fosco and Sargent Shriver are entertaining a group of guests with a boisterous, lighthearted debate on the merits of Italian versus French cuisine, though they agree that both are superior to Greek. The nannies have brought the eight children to be paraded around before bedtime. All Cosmo wants to do is clutch your hand and “help” you navigate around the living room, warning you not to step on the small, weaving Alopekis. When Mimi attempts to steal her youngest son away, he ignores her, and as she begins to make a scene you rebuke her with a harsh glare. Mimi retreats meekly. She has never argued with you, not once in over two years. You speak for Aemond, and Aemond is a god.

As the children are herded off to their beds by the nannies, Bobby Kennedy—presently serving as a New York senator despite residing primarily on his family’s compound in Massachusetts—approaches to congratulate Aemond. His wife Ethel is a tiny, nasally, scrappy but not terribly bright woman, five months pregnant with her eleventh child, and you have to get away from her like a hand pulled from a hot stove.

“You know, I was considering running,” Bobby says to Aemond, chuckling, good-natured. “But when I saw you get in the race, I thought better of it! Maybe I’ll give it a go in ’76, huh?”

“Hey, kid, what a tough year you’ve had,” Ethel tells you, patting your forearm. You can’t tear your eyes from her small belly. She has ten living children already. I couldn’t keep one. What kind of sense does that make? “We’re real sorry for your trouble, aren’t we, Bobby?”

Now he is nodding somberly. “We are. We sure are. We’ve been praying for you both.”

Aemond is thanking them, sounding touched but entirely collected. You manage some hurried response and then excuse yourself. Your hands are shaking as you cross the room, not really seeing it. You walk right into Lady Bird Johnson. She takes pity on you; she seems to perceive how rattled you are. “Oh Lyndon, look, it’s just who we were hoping to speak to! The next first lady of the United States. And how beautiful you are, just radiant. How do you keep your hair so perfect? That glamorous updo. You never have a single strand out of place.” Lady Bird lays a palm tenderly on your bare shoulder. She has an unusual, angular face, but a wise sort of compassion that only comes from suffering. Her husband is an unrepentant serial cheater. “I’ll make you a list of everything you need to know about the White House. All the quirks of the property, and the hidden gems too!”

“You’re so kind. We’ll see what happens in November…”

“Good evening, ma’am,” President Johnson says, smiling warmly. He’s an ugly man, but there’s something hypnotic that lives inside him and shines through his eyes like the blaze of a lighthouse. He pulls you in through the dark, through the storm; he promises you answers to questions you haven’t thought of yet. LBJ is 6’4 and known for bullying his political adversaries with the so-called “Johnson Treatment”; he leans in and makes rapid-fire demands until they forget he’s not allowed to hit them. “I have to tell you frankly, I don’t envy anyone who inherits that den of rattlesnakes in Washington D.C.”

“Lyndon, don’t frighten her,” Lady Bird scolds fondly.

“Everyone thinks they know what to do about Vietnam,” LBJ plods onwards. “But it’s a damned if you do, damned if you don’t clusterfuck. If you keep fighting, they call you a murderer. But if you pull the troops out and South Vietnam falls to the communists, every single man lost was for nothing, and you think the families will stand for that? Their kid in a body bag, or his legs blown off, or his brain scrambled? There’s no easy answer. It’s a goddamn bitch of a quagmire.”

Lady Bird offers you a sympathetic smirk. Sorry about all this unpleasantness, she means. When he gets himself worked up, I can’t stop him. But you find yourself feeling sorry for President Johnson. It will be difficult for him to learn how to fade into disgraced obscurity after once being so omnipotent, so beloved. Reinvention hurts like hell: fevers raging, bones mending, healing flesh that itches so ferociously you want to claw it off.

LBJ gives Lady Bird a look, quick but meaningful. She acquiesces. This has happened a thousand times before. “It was so nice talking to you, dear,” she tells you, then crosses the living room to pay her respects to Alicent.

The president steps closer, looming, towering. The Johnson Treatment?? you think, but no; he isn’t trying to intimidate you. He’s just curious.

