>>13133167If I have taken you correctly (which if so I know you will never acknowledge), this post seems a sort of modern-day regurgitation of Baudelaire's epater la bourgeoisie (can't type the accent or my computer will hang), except instead of violent or sexual taboos -- despite my most fervent wishes to the contrary, I must admit, looking at the recent submissions to OCP, that those have been thoroughly blasted by now -- you have here gone after a political one: denouncing Marxism in connection with the purges conducted by Mao, Stalin, etc. Whatever the acceptability of that opinion among the possibly-imaginary Republican voters said to inhabit a place called the "American Midwest" (I went there once, but it just felt like an emptier version of Massachusetts), among the "litterati" it is a decided no-go. (But of course you knew all that already.) The trap is to take anything about this poem seriously, even satirically so. I don't think this is a pro-Marxist satire any more than an anti-Marxist rant; in fact, to me the poem seems profoundly apolitical in that it draws all people alike (myself included), left, right, and center, to make fools of themselves by misinterpreting it in the replies.
