5/3/1994



POSTMORTEM FOR A DEFUNCT IDEOLOGY: A Dialectical Underworld Analysis * A Tragicomedy in one acte--gratuit * By Arnold Beichman

SCENE: A high-ceilinged marbled conference chamber in a think-tank-looking two-story building in Hell. A nicely landscaped garden, dotted with small villas each of which are surrounded by high walls. It's that part of hell to which only deserving intellectuals are consigned. They have every luxury and convenience and no punishment--except one: they must live in solitary. No debates, conversation, gossip, fraction meetings, conspiracies and, of course, no sex. Their only news source is the GNN (Gehenna News Network.) The only creatures they see are goblin interns, netherworld gofers who deliver meals, go out for cigarettes, change towels and linens and so on. On rare special occasions like the present one they are allowed to meet and talk. The room is bathed in a light blue fog from all the cigar, cigarette, joints and pipe smoke. Enthroned at the head of a long teak table is a clean-shaven, well-dressed stocky man in his late 50's with a crew haircut. Sitting beside him is a heavily mustached man with a beard. Around the table sit twelve men and two women. The man on the throne raps a gavel on a small table at his left.













CHAIRMAN: Comrades, we are gathered here at the request and the special dispensation of Dr. Teufel, our host. The special dispensation which allows us to meet together ends in three hours. Now then--to business. Dr. Teufel is quite unhappy at what's been happening up above since the year 1985. We are here to discuss and prepare a dialectical analysis as to what went wrong and to report to Dr. Teufel with recommendations for future programs. Now, for those of you who don't know me or are seeing me for the first time, my name is Marx, Karl Marx, and at my left is Engels, Friedrich Engels. And if you're wondering, I shaved off my beard a long time ago because it's not terribly comfortable down here with a beard unless (with a chuckle) it's one of those wispy little beards like Comrade Ho's or Comrade Lenin's. Anyway, let's get down to business and see if we can find out what went wrong. Engels, call the roll and see if everybody Dr. Teufel invited is here. ENGELS: (calls the roll) Yuri Andropov, Walter Duranty, Grand Inquisitor, Lillian Hellman, Adolf Hitler, Ho Chi Minh, N. S. Khrushchev, V. I. Lenin, Mao Zedong, Jean-Paul Sartre, J. V. Stalin, L. D. Trotsky, Beatrice and Sidney Webb. (All reply "present" as the names are read.) HITLER: I demand to know, Mr. Chairman, why isn't Mussolini here in this room with us? MARX: (smiling) Because, my dear Fuehrer, the people On High decided that when you invited Mussolini to become your war ally your defeat was inevitable. So Il Duce's been rewarded, but not with my approval I assure you, by being allowed to spend half of each year On High and half a year with us. Don't worry; he'll be back in a few weeks. HITLER: (spluttering) But, but-- MARX: Enough. You'll have your chance later. Now, let's get down to cases. What the hell happened? I've just heard that the African, Julius Nyerere, once my faithful follower, has just given up socialism for Tanzania saying it doesn't work. Even Professor John Kenneth Galbraith and Robert Heilbroner say socialism has had it. Worse yet, Margaret Thatcher kept getting elected and even a toady like John Major was also elected. It's too much. The People's Republic of China is floating bond issues in Hong Kong. Things had been going well for more than seventy years and suddenly--collapse! Why? HELLMAN: I'll tell you why: You men simply didn't have the guts to stop the rot. BEATRICE WEBB: Hear, hear. Good stuff, old dear. Let 'em have it, Lillian. If Raisa Gorbachova had been in charge instead of that damned weak-kneed fool of a husband, things would still be normal. And it's true in the United States. If Hilary Clinton were in charge instead of that jogger of a husband, things would improve for an American revolution. HELLMAN: Let's ask Andropov here, why the hell he made that bastard Gorbachev his protege? I say this whole calamity could have been avoided if Andropov hadn't picked a traitor like Gorbachev. MARX: And what, dear Yuri Vladimirovich, do you, the secret police expert, have to say for yourself after such a great failure-- HELLMAN (interrupting): Failure, hogwash! I charge that Andropov made a deal with George Bush when he was vice-president to sell out the revolution and the Communist movement. ANDROPOV (flushed red): How dare you, you renegade Trotskyite! TROTSKY: (eyes popping) How dare you call this Stalinist agent a Trotskyite? HELLMAN: Oh, cool it, Trotsky, Andropov is just showing he can't take the truth about his treason. So, Comrade Andropov, you deny my charges, do you? I ask you all around the table is it a coincidence that the New York Times and the Washington Post praised Andropov when he became general secretary. They called him a closet liberal, which I daresay he is. I charge that Andropov was working hand-in-glove with the CIA, which--remember everybody--Bush was head of before he was vice-president, and the deal was struck when Bush came to Moscow for the Brezhnev funeral in November 1982 or whenever the hell it was. And, let's never forget, Gorbachev was Andropov's protege. Bush and Andropov--and Gorbachev and Andropov. Q.E.D. ANDROPOV: (now smiling sweetly) And tell me, Miss Hellman, or should I say Comrade Hellman?--if I made such a deal with Bush why did we shoot down that Korean airplane? Or do you think that was just a trick to cover my deal with Bush? I wish it were the good old days when my Chekists could have questioned you more, eh, directly. HELLMAN: Your threats don't scare me, Andropov. Explain to me, to all of us, if you're so innocent, how come that George Bush said in an interview after he met with you at the funeral and I'm quoting Bush from that interview in the Christian Science Monitor "My view of Andropov is that some people make this KGB thing sound horrendous. May I speak defensively as a former head of the CIA. But leave out the operational side of KGB--the naughty things they allegedly do." I rest my case. MARX: Please, Hellman, Yuri Vladimirovich, no sectarianism, please. We're supposed to be doing a post-mortem. We should be dealing with social forces which make history, not personalities and I don't care what that renegade revisionist Gramsci says. Josef Vissarionovich, you've been making faces, what have you got to say? STALIN (removes pipe from mouth): I will ask a simple dialectical question: How come none of this happened when I was around? MAO ZEDONG: Right and I ask the same question: How come none of this happened when I was around? HO CHIH MINH: And I, too, ask the same question: how come we were able to beat back the Americans and how come we had friends in America who destroyed an American President? STALIN: How come when I was around we had admirers everywhere in the West, all of them helping us, like my dear friends, the Webbs,(he bows low in their direction) Gide, Barbusse, Sartre here, Picasso, like H. G. Wells and Bernard Shaw, Vice-President Henry A. Wallace and the American Ambassador Joseph Davies? There was Kim Philby and his two pederasts--what's their names?--and there was Alger Hiss and the Rosenbergs. I could go on and on and on. ENGELS: Why don't you go on? What's the story on Harry Hopkins? STALIN: Everybody helped. Hopkins was just one of many, like Comrade Hellman, Henry Wallace and our many friends in Whitehall. And we did as we pleased to strengthen Soviet power. Look at it now. There is not even a Soviet Union. HELLMAN: Right on, right on, Uncle Joe. (Stalin grimaces.) STALIN: When I was in charge, we did what we had to and friends like Walter Duranty--I'm glad to see you looking so well, Duranty (Duranty glows)--understood the needs of the revolution. I often listened to the records we made of his conversations like the time when he said to a group of foreign correspondents in Moscow: "What are a few million dead Russians in a situation like this? Quite unimportant. This is just an incident in the sweeping historical changes here." Duranty understood proletarian truth when he wrote in the New York Times: "There is no actual starvation or deaths from starvation but there is widespread mortality from diseases due to malnutrition." If we could have without embarrassing him, we'd have given him the Order of Lenin publicly not privately. However, he got a Pulitzer Prize which wasn't bad at all. MARX: Enough, Josef Vissarionovich, where did it go wrong? STALIN: I'm not boasting. I'm reciting facts. When I was around the worst crime among intellectuals in the