7.6.11

I want to be where comrades are

Contrary to what may be popular belief, I was not raptured. I am simply more busy than I've ever been in my life.

Sometimes, for some reason, I get the Little Mermaid song "Part of Your World" stuck in my head. Honestly, what isn't to like about that song? It is incredibly catchy.

I also have the habit of talking to myself when alone, which I believe I wrote about years ago on this blog. Living alone has merely exacerbated this phenomenon. It isn't as though I sit and have conversations with myself. I simply sometimes narrate what I am doing. Like a real asshole.

So, I have found that lately, when the this song gets stuck in my head, I have begun to, rather than sing it, say the words, but in a Russian accent. I've realized that imagining that I am Joseph Stalin, whimsically saying the words rather than singing them, is really funny when you replace certain words with other words.

For example:

Right before Ariel breaks into song, she says this: "Maybe he's right. Maybe there is something the matter with me.
I just don't see how a world that makes such wonderful things could be bad."

Now, imagine Joseph Stalin, sequestered away from the common folk of the Soviet Union, in either an underground compound, or whatever (this definitely works best if you imagine him underground, for obvious reasons). And you HAVE to imagine this in a russian accent. "Maybe the comrades are right. Maybe there is something the matter with me. I just don't see how a world that makes wonderful things could be bad," says Comrade Stalin, as he wistfully imagines a country not raped stupid by communism.

"Look at this stuff...it is not neat? Wouldn't you say my arsenal is complete? Wouldn't you say I am comrade...comrade who has...everything? Look at this trove...stockpile untold. How many warheads, can one compound hold? Looking around here you think...sure...this comrade has everything.

I have gadgets and gizmos a plenty...I've got whose-its and whats-its galore. You want thermal bombs? I have twenty (said, as he waves a disinterested, dismissive hand in the direction of said thermal bombs) But who cares? Is no big deal. I want more....(said in an intense, sinister whisper.)

I want to be where comrades are. I want to see, want to see them marching. Standing around in those--how you say?--food lines. Riding around underground compound in party leader issued red Benz you don't get too far, a comrade must use legs for marching along on those--how you say--streets?

Up where comrades walk, where comrades run, where comrades toil all day under threat of nuclear fire storm...wandering free, wish I could be, part of that world..."

You get the idea. I think that maybe had Stalin been able to see the Little Mermaid, he'd have taken the Soviet Union in a different direction. He'd have realized that he and the little mermaid were the same person--just cooped up, misunderstood comrades, waiting for their chance to break free from King Triton/Communism's oppressive clutches.

This is where your mind goes, and what it produces, when you teach history, live alone, and are an apparently unsalvageable nerd.