Comrade Marcel
22nd October 2003, 05:10
I wrote this as an assignment for my creative writing class. Basically I was given a picture of a house and told to write about it and try to keep it under one page (I tried my best).
The Trotskyite House (short version) - By: Marcell Rodden
When they first moved in the house stunk of Urine all throughout, the walls were covered in graffiti, the attic was full of dead cats, rats, bats, birds & raccoons; none of the toilets worked, the basement - which also had many dead animals in it - was full of drug paraphernalia such as needles & crack-pipes, the backyard had grown grass as high as corn stalks & there was a half eaten dead dog hidden within it, the roof was collapsing, most of the windows broken glass, & all the paint was chipped off the outside of the house.
But, the city chapter of the Militant Army of Trotskyists - or MAT for short - worked together collectively and made the house a decent place to live. They got rid of the smell, painted the walls, cleaned the attic & made it livable, repaired the toilets, cleaned the basement, mowed the back yard & got rid of the dead dog, repaired the roof, replaced all the windows, & painted the outside of the house red.
22 MAT members shared the 7 bedrooms. They did everything as a collective: cooking, cleaning, and maintenance work. 10 of the MAT members were women, & MAT rules were that women were not to do any of the traditional house work usually subjected to them in domestic situations. The 12 men did most things around the house. However the women did take part in maintenance work such as plumbing, painting, flooring, etc.
The basement was used as a sort of "weapons cache". Ron Asters, the leader of MAT said that it was "time for militant training to prepare us for a real worker's revolution" and so the MAT had begun to stockpile assault rifles and make explosives. MAT's revolutionary program was to overthrow the capitalist state apparatus.
MAT were enemies not just with the state, but with other revolutionary groups as well. The two groups they liked to attack the most was the Maoist Guard and the Leonid Brezhnev Communist Youth League. Ron Asters wrote in the MAT's newspaper The Vanguardian that those organizations were "Stalinist Bureaucrats and traitors to the working class." MAT would often get in to physical confrontations with these groups, & they would also interrupt each others meetings & events.
One time a Maoist Guard member threw a stink bomb in to the room of a campus building were MAT was having a study group entitled 'For a sweep of the Stalinist bureaucracy in China and a Crushing defeat for the Maoist Cult of Personality'. MAT got back at them by catching the bomber - a 18 year old man named Armando - & beating him with hockey sticks when he went for a smoke outside the campus building were Maoist Guard was meeting.
One MAT member was a 16 year old male with Dyslexia named CJ. CJ would try his best to write articles but he was not very smart to begin with & his dyslexia made it totally impossible. CJ's writings looked like this:
Stailn wa s not a reel revelutionary, he onyl want to get pwre. Thats y eh kiled teh orginal bolshviks.
CJ liked to "talk a lot of shit". This meant that he would say that he would beat up this or that person, but when the time came around to put his threats to action he would either run away or get his ass kicked.
CJ did almost anything Ron Asters told him to do and seemed to be very loyal, therefor he came in useful to MAT. Of course no one could predict the tremendous screw up that CJ was about to make.....
You see when it was time for the "communal supper" one Tuesday night - the night CJ was supposed to make dinner - CJ went out to make BBQ hot dogs and burgers (MAT didn't make any veggie dogs or anything like that because there was no vegans in MAT. Ron Asters said that "Veganism is petty-bourgeois activism that had no relevance to the advancement of the working class").
CJ put the BBQ on 'HI', laid out the all-beef hot dogs on the grill, then went inside to use his computer to surf message boards and debate with his enemies online. His plan was to come back out in about 10 minutes to check on the hot dogs and hoped they would be ready. He didn't bother to tell the other MAT members that he was cooking because he wanted to show them that he was responsible, capable, and that they could depend on him. After about 90 minutes, CJ had totally forgotten about the BBQ and was in his own world, angrily smashing his keyboard and shouting out "Kautskyist asshole!" and "Stalinist traitors!", when suddenly a loud whistling sound started up from outside. It got louder and louder, and no one knew what it was....
It was the BBQ & it exploded. Since it was situated close to one of the basement windows, heat from the blast set off the explosives in the "weapons cache", which blew up the entire house and killed all the MAT members except for Ron Asters.
Ron Asters was away at the MAT national conference during the blast, & accusations said that he had sabotaged the BBQ. These accusations further escalated when it came out that Ron Asters was actually an agent who worked for the state, and it even caused the group to split in to 2. The break-off group called themselves Trotskyist Army of Militants, or TAM for short.
Ron Asters disappeared 2 weeks later & was never seen or heard from until one day about 2 years later when an article appeared in The Vanguardian that claimed to be written by him. In the article Asters supposedly admits responsibility for the blast.
But the real truth was the blast was caused by a rusty old gas tank that was reused too many times & a 16 year old boy with dyslexia named CJ who couldn't even cook a wiener, let alone lead a revolution.