“Do you know what Aemond’s plan is for ‘Nam?” LBJ asks, eyes urgent, voice low. “I’m sure he has one. He’s sworn to end the draft as soon as he gets into office, but how is he going to make sure the South Vietnamese can fend off the North themselves? We’re trying to train the bastards, but if we left they’d fold in months. It would be the first war the U.S. ever lost. Does he understand that?”

“He doesn’t really discuss it with me.” That’s true; you know his policies, but only because they are a constant subject of conversation within the family, something you all breathe like oxygen.

“We can’t let Nixon win,” LBJ continues. “It’s mass suicide to leave the country in his hands. The man can’t hold his liquor anymore, getting robbed by Kennedy in ’60 broke something in him. He gets sloshed and shoves his aids around, makes up conspiracies in his head. He’s a paranoid little prick. He’ll surveille the American people. He’ll launch a nuke at Moscow.”

You honestly don’t know what he expects you to say. “I’ll pass the message along to Aemond.”

“People love you, Mrs. Targaryen.” LBJ watching you closely. “Believe it or not, they used to love me too. But I still remember how to play the game. You’re the only reason Aemond is leading the polls in Florida. You can get him other states too. Jack needed Jackie. Aemond needs you. And you’ve had tragedies, and that’s a damn shame. But don’t you miss an opportunity. You take every disappointment, every fucked up cruelty of life and find a way to make it work for you. You pin it to your chest like a goddamn medal. Every single scar makes you look more mortal to those people going to the ballot box in November. You want them to be able to see themselves in you. It helps the mansions and the millions go down smoother.”

“President Johnson!” Aegon says as he saunters over, huge mocking grin. He thumps a closed fist against the Texan’s broad chest; the Secret Service agents standing ten feet away observe this sternly. “How thoughtful of you to be here, taking time out of your busy schedule, squeezing us in between war crimes.”

“The mayor of Trenton,” LBJ jabs.

“The butcher of Saigon.”

Now the president is no longer amused. “You’ve never accomplished anything in your whole damn life, son. Your obituary will be the size of a postage stamp. I’m looking forward to reading it someday soon.” He leaves, rejoining Lady Bird at the opposite end of the room.

You frown at Aegon, disapproving. You’re dressed in a sparkling, royal blue gown that Aemond chose. “That was unnecessary.”

Aegon is wearing an ill-fitting green shirt—half the buttons undone—khaki pants, and tan moccasins. “I just did you a favor.”

“What happened to your new girlfriend? Shouldn’t she be getting railed in your basement right now? Did she have a prior commitment? Did she have a spelling test to study for? Those can be tricky, such complex words. Juvenile. Inappropriate. Infidelity.”

“You know what he brags about?” Aegon says, meaning LBJ. “That he’s fucked more women by accident than John F. Kennedy ever did on purpose.”

“That sounds…logistically challenging.”

“He’s a lech. He’s a freak. He tells everyone on Capitol Hill how big his cock is. He takes it out and swings it around during meetings.”

“And that’s all far less than admirable, but he’s not going to do something like that around me.”

“How do you know?”

“Because he’s not an idiot,” you say impatiently. “He was perfectly civil. And I was getting interesting advice.”

Aegon rolls his eyes, exasperated. “Yeah, okay, I’m sorry I crashed your cute little pep talk with Lyndon Johnson, the most hated man on the planet.”

“I guess you can’t stop Aemond from touching me, so you have to terrorize LBJ instead.”

“Shut the fuck up,” Aegon hisses, and his venom stuns you. And now you’re both trapped: you loosed the arrow, he proved you hit the mark. He’s flushing a deep, mortified red. Your guts are twisting with remorse.

“Aegon, wait, I didn’t mean—”

He whirls and storms off, shoving his way through the crowd. People glare at him as they clutch their glasses and plates, sighing in that What else do you expect from the worthless son? sort of way. You’re still gaping blankly at the place where Aegon stood when Aemond finds you, snakes a hand around the back of your neck, and whispers through the painstakingly-arranged wisps of hair that fall around your ear: “Follow me.”

