Communist Bloc Party

One lazy summer day, Leon Trotsky sat down with his morning coffee to read his daily copy of the Socialist Appeal.


"A Communist Bloc Party!" he exclaimed. "Why, what a wonderful idea! What won't my comrades think of next. Oh, but there's so much to do - I'm going to bring my famous borscht and that wonderful vodka Joseph brought me back from his favorite gulag." Leon set straight away to his cooking, and before he knew it, the day of the party had arrived.

Leon and his pal Vlad decided to go to the party together, so they wouldn't get stuck talking to anyone dull. When they arrived, they were surprised at the line to get in. Vlad started grumbling something about "where do all these people think they are, Studio 54?" and Leon tried his best to ignore him and relax his mind. Sometimes Vlad could be really high-strung.

Soon enough, the line approached the door, and a sea of crepe paper decorated with hammers and sickles became visible. "How festive!" Leon exclaimed, but Vlad only rolled his eyes in disdain.

"What, they couldn't afford real decorations? God, Leon, we're only the party leaders. What's next, a hired clown? Honestly."

Leon fought the urge to smash his vodka bottle over Vlad's shiny bald head. What was Vlad's problem anyway? He was usually the life of the party, and such a dancer!

Finally they made it inside. Leon placed his bottle and his borscht on the potluck table and the two men looked around the room for a familiar face.

All of a sudden, a voice boomed out: "LOOK AT THESE LOSERS!" Leon turned his head to see Joseph bellowing across to the room to them. Vlad's sulky expression transformed into a toothy grin as he called back a greeting and made his way over to Joe. The two clapped each others' shoulders in a half-hug, then Joe grabbed Leon's hand and fiercely shook it up and down. "What the hell is up, my friends?" Joe boomed. "Why the hell don't you guys have a drink?" At that, he turned on his heel, and elbowed his way through the crowd of revolutionaries towards the bar to get his friends some drinks. Vlad and Leon followed quickly, trying to keep up with his determined pace.

Joe tossed them each a bottle of something. Despite Nikita Khrushchev's insistences to "CHUG, CHUG, CHUG!" Leon sipped at it slowly and tried not to act too put out at Joe and Vlad's close friendship. Leon knew that the two had been good friends for a long time, and it wasn't that he was jealous, it was just.... He didn't know. Life had gotten so complicated these days. He was sick of being known as Vlad's sidekick all the time and really longed for their friendship in the older days, when Vlad wasn't as egocentric or hurtful.

Leon excused himself politely and went around the room to mingle with the other guests. What an odd party it was, almost as if no one could agree on anything. Why, there was Ho Chi Minh alone in a corner, typing something...

...while Breshnev simply glowered against a wall. Leon could tell he was just waiting for someone to come up to ask him about his medals.

"Things could be worse, I suppose," Leon thought with a sigh. "I've got my health, and I've got great hair." It was the one thing he had that Vlad didn't, which annoyed Vlad to no end, though he would never admit it. Vlad had started going bald in his early twenties and so overcompensated by growing outrageously bushy facial hair. He wasn't fooling anyone, Leon smirked.

"Yes," Leon rolled his eyes as he spied Mikhail hovering by the buffet, "things could always be worse."

He quickly changed directions to avoid contact with Gorby, and made his way outside into the bright sunlight. Several comrades had started playing games to fulfill their physical fitness requirement for the day. Leon had always found that idea rather stupid, but Vlad insisted on having a muscular population. He said it "inspired his mind," or something like that. When Vlad started in on a rant, Leon would often completely tune out and instead think of fluffy zoo animals or a day at the beach. Would Vlad ever take him to a beach, like he had promised so long ago? Leon was beginning to doubt it.

He shook his head, trying to clear these dark thoughts from his mind once again, and tried concentrating on the game of baseball that Che and some of the others had started. Life was so easy for those South Americans - it seemed like every day was full of sunshine and non-starchy food for lunch. Leon loved musicals, and he imagined that, like Eva Perón, the Argentines were constantly bursting into song when the mood struck. No one ever sang in Russia.

Yes, life certainly did seem easy for Che and his buddies: all the young people looked up to him, and why not? He was hip and inspiring, and always had the finest cigars, given to him by his best friend Fidel. Che and Fidel seemed to get along so well, almost like Leon and Vlad used to. Maybe he and Vlad should go on holiday to a warm climate like Argentina or Cuba - maybe the cold Russian weather was the cause of many of their difficulties. Yes, a holiday would surely help to fix things, once and for all. They just needed some time away, and maybe some piña coladas.

