For a gloomy and unathletic individual such as myself, a newspaper’s obituary section is the equivalent of the sports pages. Saturday’s New York Times featured a few paragraphs dedicated to Helen Travis, a veteran left wing activist who died the other day at the ripe old age of 86. One phrase caught my attention:

“A student trip to the Soviet Union in 1934 impressed her with the promises of socialism…”

1934? In 1934 the Soviet Union was a savage totalitarian dictatorship characterized by mass graves, concentration camps and the Stalin cult. The genocidal Ukrainian famine was a recent memory and the economy was in ruins, wrecked by years of socialist mismanagement. To have been “impressed” by that gargoyle state, Travis must have been wicked, deluded or terribly, terribly stupid.