Last week I attended my first communist youth rally as a token gesture toward the burgeoning popularity of Penn's Soviet youth culture. Admittedly, I had my hesitations. Although I enjoy jamming to musical artists like Hammer and Sickle: The Next Generation, Jessica Stalin, and The Backstreet Kibbutz, I was sincerely afraid that my peers would find me lame and unequal. Ever since last year at a screening of Sergei Eisenstein Jr.'s Battleship Huntsman when a trendy Soviet-ster called my beat-up Converse sneakers pseudo-bourgeois, I have been haunted by insecurities regarding my personal inferiority to communist politics. The youth rally allayed even my deepest fears.
As I arrived, a friendly gang of Chinese pandas riding bareback atop Soviet elephants were handing out free reefer. These amenities I enjoyed as the promising young voices of Lenin and the Blowfish warmed up the crowd. The band unified our fragmented and beaten-down-by-capitalism youth spirits until we were all singing as a collective voice along with lyrics that, had we been less stoned, many of us may have realized we didn't know the words to. In the moment, however, I commanded every syllable to "Stalin's Little Workhorse." I was so baked and fired up on Trotskyism that it seemed like even the Chinese pandas knew all the words.
The Lenins wrapped up their act and the crowd's passionate Soviet rhapsody sizzled down a bit when the next feature of the program, a 10-hour "educational" film series narrated by CP spokesman Morgan Freeman commenced. Memory, which works in mysterious ways, has rendered this portion of the evening rather hazy for me. However, when I woke up the next morning, a letter confirming the CP's receipt of my 100% absolutely binding factory deportation application greeted me, filling in the blanks that memory had distorted.
Fortunately, I no longer feel inferior to communist politics. As a result of the youth rally, I am now a card carrying member of the party with irrevocable deportation status to a shoe polish factory in North Korea. I don't get to graduate in the spring with my filthy capitalist peers, which feels a little disappointing, but on the other hand, the workers get free shoe polish on Tuesdays. Whose sneakers look pseudo-bourgeois now? Communism rocks.