capitalist world, was red-baiting, worse even than murder or larceny or voting Republican. And now? The revolution went wrong because-- LENIN: Enough. I never liked you, Josef Vissarionovich, but you were an excellent pupil and you understood the uses of proletarian terror and the necessity, as I once wrote, of "revolutionary violence against the faltering and unrestrained elements of the toiling masses themselves." STALIN: Thank you, Vladimir Ilyitch. LENIN: Before you thank me, what you didn't understand is how to deal with the secret police. You kept executing them. How can you have a proletarian state without a dependable secret police? But how can you have a dependable secret police if you keep shooting them? I didn't have to shoot Feliks Dzerzhinsky, a born Chekist, did I? STALIN: Dzerzhinsky was a Pole. In time, Vladimir Ilyitch, you would have shot him. I would have. You can't trust Poles-- TROTSKY (mutters): Or Georgians! KHRUSHCHEV: You're absolutely right, Josef Visarionovich, (audience gasps) I mean absolutely about police and Poles. I should have shot Gomulka. Still, our first duty was to get rid of that cobra from Georgia. You should have seen Beria when he saw you, Josef Visarionovich, dead. He was dancing around like a gypsy and singing, "The Blackass Bastard's gone, thanks to God." STALIN: (writes something in a little black notebook.) I will talk to Beria if Dr. Teufel will allow me to see him. As for you, Nikita Sergeyevich, you were the last one I'd have made the Vozhd. You should have shot Solzhenitsyn and that would have been the end of it. KHRUSHCHEV: Well, why the hell didn't you shoot him? All you did was toss him into the Gulag. STALIN: You're right, he seemed so harmless. (thoughtfully) But then I couldn't shoot everybody, could I? After all, I could have shot you and didn't. You used to dance the gopak so well when you were drunk that I thought you were just another Ukrainian toad pretending to be a Great Russian. I never thought you would betray me and the revolution. Ah, well, live and learn. MARX: Comrades, all this factionalism and sectarianism is getting us nowhere. What am I going to tell Dr. Teufel, that in this gathering of revolutionary geniuses, nobody had an answer to the burning question of the day: What went wrong? (turning to Trotsky). So tell us, Lev Davidovich, what's your theory? After all, at the 13th Soviet Communist Party Congress, you accepted democratic centralism and defeat at the hands of Josef Vissarionovich with these words:

The Party in the last analysis is always right because the Party is the single historic instrument given to the proletariat for the solution of its fundamental problems...I know that one must not be right against the Party. One can be right only with the Party, and through the Party, for history has created no other road for the realization of what is right.

TROTSKY: I remember my last thoughts as Stalin's assassin sent his ice-pick through my skull: how wrong I had been about the party with Stalin as the helmsman. If I had killed you, Josef Vissarionovich, early in the game, I would have won and I would have been the Party and we would not only have had a revolution still in power but it would have been by now a worldwide revolution. You, Josef Vissarionovich, believed in terror for terror's sake; I did not. GRAND INQUISITOR: Excuse me, Lev Davidovich, weren't you the executioner at Kronstadt who told your Red Army mercenaries to shoot down the soldiers and sailors like partridges? Weren't you the revolutionary who wiped out 18,000 members of the working class, at Kronstadt because they gave up on your revolution, because they cried "the revolution betrayed"? Or are my facts wrong? TROTSKY: (flushed) Everybody has a right to be a fool but you, Grand Inquisitor, abuse the privilege. Aren't you the one who, according to your admirer Dostoyevsky, said to Jesus in the prison-cell:

But let me tell Thee that now, today, people are more persuaded than ever that they have perfect freedom, yet they have brought their freedom to us and laid it humbly at our feet....for nothing has ever been more insupportable than for a man and a human society than freedom...I tell Thee that man is tormented by no greater anxiety than to find someone quickly to whom he can hand over that gift of freedom with which the ill-fated creature is born.