It’s not a question. It’s a command. You trail him through the living room, into the foyer, and through the front door, not knowing what he wants. Outside the moon is a sliver; the light from the main house makes the stars hard to see. “Aemond, you’ll never believe the conversation I just had with LBJ. He really unloaded, I think the stress is driving him insane. I have to tell you what he said about—”

“Later.” And this is jarring; Aemond doesn’t put anything before strategy. He grabs your hand as he turns into Helaena’s garden, and only then do you understand what he wants. Instinctively, your legs lock up and your feet stop moving. Aemond tugs you onward. He wants it to be like the very first time. He intends to start over with you, the dawning of a new age in the dead of night.

Hidden in the circle of hedges, he takes your face roughly in his hands and kisses you, drinks you down like a vampire, consumes you like wildfire. But your skull echoes with panic. I don’t want him touching me. I don’t want another child with him. “Aemond…”

He doesn’t hear you, or acts like he doesn’t, or mistakes it for a murmur of desire, or chooses to believe it is. He has you down on the grass under the vengeful gaze of Zeus, the fountain splashing, the sounds of the house a low foreign drone. He yanks off your panties, but he doesn’t want you naked like he always did before. He pushes the hem of your shimmering cobalt gown up to your hips and unbuckles his trousers. And you realize as he’s touching you, as he’s easing himself into you: He doesn’t want to have to look at my scar.

You can’t ignore him, you can’t pretend it’s not happening. He’s too big for that. It’s a biting fullness that demands to be felt. So you kiss him back, and knot your fingers in his short hair like you used to, and try to remember the things you always said to him before. And when Aemond is too absorbed to notice, you look away from him, from the statue of Zeus, and peer up into the stone face of Athena instead: the goddess who never married and who knows the answer to every question.

“I love you,” Aemond says when it’s over, marveling at the slopes of your face in the dim ethereal light. “Everything will be right again soon. Everything will be perfect.”

You conjure up a smile and nod like you believe him.

“What did LBJ say?”

“Can I tell you later tonight? After the party, maybe? I just need a few minutes.”

“Of course.” And now Aemond pretends to be patient. He buckles his belt and returns to the main house, his blood coursing with the possibilities only you can make real, his skin damp with your sweat.

For a while—ten minutes, twenty minutes—you lie there on the cool grass wondering what it was like for all those mortals and nymphs, being pinned down by Zeus and then having Hera try to kill them afterwards, raising ill-fated reviled bastards they couldn’t help but love. What is heaven if the realm of the immortals is so cruel? Why does the god of justice seem so immune to it?

When at last you rise and walk back towards the house, you find Mimi at the edge of the garden. She’s on her knees and retching into a rose bush; she’s cut her face on the thorns, but she hasn’t noticed yet. She’s groaning; she seems lost.

You reach for her, gripping her bony shoulders. “Mimi, here, let’s get you upstairs…”

“No,” she blubbers, tears streaming down her scratched cheeks. “Just go away. Leave me.”

“Mimi—”

“No!” she roars, a mournful hemorrhage as she slaps your hands until you release her.

“You don’t have to be this way,” you tell her, distraught. “You can give up drinking. We’ll help you, me and Fosco and Ludwika. You can start over. You can be healthy and present again, you can live a real life.”

Mimi stares up at you, her grey eyes glassy and bloodshot but with a vicious, piercing honesty. “My husband hates me. My kids don’t know I exist. What the hell do I have to be sober for?”

You weren’t expecting this. You don’t know what to say. “We can help make the world better.”

“The world would be better without me in it.”