- the end -
The Trotskyite House (short version) - By: Marcell Rodden
When they first moved in the house stunk of Urine all throughout, the walls were covered in graffiti, the attic was full of dead cats, rats, bats, birds & raccoons; none of the toilets worked, the basement - which also had many dead animals in it - was full of drug paraphernalia such as needles & crack-pipes, the backyard had grown grass as high as corn stalks & there was a half eaten dead dog hidden within it, the roof was collapsing, most of the windows broken glass, & all the paint was chipped off the outside of the house.
But, the city chapter of the Militant Army of Trotskyists - or MAT for short - worked together collectively and made the house a decent place to live. They got rid of the smell, painted the walls, cleaned the attic & made it livable, repaired the toilets, cleaned the basement, mowed the back yard & got rid of the dead dog, repaired the roof, replaced all the windows, & painted the outside of the house red.
22 MAT members shared the 7 bedrooms. They did everything as a collective: cooking, cleaning, and maintenance work. 10 of the MAT members were women, & MAT rules were that women were not to do any of the traditional house work usually subjected to them in domestic situations. The 12 men did most things around the house. However the women did take part in maintenance work such as plumbing, painting, flooring, etc.
The basement was used as a sort of "weapons cache". Ron Asters, the leader of MAT said that it was "time for militant training to prepare us for a real worker's revolution" and so the MAT had begun to stockpile assault rifles and make explosives. MAT's revolutionary program was to overthrow the capitalist state apparatus.
MAT were enemies not just with the state, but with other revolutionary groups as well. The two groups they liked to attack the most was the Maoist Guard and the Leonid Brezhnev Communist Youth League. Ron Asters wrote in the MAT's newspaper The Vanguardian that those organizations were "Stalinist Bureaucrats and traitors to the working class." MAT would often get in to physical confrontations with these groups, & they would also interrupt each others meetings & events.
One time a Maoist Guard member threw a stink bomb in to the room of a campus building were MAT was having a study group entitled 'For a sweep of the Stalinist bureaucracy in China and a Crushing defeat for the Maoist Cult of Personality'. MAT got back at them by catching the bomber - a 18 year old man named Armando - & beating him with hockey sticks when he went for a smoke outside the campus building were Maoist Guard was meeting.
One MAT member was a 16 year old male with Dyslexia named CJ. CJ would try his best to write articles but he was not very smart to begin with & his dyslexia made it totally impossible. CJ's writings looked like this:
Stailn wa s not a reel revelutionary, he onyl want to get pwre. Thats y eh kiled teh orginal bolshviks.
CJ liked to "talk a lot of shit". This meant that he would say that he would beat up this or that person, but when the time came around to put his threats to action he would either run away or get his ass kicked.
CJ did almost anything Ron Asters told him to do and seemed to be very loyal, therefor he came in useful to MAT. Of course no one could predict the tremendous screw up that CJ was about to make.....
You see when it was time for the "communal supper" one Tuesday night - the night CJ was supposed to make dinner - CJ went out to make BBQ hot dogs and burgers (MAT didn't make any veggie dogs or anything like that because there was no vegans in MAT. Ron Asters said that "Veganism is petty-bourgeois activism that had no relevance to the advancement of the working class").
CJ put the BBQ on 'HI', laid out the all-beef hot dogs on the grill, then went inside to use his computer to surf message boards and debate with his enemies online. His plan was to come back out in about 10 minutes to check on the hot dogs and hoped they would be ready. He didn't bother to tell the other MAT members that he was cooking because he wanted to show them that he was responsible, capable, and that they could depend on him. After about 90 minutes, CJ had totally forgotten about the BBQ and was in his own world, angrily smashing his keyboard and shouting out "Kautskyist asshole!" and "Stalinist traitors!", when suddenly a loud whistling sound started up from outside. It got louder and louder, and no one knew what it was....
It was the BBQ & it exploded. Since it was situated close to one of the basement windows, heat from the blast set off the explosives in the "weapons cache", which blew up the entire house and killed all the MAT members except for Ron Asters.
Ron Asters was away at the MAT national conference during the blast, & accusations said that he had sabotaged the BBQ. These accusations further escalated when it came out that Ron Asters was actually an agent who worked for the state, and it even caused the group to split in to 2. The break-off group called themselves Trotskyist Army of Militants, or TAM for short.
Ron Asters disappeared 2 weeks later & was never seen or heard from until one day about 2 years later when an article appeared in The Vanguardian that claimed to be written by him. In the article Asters supposedly admits responsibility for the blast.
But the real truth was the blast was caused by a rusty old gas tank that was reused too many times & a 16 year old boy with dyslexia named CJ who couldn't even cook a wiener, let alone lead a revolution.
- the end -