GRAND INQUISITOR: Well, you quote me accurately, am I wrong? TROTSKY: You might ask Vaclav Havel, Boris Yeltsin, Lech Walesa if you were right. I lost faith in my own infallibility and that is why I am here with you. And as for Kronstadt, you, Grand Inquisitor, would have done the same thing as I did at Kronstadt except you would have said you were doing it for God and I said I was doing it for the revolution. SARTRE: (trembling) I can no longer keep silent at this travesty. Revolution is too serious to be left to so-called revolutionaries, when in truth you are counter-revolutionaries. The revolution has not failed; it only appears to have failed, and appearance-- MAO ZEDONG: Please excuse my interruption but what do you mean that the Revolution hasn't failed? There is no more USSR, there is no official Soviet Communist Party, there is no general secretary, a counter-revolution has taken power headed by a traitor named Yeltsin who should have been shot years ago, people parade in public against the revolution and the police do nothing, CIA spies march in and out of the country, secret party archives are being peddled on Moscow street-corners and you say the revolution hasn't failed? SARTRE: (face flushed beet-red, eyes popping through his thick-lens glasses) Well, where is your revolution going? MAO ZEDONG: (hisses) Shut up, you creature, shut up. (continues) The revolution hasn't failed in the People's Republic of China because I made sure that the people I left behind were prepared to do what was necessary. Had there been one Tiananmen Square in Russia the revolution would be in power and there would still be a USSR. SARTRE: Whom are you trying to fool? Do you know what they are saying in China today about your economy? "Build what you want but build it in the name of Chinese socialism." Capitalism has been restored in China thanks to those successors of yours. And Vietnam will be next. But not the Khmer Rouge, not Kim Il Sung, not the Shining Path, they won't betray the revolution. HO CHIH MINH: Let us remember when it came to a showdown, there was blood in Tiananmen Square. What is needed are one, two, three, many Tiananmens in Red Square. Comrade Sartre, as someone who lived in France as a young man, I know you and your Cartesian merde philosophy or whatever it is but in reality, you are all da-daists, bohemian pederasts and pedophiles. You think a revolution is like writing plays or-- SARTRE: A revolution is like writing a play. In "Les Mains Sales," my revolutionary general declaims: "On this earth at present good and evil are inseparable. I agree to be bad in order to become good." Later I wrote that "To keep hope alive one must, in spite of all mistakes, horrors and crimes, recognize the obvious superiority of the socialist camp." I knew all about those mistakes and horrors. So do you, all of us here. It went wrong because the revolutionaries became civilized. They became bourgeois, revisionists, humanists. Instead of accepting the permanent revolution-- TROTSKY: (interrupting) Which is what I was preaching to deaf ears. Please continue, M'sieu Sartre. SARTRE: (sarcastically) Thank you, Comrade Trotsky. Instead of accepting the inevitability of permanent revolution, traitors like Gorbachev got involved with technology, with fiber optics, with computers, fax machines, chips, high definition television and whatnot and that was the end. The revolution has been embourgeoised. The dialectics of technology led to the synthesis of counter-revolution. HELLMAN: (under her breath) Whatever the hell that means. SARTRE: I tell you, Comrade Mao, if the Chinese revolution gets involved with capitalist technology your revolution will founder as did the Bolshevik revolution. MAO: (spits into his spittoon) What do you know about our revolution, you rat-tail? SARTRE: (shows his teeth in what is supposed to be a grin) I'll tell you what I know. I know that your revolution is going to make Coca-cola the richest corporation in the world. Yes, the richest. Your great revolutionary successors have just signed an agreement with Coca-cola which is going to invest 150 million dollars so that your people will drink this imperialist swill and make America richer. Truly, coca-colonization. You and your revolution. The great Mao! MAO: (glowers) Deng will pay for this when he gets here and soon. He will pay for the great betrayal. But my portrait is still hanging in Tiananmen Square. Deng hasn't dared touch my portrait. Where is Stalin's portrait or Lenin's? Not in Red Square. So whose revolution is a failure? SIDNEY WEBB: May I interpose here? BEATRICE WEBB: