Jim Devine wrote:
[interestingly, the way that the SWP functionary's way of handing accusations of sexual molestation are exactly the same as the Catholic Church's.]
Don't believe all the bullshit you read in the NY Times. I read an excerpt from this stupid book when it appeared in Granta and posted this comment on it to the swp yahoo (these 2 terms really sort of go together, don't they?) mailing list: I can’t remember anything leaving such a bad taste in my mouth as Säid Sayrafiezadeh's “When Skateboards will be free”. It was almost enough to make me reapply for membership in the SWP. Almost. Although Said is not a rightwinger (at least for the time being), it is clear that he is trying to pull off something like this excerpt from David Horowitz’s “Radical Son”: >>The powerful early chapters of the book introduce his parents and recount his youth as a red-diaper baby. For his father, communism provided the certainty, self-confidence, and sense of mastery of fate that he lacked; it promised an end to the alienation that he felt from his country and, indeed, himself. This made for a strange childhood: "Almost all conversation in our household was political, other than what was necessary to advance the business of daily life." Horowitz was warned off baseball, "a form of capitalist exploitation," and especially the Yankees, "the ruling class of baseball": "To root for the Yankees," as Horowitz furtively did, "was to betray a lack of social consciousness that was unthinkable for people like us."<< In fact, the real model for this is the witch-hunt movies of the 1950s in which the Reds were virtually indistinguishable from the pod people in “Invasion of the Body Snatchers.” Although I didn’t really know Said’s parents, I truly doubt that they were as one-dimensional as they were depicted in his memoir, which I assume is an excerpt from a full-length book. If David Horowitz is denied baseball, so poor Said is denied a skateboard. His mother who seems to have taken a vow of poverty doubts the need for such a trifle, especially since it would set her back $10 or so. Frankly, this sounds fabricated like much else in this memoir. No matter how poor his mother was, it seems dubious that she couldn’t scrape up such a paltry sum. His whole purpose, of course, is to create a dichotomy between his own desire for normalcy and his parents’ robotic asceticism. It is not even reliable as a guide to life inside the SWP, which by this time had taken on certain “odd” characteristics to put it mildly. Said informs us that his mother was attending a forum on “Trotsky and the Fourth International.” As a forum director of the SWP for a number of years, I can say that anybody who proposed such a topic would have raised eyebrows. This is especially true in the period that Said covers, which was marked by a growing disaffection from Trotskyist traditions. But the worst thing about this venal exercise was the charge he made about being molested by a baby-sitter while his mother attended the forum. Said writes that this man “put his hands in my pants and gently ran his fingers over and around my dick and balls sending a Shockwave coursing through my four-year-old body.” When Said’s mother calls the SWP headquarters to tell them that her son had been molested by a party member, she supposedly is told that “Under capitalism everybody has problems.” According to Said, “it was left at that.” So, here we have it. The SWP not only forces children to go without skateboards, it shrugs it shoulders when they are buggered. What trash. Try to imagine such an incident occurring. I can’t. Whatever the faults of the SWP in this period, it was not likely to tolerate child molestation. Male SWP members of long standing were expelled for using violence against their female companions so it is doubtful that sexual abuse of a four year old would go unpunished. If the SWP was guilty of anything, it was turning into such a suffocating cult that the child of two of its members would turn into such a vengeful fabricator. Let’s hope that in the revolutionary party of the future we can create an environment where parents and children can relate to each other normally. I should qualify that by saying as normal as can be expected in bourgeois society, which the revolutionary party has to operate in. _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