Then Mimi curls up on the grass under the rose bush, and stays there until you return with Fosco to drag her upstairs to her empty bed.

~~~~~~~~~~

The next afternoon, you’re lying on a lounge chair by the pool. Tomorrow the family will leave Asteria and embark upon a vigorous campaign schedule that will continue, with very few breaks, until Election Day on Tuesday, November 5th. The children are splashing and shrieking in the pool with Fosco, but you aren’t looking at them. You’re staring across the sun-drenched emerald lawn at the Atlantic Ocean. You’re envisioning all the bones and splinters of sunken ships that must litter the silt of the abyss; you’re thinking that it’s a graveyard with no headstones, no memory. Your swimsuit is a red one-piece. Your eyes are shielded by large black Ray Bans aviator sunglasses. Your gaze flicks up to the cloudless blue sky, where all the stars and planets are invisible.

Jupiter has nearly a hundred moons; the largest four were discovered by Galileo in 1610. Europa is a smooth white cosmic marble with a crust of ice, beautiful, immaculate. Ganymede, the largest moon in our solar system and the only satellite with its own magnetic field, is rumored to have a vast underground saltwater ocean that may contain life. Callisto is dark and indomitable, riddled with impact craters; because of her dynamic atmosphere and location beyond Jupiter’s radiation belts, she is considered the best location for possible future crewed missions to the Jovian system. But Io is a wasteland. She has no water and no oxygen. Her only children are 400 active volcanoes, sulfur plumes and lava flows, mountains of silicate rock higher than Mount Everest, cataclysmic earthquakes as her crust slips around on a mantle of magma. Her daily radiation levels are 36 times the lethal limit for humans. If Hades had a home in our corner of the galaxy, it would be Io. She glows ruby and gold with barren apocalyptic fury. You can feel yourself turning poisonous like she is. You can feel your skin splitting open as the lava spills out.

Aegon trots out of the house—red swim trunks, cheap red plastic sunglasses, no shirt, a beach towel slung around his neck, flip flops—and kicks your chair. “Get up. We’re going sailing.”

“I don’t want to talk to anybody.”

“Great, because I’m not asking you to talk. I’m telling you to get in my boat.”

You don’t reply. You don’t think you can without your voice cracking. Aegon crouches down beside your chair and pushes your sunglasses up into your Brigitte Bardot-inspired hair so he can see your face. Your eyes are pink, wet, desperately sad. Deep troubled grooves appear in his forehead as he studies you. Gently, wordlessly, he pats your cheek twice and lowers your sunglasses back over your eyes. Then he stands up again and offers you his hand.

“Let’s go,” Aegon says, softly this time. You take his hand and follow him down to the boathouse.

Five vessels are currently kept there. Aegon’s sailboat is a 25-foot Wianno Senior sloop, just roomy enough for a few passengers. He’s had it since long before you married into the Targaryen family. It is white with hand-painted gold accents; the name Sunfyre adorns the stern. He unmoors the boat, pushes it out into the open water, and raises the sails.

You glide eastbound over the glittering crests of waves, slowly at first, then faster as the sails catch the wind. Aegon has one hand on the rudder, the other grasping the ropes. And the farther you get from shore, the smaller Asteria seems, and the Targaryen family, and the presidential election, and the United States itself. Now all that exists is this boat: you, Aegon, the squawking gulls, the school of mackerel, the ocean. The sun beats down; the breeze rips strands of your hair free. The battery-powered record player is blasting White Room by Cream. When you are far enough from land that no journalists would be able to get a photo, Aegon takes two joints and his Zippo out of the pocket of his swim trunks. He puts both joints between his lips, lights them, and passes you one. Then he stretches out beside you on the deck, gazing up at the September sky.

You ask as your muscles unravel and your thoughts turn light and easy to share: “Why did you bring me out here?”

“So you can drown yourself,” Aegon says, and you both laugh. “Nah. I used to go sailing all the time when I was a teenager. It always made me feel better. It was the only place where I could really be alone.”

You consider the math. “Wow. You haven’t been a teenager since before I was in kindergarten.”

“It’s weird to think about. You don’t seem that young.”

“Thanks, I guess. You don’t seem that old.”

“Maybe we’re meeting in the middle.” He inhales deeply and then exhales in a rush of smoke. “What do you think, should I get an earring?”

“Yeah.”

“Why?”

“It might shock Otto so bad it kills him.”

“I’ll get two.” And then Aegon says: “It’s not cool for you to mock me.”

You are dismayed; you didn’t mean to hurt him. “I wasn’t.”

“Yes, you were. You were mocking me. You mocked me about the receipt under my ashtray, and then you mocked me again last night. I’m up for a lot of things, but I can’t handle that. Okay?”