Please, Sidney, sit down. I think you are all very, very wrong. SIDNEY: But, Beatrice, I would like to finish what-- BEATRICE: (glares) Sidney, sit down--NOW. You can talk when I finish and not before. The most important achievement of Comrades Lenin and Stalin were the millions they sacrificed to the cause of revolution and had Josef Vissarionovich lived past 1953, millions more would have been sacrificed and quite properly. I think it was Mr. Duranty who quite wittily (Duranty glows) stole a remark of mine (Duranty glowers) and wrote in the New York Times that you can't make an omelette without breaking a few eggs, perhaps dozens of eggs. That's what eggs are for, breaking as many as it takes to make the perfect omelette. STALIN: You, Mrs. Webb were the only one who really understood what I was doing. I particularly appreciated when you wrote about my collectivization program: "Strong must have been the faith and resolute the will of the men who, in the interest of what seemed to them the public good, could take so momentous a decision." Yes, when fascist elements in the West were talking about famine in the Ukraine, you understood and so did, I must say, your husband. MARX: Alright, enough of this mutual admiration which I share with you, Beatrice. Still I think we've heard enough and it's closing time and-- HITLER: (jumps up from the table) Why haven't I been called on? I'll tell you why we failed? We were too soft. Look around you. The Jews are still everywhere. Why there are three of them right here--you, Marx, sitting at the head of the table and, if you please, Hellman and Trotsky. MARX: I wish, Dr. Hitler, you would not include me with the Hellman-Trotsky axis. Have you never read my tract, "A World Without Jews"? I don't imagine you ever read my essays on "Money-Jews" in the Deutsch-Franzosiche Jahrbucher. HITLER: Look at you, do you look like an Aryan? MARX: (wearily) Have you ever looked at yourself? Do you look like an Aryan? Let's face it: You had your chance, Hitler, and you muffed it like the turd you are. You had your chance when you signed the treaty with Stalin and then you let the British frighten you. Comrade Engels has the floor. ENGELS: (jumps up, waving a paper) I have here a resolution condemning Hitler as a counter-revolutionary and blaming the failure of the real revolution on his Nazi party. HITLER: (mouth agape) What is this? A Masonic-Jewish plot! ENGELS: The proof of Hitler's failure is that when Stalin starved and liquidated millions for the Revolution he was applauded by people like Hellman, Duranty and the Webbs and many, many others. President Roosevelt applauded Stalin. Churchill told the House of Commons on February 27, 1945: "I know of no Government which stands to its obligations, even in its own despite, more solidly than the Russian Soviet government." When Comrade Mao killed millions in the name of the Revolution, the West applauded including people like David Rockefeller. But for doing the same thing Hitler was condemned and quite rightly. Hitler was a blinded utopian who killed for the metaphysics of revolution while Stalin understood the dialectics of revolution. I propose the resolution and ask for a vote. TROTSKY: Excuse me, but could you read it to us first? MARX: (his face is flushed beet-red) There you go with your sectarianism! What's there to read? Don't you trust us? What could Engels write and I countersign that you would not approve of? Trotsky, I don't know how Lenin was able to stand you for as long as he did. Do I hear a second to Comrade Engels' motion? SARTRE: Where is the resolution going to be sent? To L'Humanite, the New York Times Op-Ed page? Or what? MARX: The resolution will be presented to Dr. Teufel as the consensus of this meeting. HELLMAN: (stamps out a joint under her heel) This is a load of crap in my opinion. I'm not putting my name to anything that I don't see for myself. MARX: Your vulgarity, Miss Hellman, is on a par with your knowledge of Marxism. LENIN: Please, Dr. Marx, Marxism-Leninism. STALIN: And why not, Marxism-Leninism-Stalinism? After all, I made some contributions to theory. MARX: (wrinkles face in disgust) I prefer Marxism to your version, Comrades. You turned my ideas upside down, you tried to make peasants into proletarians and what do we have now? A lumpen-proletariat which thinks only of bread, sausage and aspirin and their traitorous leaders who can only think of profits and privatization. Your failure to create Bolshevik Man is on a par with Hitler's failure to create Aryan Man. LENIN (contemptuously): Look, Marx, as far as I am concerned you were a counter-revolutionary. It