Leon looked around to see where Vlad had gone and saw that he and Joe were both looking at him from the patio with mischievous looks on their faces, like they had just been talking about him or something. Leon became flustered and he could feel his cheeks starting to turn pink. Just how much more of this was he supposed to take?!? He had given Vlad the best years of his life, let Vlad take credit for all of his genius ideas, and this was how he was to be repaid? All of a sudden, tears began to sting his eyes, and a lump began to swell in his throat. He turned on his heel and stormed off, back into the house, almost trampling over Chairman Mao in the process, who had just arrived and was coming outside to cheer on the baseball players.

"Hey, watch where you're going, Trotsky!" Mao shrieked. "Great," thought Leon, "the last person I need to have on my bad side." He muttered an apology over his shoulder as he fled.

He pushed his way through a sea of Bolsheviks, determined not to let anyone see the hurt written across his face. If Vlad preferred Joe so much, why couldn't he just be up front about it? "Maybe I'm just overreacting." He stopped. "That must be it. God, I can be such a Scorpio sometimes. Come on, Leon, get a hold of yourself, I'm sure there's a rational explanation for everything." He took three deep breaths to steady his nerves, and made his way back outside.

Vlad and Joe were no longer on the patio. Leon whirled around. Where could they be? There. There he was. Vlad was a few feet away, playing chess with Bogdanov. Joe was nowhere to be found. Leon blinked in confusion. What exactly had he just imagined? All of a sudden, he heard an angry cry.


"Dammit!" Vlad yelled. Bogdanov had clearly bested him, and in no time at all, as Leon had only fled from Joe and Vlad several minutes earlier. Vlad turned his head, searching the room for Leon to comfort him. Their eyes met, and Leon recognized the rage that only he had the power to quell. He went to Vlad, and clapped him on the shoulder, reassuring him that the next game would be his. Vlad huffed and puffed, but his demons were calmed. "Good game, Alexander," he said reluctantly but steadily as he held out his hand to his opponent, "but I think we're done here." And with that, Vlad and Leon left the party, friends till the end.

Anti Family Circus

I have long been disturbed by the supposedly delightful and gentle humor of the cartoon known as "Family Circus", appearing each day in the comics section of your local paper. Though the cartoon strives to appear completely nonoffensive by creating a portrait of an ideal and carefree young family, there is much going on below the surface. Anything beyond a superficial glance of the cartoon reveals familial disputes and burgeoning questions of sexuality that manifest themselves and shed light on the true situation at home. Clearly, all is not as it seems in the land of Bil, Thel, Billy, Dolly, Jeffy, PJ, Barfy, Sam, and Kittycat.

Let us take an in-depth look at the thinly-veiled family discord.


Here we see Dolly and Jeffy showing Thel that their affection for one another is merely a ruse: an attempt perhaps to gain Mommy's approval in a wicked game of sibling rivalry. Also alarmingly, Dolly appears to be smothering Jeffy in her bear hug. By Thel's blank expression, we can infer that she is not concerned by this. Maybe she would prefer it if her male middle child were only a dim and distant memory? Or maybe she is too doped up on antidepressants to even care? We may never know.


Oh, the trials and tribulations of a being a middle child: Jeffy has never been taught to read. Perhaps in a remnant of traditional educational systems, only the oldest son/heir Billy has ever been schooled. Or could it be that none of the children are educated? Why is Bil so fearful that his children will learn how to read? Is there a dirty little secret he is hiding, some dreadful skeleton in his closet? Instead of risking that his secrets ever be uncovered, he sentences them to a life of neglect and idiocy.


In this panel, one of our burning questions is answered: just what exactly is Daddy hiding? The answer, of course, is internet pornography.


Well, we can breathe a small sigh of relief. We know now that at least Billy is being educated, but upon closer examination, just what is he being taught? "Know", "Knot", "Knee", "Knob". Clearly a male figure in the family or in the educational system is soliciting Billy for oral sex. If we read between the lines, we can decipher the hidden meaning: "Know about knots [an evident argument for a bondage fetish], get on your knees and do what you will with my knob." An alarming and disturbing discovery. Just what sort of family circus is this anyway?