“Okay.” You turn your head so you can see him: shaggy blonde hair, stubble, perpetual sunburn, the softness of his belly and his chest, flesh you long to vanish into like rain through parched earth. “Aegon?”

He looks over at you. “Io?”

“I don’t want Aemond to touch me either.”

He’s surprised; not by what you feel, but because you’ve said it aloud, a treason like Prometheus giving mankind the gift of fire. “What are we gonna do about it?”

If you were the goddess of wisdom, maybe you’d know.

[chainmail-butch]

A Speech For the Colonist.

It is my opinion that communist movements within the US fail because they refuse to address decolonization.

It is my further opinion that the contradiction between colonizer and colonized supercedes the contradiction of class. The Native American Nations are colonized, Black people are colonized, Hispanic people are colonized. Colonization is the key to white supremacy and white supremacy is the key to class within the United States and Canada.

If you talk to most white communists about decolonization within the United States you'll get things like, "Well, decolonization will come with the revolution because we'll give the people the autonomy and resources they need to care for their communities." This is the exact same rhetoric that alienated black revolutionaries from the American Communist Party in the 60s. "Under communism every worker will have what he needs and be able to give according to his means, so we don't need to worry about race."

Comrade, we do. We do need to worry about race. We cannot simply wish a reality away because in our minds Everyone Will Be White in a communist society.

We need to acknowledge the fact that every single White Person within the United States, and the rest of the Americas for that matter, is a colonist. Our institutions are colonial. Our industry is colonial. Our cities are colonial. Our infrastructure is colonial. Our lawns are colonial. Every single aspect of our lives has its roots in colonization.

We still plunder the earth like we're sending silver and timber back to England and Spain.

By pretending that we are not colonists we make it impossible to address the ways in which we colonize. By ignoring the ways in which we colonize we fail to address the ways in which we are imperialist. By failing to address our imperialism we fail address capitalism.

We are colonists. Pretending that this isn't the case doesn't make it any less reality.

You'll acknowledge the fact that we live on stolen land but would you hand Seattle back to the Duwamish? Would you cede Delaware back to the Lenape? Would you take up arms, and then lay them down to a nation of people that are unlike you? Would you take up arms and lay them down again for a nation of people that you might not agree with politically? Have you confronted your fear that they would treat you just like we treat them?

For that matter, how have you addressed your conception of Black Nationalism? Any white communist will tell you that Nationalism as a concept is counter-revolutionary but how do you address the fact that there is an entire race of people who were ripped from their homes and forced to colonize another land? The solution certainly isn't Liberia, which is itself a colonial exercise.

How do you address the fact that any black person will tell you that a nation created for and by black americans would be a pretty good deal in their book? How do address the fact that our colonial nation isn't their nation and they know it? What do you do? Do you call them reactionary? Do you tell them that their desire for a home of their own is because we orphaned their ancestors and that they need to get over it?

Comrade, these are the questions you need to answer. You need to listen to the people we have colonized and you need to really observe our material conditions.

We live with the unique situation that, as a result of a vicious and often ignored genocide, the colonizers are the majority ethnic group within the colonized land. White people make up 57% of this country. And unlike other colonized regions, there's no France for us to return to. There's no England, there's no Belgium, there's no Netherlands, there's no Spain. The working class white is stuck here. It's up to us to address our own reality and to understand that, ultimately, no way and no how can we be the face of revolution within the united states.

No white led communist movement will prosper because, even now, we still have too much to lose. Our people will never start the fight as we are now. Understand that.

[starseedpatriot]

We're going to need a lot of rope.🇨🇦 Canazuelan Communist NDP Party Member of Parliament: “There is no such thing as parental rights in Canada”(18 seconds)

🥑Join: @davidavocadowolfe 🥑

[octuscle]

Studying has been so stressful lately ? Have you got something to help me relax ?