was you who said there are countries such as America and England where workers can achieve their goals by peaceful means. MARX (face flushed red) I said that as part of a tactic which you later endorsed, one step backward, two steps forward. Reculer pour mieux sauter, you used to say. And, tell me, what happened to the revolution in England that you and Trotsky were waiting for, that you thought was inevitable? TROTSKY: (indignantly flapping his arms) Marx, you yourself are being guilty of vulgar Marxism. MARX: (triumphantly, fishing a piece of paper out of his coat pocket). Oh, yes? Didn't you write that--and I quote-- "England is headed for revolution because she has already entered the stage of capitalist disintegration?" You and Lenin are both revolutionary failures. LENIN: Look here, Marx, had it not been for me you would today be a forgotten scribbler, yes, me. I rescued you from the rubbish-bin of history where you deserve to be and today instead of being a footnote your name is on the lips of every American sociologist and political scientist, people are busy re-examining what they call Marxism, and all because of Leninism. Understand? MARX: I haven't heard such heresy since Bakunin. I ought to expel you from our ranks-- LENIN: Old man, I came prepared and if anybody is going to be expelled from our ranks, it's going to be you and if Engels wants to share your fate, fine by me. Comrades, do we support revolution or are we going to support a scheisser like Karl Marx? Yes, Marx, we're going to turn you upside down again and this time (chuckles fiendishly) we'll hang you upside down like they did to Mussolini. Okay, let's hear it. Who's for Vladimir Ilyitch? Great shout of "For Lenin." SIDNEY WEBB: I'm with Dr. Marx. BEATRICE: (flushed) Sidney, how dare you! We'll see about that. HELLMAN: lighting another joint) I've had it. I pass. (There's a shout, "Party discipline!) HELLMAN: Discipline, shmishiplin. Okay, with Lenin. SARTRE: I am with both, Lenin and Marx. To me they are inseparable. (Lenin and Stalin exchange significant looks. Sartre pales.) HITLER: I hereby announce the formation of a new party and no Jew Communists allowed. GRAND INQUISITOR: I go with Lenin and Mother Russia. LENIN: (roars, turning to the enraged Marx) Well, Comrade Menshevik, are you ready for the firing squad, ha-ha-ha?

Enter Dr. Teufel, tall, distinguished, eyes twinkling, wearing an academic cap and gown. He bears a startling resemblance to G. W. F. Hegel. All rise and applaud. He is accompanied by a beautiful blonde, his secretary, wearing a miniskirt and spike heels. Walking behind the blonde is a grey-haired man with stooped shoulders.

DR. TEUFEL: You people, you Marxists are hopeless. (chuckles) I've been watching you on my screen and listening to you. You didn't realize what repressive tolerance would do to the revolution but that's what destroyed your revolution. Herbert Marcuse (pointing to the grey-haired man) was right. The bourgeoisie allowed you to say anything and do anything. In the name of academic freedom the rich, bourgeois foundations in America even financed your revolutions and your revolutionary ideas. Today, you're all hasbeens, dead white males and females, you're-- SARTRE: (livid) How can you say we're hasbeens when Marxism is still an article of faith in every American university even if it has been betrayed by French intellectual adventurers. DR. TEUFEL: (smiling patronizingly) Sartre, you're a fool because you don't know your own business. Let me refer you to something an even more distinguished Marxist philosopher, Georgy Lukacs, said recently: "Marxism as a general theory of society has in fact undergone an interruption. It has stood still. One may add that Marxism, conceived as it should be conceived, as a general theory of society and of history, no longer exists, that it came to an end some time ago...Our analysis stood still but capitalism continued to evolve. We stopped with Lenin. After him there has been no Marxism." So what do you say to that, Sartre? SARTRE: Lukacs was always on the side of the enemy. STALIN: (puffing away on his pipe) Mind your tongue, Sartre, or we'll slice it off. Lukacs never betrayed Stalin. DR. TEUFEL: Stop your threats, this isn't the Kremlin or the Lubyanka, Josef Vissarionovich. You all had victory in your hands and now it's gone. You and the rest of you are failures, especially you, Andropov, with your pal, Mikhail Sergeyevich. I'm looking forward (grins diabolically) to meeting Mr. Gorbachev and discussing with him an arrested case of sibling rivalry, as the Freudo-Marxists would call