A Funeral Parlor Radical

That particular one of Lord Redesdale’s spirited daughters who elected to rebel against neo-fascist Farve by becoming a Communist could hardly have been expected to embrace that dismal religion without the noblesse oblige of a born snob. Daughters Unity and Diana, to be sure, also chose to punish Farve and Muv for their neolithic upbringing by pursuing the Real Thing—Unity by sacrificing her life to the Führer, Diana by marrying Oswald Mosley and going to jail with him for treason—but both slogged ahead doggedly without a trace of wit.

ON the other hand Nancy, who wrote the reedy swan-songs of the Cliveden Set, and Jessica, who has written this apologia for the Good Deeds of the Far Left, both happened to be endowed with a sense of the absurd. And if either Lenin or Stalin (or Hitler) had been gifted with the merest vestige of that saving grace, who can doubt that the history of our age would have stopped short of genocide? It was Jessica’s ability to laugh at herself, in any event, which told her to drop the Party when Stalin’s gross crimes and the first rumors of Gulag had become too notorious to be glossed over any longer. And which told her to direct her thrusts against an enemy more tangible and certainly more ludicrous than capitalism, the American funeral racket—an enemy not only too stupid to fight back effectively, but capable of being twisted into a symbol of “dying” capitalism itself.

SR

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Selden Rodman

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Martin Luther King Jr

That particular one of Lord Redesdale’s spirited daughters who elected to rebel against neo-fascist Farve by becoming a Communist could hardly have been expected to embrace that dismal religion without the noblesse oblige of a born snob. Daughters Unity and Diana, to be sure, also chose to punish Farve and Muv for their neolithic upbringing by pursuing the Real Thing—Unity by sacrificing her life to the Führer, Diana by marrying Oswald Mosley and going to jail with him for treason—but both slogged ahead doggedly without a trace of wit.

ON the other hand Nancy, who wrote the reedy swan-songs of the Cliveden Set, and Jessica, who has written this apologia for the Good Deeds of the Far Left, both happened to be endowed with a sense of the absurd. And if either Lenin or Stalin (or Hitler) had been gifted with the merest vestige of that saving grace, who can doubt that the history of our age would have stopped short of genocide? It was Jessica’s ability to laugh at herself, in any event, which told her to drop the Party when Stalin’s gross crimes and the first rumors of Gulag had become too notorious to be glossed over any longer. And which told her to direct her thrusts against an enemy more tangible and certainly more ludicrous than capitalism, the American funeral racket—an enemy not only too stupid to fight back effectively, but capable of being twisted into a symbol of “dying” capitalism itself.