The homoeroticism does not stop here. Billy has obviously been affected by his sexual burdens and retreats into a life of fantasy. However, he does not dream of a normal family to take him away, one in which there are loving and devoted parents who will take him to the beach or to waterparks; hardly so, in fact. Here we see Billy, in his puffed-up rage, lost in a rêverie about the loincloth-swaddled Tarzan. In his fantasy, Tarzan is gazing intimately and intensely with burning eyes, suggesting that Billy is yearning for a romantic figure to rescue him instead of a familial one, the proverbial white knight of days-of-yore fairy tales. The question is, will Tarzan ever come for Billy?


Truth be told, I don't exactly understand what is going on in this cartoon. However, what does catch my eye is the tantalizing way Zippy the Pinhead is seducing Jeffy.


Apparently Billy is not the only child in the family with homosexual tendencies. We can infer by the fact that Thel is 'turning Jeffy's dreams off' that she does not approve of her little boy's dreams. I have a feeling Thel irrationally blames herself for Billy and so is trying to coach Jeffy to bat for what is, in her mind, "the proper team". Eventually, after Bil Sr.'s syphilitic death following an unfortunate internet encounter, she will come to accept both her boys' lifestyles and will crochet them rainbow-colored flags to proudly display on their verandahs come Pride Week.


Until that day though, Jeffy will descend into a life of illicit substance abuse, taking his youngest brother PJ with him (who sadly, would not make it out alive since, like Jeffy, PJ never learned to read and therefore could not figure out which prescription pills were not supposed to be mixed). During a particularly bad financial scrape, Jeffy sells Dolly on the black market to raise money for his next fix, thereby finally achieving revenge on his sister for treating him so poorly as a child. Dolly will be sold to the Sultan of Brunei and spend the rest of her skinny years as a sex slave. Years later, she will be found as a washed-up prostitute in a Bangkok bordello with a particular talent for ping pong balls.

Barfy, Sam, and Kittycat fled the backyard long ago. Being that they were not licensed, they were taken to the pound and eventually adopted by a nice first-generation immigrant family. They happily lived out the remainder of their years in the sun-filled countryside, at last escaping the family circus...I mean curse.

St. Funion

	Well hello there, my dear children, I'm St. Funion, the patron saint of this blog, here to bring sunshine and sweet odor to your day! I was born in a humble onion patch during a Midwestern famine, the only one of my kind to survive the cruel winds and scorching sun of the harsh Iowan summer. Some called it luck, others called it a miracle.
At a tender age - I was barely more than a shoot! - I was plucked from the withered vine that was my home to serve as a meager addition to the Kowalski family's stew.
When Sharon, the dowager Kowalski, sliced into me, she immediately noticed my strange likeness to Jack Skellington, king of Halloweentown, of "The Nightmare Before Christmas", which her grandchildren had made her watch only days before. She dropped her knife in astonishment and called young Maggie and Joel into the room to see the miraclous discovery she had made. The children immediately wrapped me in cellophane and tenderly placed me into their vintage 1973 Frigidaire to preserve me as long as they could.
From that moment on, I became something of a spectacle in that small metropolis. People came from as far away as Butte, Montana to see the wonder. I had never felt more alive, and in my joy, passed on my gift of lust for life to all who saw me. Those with laryngitis could speak above a whisper after seeing me, those with rosacea were notably less rosy.
Sharon soon became overcome with hubris, and boasted that her onion was the cure-all for what-ails-ye. She began touring the country, determined that her act get so big that she make it to Tallahassee, Florida. As a little girl, she had read a leaflet about the Sunshine State, and it had been her dream ever since to make it big there. Convinced my restorative powers could rival those of the Florida sun, she packed up the Ford Aerostar and off we went.
Unfortunately, in her hubris, she had forgotton to pack the spare tire that was crucial to her minivan's safety. Somewhere on the lonely road between Gary, Indiana and Memphis, Sharon ran over a bottle of Mr. Pibb. The tire immediately went flat, forcing Sharon to swerve wildly. In the hustle and bustle, I was cast out of the slightly-ajar passenger-side window and flew into the open sunroof of lengli's Passat as she escaped rural Greencastle society for a birthday weekend in downtown Chicago. Another miracle? You be the judge.
Since then, she and I have worked side by side, for the good of the human race. I am happy to present myself to you, the readers, for the first time, and look forward to much interaction in the future. Peace and sweet perfumes be with you, St. Funion