Thursday morning, 8:00 a.m. You park the old Toyota Prius that you took over from your mother in the student parking lot. Thank God it's the weekend soon, you think. But you don't feel like going to the microeconomics lecture right away. Integration of AI in the pricing of inhomogeneous markets. Unfortunately, you're not one of those nerds who can jerk off to the lecture notes. But you have to go through it now. Before you go in there, you surf through Instagram a bit. An ad for Chronivac TimeTravel pops up. It looks silly… Kind of like a role-playing game. You have to choose a character. You think about how your dad always raves about his college days. Maybe it would be cool if it was 1983. And if you were a bodybuilder. A stupid meathead. You choose that as your character. You'll worry about the rest later. Your lecture is about to start. And you still have to fight your way through the group of activists protesting against the climate policy.

The lecture is really too complicated for you. AI is a complex subject. But in combination with microeconomics? Whoever came up with that… You breathe a sigh of relief when the lecture is over. As well as you can with your face mask on. This pandemic is really exhausting. But it's good that at least there are lectures in presence again. This videoconference crap is really not mature yet. Next lecture is Spanish for Business. That's more your thing. The professor is really hot. Good motivation to go back to the workout later. You've been spending every free minute in the gym for two months, and you're starting to see results.

During the lunch break you sit with the lads from the wrestling team. Wrestling is not your thing. But the lads look like bulls. And you like that. You talk about the legalization of cannabis in Canada. That would be a cool thing here too. You've pretty much given up smoking and alcohol since you got into bodybuilding. But you don't think there's anything wrong with a little weed now and then.

At 4:00 p.m., university is over for you for the day. You sit down in the five-year-old VW Jetta that you took over from your mother. It's really embarrassing. You feel ashamed every time you drive it to the gym. Let's see, maybe you can at least put a cool matte black finish on it…

The workout was awesome again. You totally forgot the time. You're back in your car at 9:00 p.m. and drive to your dorm. You turn on the news while you prepare your dinner. China's Vice President Xi Jinping is appointed vice chairman of the Communist Party's military commission. The 57-year-old is seen as a potential successor to state and party leader Hu Jintao. Boring stuff… You certainly don't have to remember that name.

The alarm clock rings at 5:00 am. Breakfast. And off to the gym. The car radio is talking about a possible invasion of Iraq. Many of your buddies from the gym were in the army or navy… Their nerves are on edge. You can understand if you still have friends or family who might have to go to war. But 09/11 must be avenged!

Before university, leg training is the order of the day. You are proud of your colossal thighs. Many of your buddies only work out the upper body. You have the best proportions here. You've only been lifting iron for two years. But for you it's not a leisure activity, for you it's a religion.

You're just in time for your lecture. Game theory. You take your pad and pen and start taking notes. A laptop would be really cool right now. But you know four or five people on campus who have one. It's just incredibly expensive… But you won't need much longer for your bachelor's degree in sport management. Then you will hopefully be able to afford something like that. And hopefully also a new car. Your Jeep Wrangler is a cool car. But it's also eleven years old. Built in 1980… At least it gets you to the gym at 4:00 p.m. reliably.

Some dumbass turned on CNN instead of MTV on the workout floor. Some shit with the Soviet Union. Apparently everything is falling apart there and the former Soviet republics are forming a new union. Boring shit. Fortunately, someone quickly switches back to MTV. Good Vibrations with Marky Mark. Cool guy. But quite a weakling. You do a double bicepz pose in front of the mirror. You've been here every free minute for almost three years. Maybe you should be in one of those music videos.

After your workout, you wanted to go straight to bed. But it's Friday night. 10:00 p.m. The lads ask if you'd like to go to the late show of the new film with Michael J. Fox. Back to the Future. Why not. The movie's pretty funny, too. Time travel. Strange conception… But you like the idea…

Saturday morning, October 22, 1983. At 10:00 you're back at the Gym. On the way here, you've been listening to the radio about peace demonstrations in Europe. The Russki is once again threatening nuclear war. And we are stationing Pershings in Germany. Bonnie Tyler's "total eclipse of the heart" is playing from the speakers in the gym. Fuck the Russki and fuck the Germans. You're all about getting your muscles burning. At 2:00 p.m., your shift at the counter begins. Tonight you and your pals are going to wrestling. That would be a cool alternative. You as the new Hulk Hogan! But until that happens, you help out at the gym on weekends. And during the week, you'll drive a backhoe on a construction site. Hey, it's a cool life. You don't want any other!