it, with Boris Yeltsin. GRAND INQUISITOR: Pardon me, Dr.Teufel, but are you sure Mikhail Sergeyevich will be coming here? After all, Time Magazine called him "Man of the Decade" in its cover story. That's practically a beatification. Perhaps, he'll be sent to On High. ANDROPOV: (with a gentle smile, bows to Dr. Teufel) If Dr. Teufel will permit it, I will arrange that Mister Gorbachev comes to see us well before the decade is over. DR. TEUFEL: (ignores Andropov and turns to his secretary) Stop flirting with Sidney; it won't do you any good,(grins) not while Mrs. Webb is around. Make a note, Marilyn, I want to talk to Henry Luce about what's happened to Time Magazine and get me a file folder on Strobe Talbott, President Clinton's new Undersecretary of State. (Marilyn pays Dr. Teufel no attention, she is now batting her eyelids at the Grand Inquisitor.) Marilyn! MARILYN: (ever so shyly) Well, better Sidney Webb and the Grand Inquisitor than the Kennedy boys, don't you think, Toofie dear? DR. TEUFEL: (smiles indulgently) Anyway, to get back to the problem at hand. Forget the working-class. I'm working with a new breed of revolutionaries up above: professors, feminists, gays and lesbians, anti-anti-socialists, environmentalists, animal rights lovers, pedophiles, National Endowment for the Arts administrators, wetlands and rain forest lovers, quota and affirmative action pushers, PLO groupies, druggies and huggies, all the people who quite understandably hate Western culture and capitalism, who use words like Afrocentric and who say Mogadishu and Kinshasa are the cradle of civilization and who can prove with non-existent archives that Socrates was really a Nubian tribal chief. There are so many up there, especially in the universities, I don't have time to meet with all of them. And they understand that repressive tolerance is capitalism's most powerful counter-revolutionary weapon. (applause, cheers). BEATRICE WEBB AND HELLMAN: (together) Tally-ho, Toofie. Great stuff. DR. TEUFEL: The man who understood what repressive tolerance meant to capitalism is with me here on the platform--stand up and take a bow, Professor Herbert Marcuse. (Marcuse comes forward.) You alone understood what was needed in the revolution.(Marx and Engels pale). You so-called revolutionaries never knew how to harness the energies of people who weren't ready to die for Marx's fictitious working class but were willing to die to save the spotted owl. You and your dialectics never knew what to do with the PC's; in fact you don't even know what PC stands for, do you? MARX: (triumphantly) Proletarian cause. DR. TEUFEL: (shakes his head from side to side, sadly) No, Marx, it just shows how out of touch you are. "PC" is the fastest growing political movement in America and it stands for "politically correct." I've just come from a meeting with Antonio Gramsci and Professor Marcuse. They understand what you, Herr Doktor Professor Marx, failed to understand: culture comes before economics. (Marx and Engels look at each other in consternation) We're making great headway. HITLER: Remember what that flat slob, Herman Goering, used to say: "When I hear the word 'culture' I reach for my revolver." DR. TEUFEL: And when I hear the word "culture," my dear Hitler, I reach for a comparative literature professor who swears by something called "deconstruction," or an American sociologist with tenure. You Marxists had a pretty good run for seventy years or so. In fact, you did a fantastic job. And I congratulate you, Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Ho, fantastic. HITLER (glowering). What about congratulating me? Wasn't my party called the National Socialist Workers Party? I admit publicly I got some of my ideas from Marx. DR. TEUFEL: (wearily to Hitler) I'll let you and Marx argue that one. Anyway, the party's over except for some up there who still believe in Trotsky. (Trotsky pouts). Proletarian destruction is out, politically correct deconstruction is in. America is today the world capital of affirmative action, diversity, multiculturalism, job "quotas," gay and lesbian rights, radical feminism, anti-white racism and AIDS martyrdom. Any country that can transform a disease into a politico-cultural platform is ripe for a new kind of revolution. At the next convention of the Modern Language Association I am going to update myself about how to make that revolution. Back to your cells until we meet again. Meeting adjourned sine die.

Marilyn sashays over to Sidney Webb as Beatrice, swinging an umbrella, interposes herself between them. Dr. Teufel claps his hands: Darkness, and--

CURTAIN