Communism

It was an idea whose time had come
or so they thought.
First there was the original, the Marx
version.
It seemed to be a great idea, everybody equal
pulling their own weight in a
great society. You might say it was the French
philosophers who started the whole damn thing
when they sliced off the king’s head
in the Place de la Revolution, 1789
to, you know, get him and his royal legions
out of the way
so Liberte, Egalite, and Fraternite could
rule the day
instead of the divine right of fuddy-duddy
kings
which was an old disproven
notion. It had fallen, like the guillotine upon the king,
by the wayside. Later,
When the Bolsheviks got a hold of it
it became something else, and so
there evolved the Russian
version
which morphed into the Lenin
version
and eventually degenerated into the bloody Stalin
purge version
Then of course there was the Chinese
version
which, when Mao got a hold of it became
some great bloody leap backward and
a cultural revolution the likes of which the world
had never seen
since Pharoah, or whoever the hell it was that collected
all those sweating men out in the desert to stack
stone upon Ozymandian stone
up to the sky
but who knows why.
But I digress. It was the Ho Chi Minh
version
that really tripped us Americans up because
that great idea whose time had come had
proven to be not such a great idea
or so we thought.
And the whole damned ideological notion of
Communism
had become a terrible bogey man, an ogre in
the furtive minds of Capitalist men that
eventually got mired in the bogs of
Vietnam
And what a helluva thing that was.
Oh, and while all that was going down
along came the Che
version
and then the Castro
version
but the jury’s still out on all that or
so it seems,
‘though things are never as they
seem.
Maybe it was all just a bad
dream.

Smoke