Dartblog

The brilliant law professor Ann Althouse noted on her blog a strange photograph of Bill and Hillary Clinton in a recent edition of The Los Angeles Times. The photo was from a fall kick-off campaign rally in Portsmouth, New Hampshire; it shows Bill and Hillary, chiseled, stone-lipped, and serene, in a classic Dear Leader sort of pose. Naturally, someone noticed its resemblance to the old Soviet agitprop and made the necessary adjustments, seen above. It’s grand; Hillary really does want to take things away from you, using the predatory force of the state, because she thinks she can allocate things better than you. And here is that point, set in historical context.

Just a few years after the Russian Revolution, the Blue Blouse Workers’ Theater, a leftist confabulation of party-line artists, presented a poem lauding the Party’s introduction of the light bulb. The poem is called “Electrification.”

We, the workers and the peasants
Swept the tsarist throne away.
We twist a socket in the ceiling
And it shines the night away!

In the hut of the widow Natalka
Something’s shining through the night.
I’ll be darned, I’ll be darned
Moonlight sure don’t shine that bright.

Electricity and steam
Reap and mow and forge for us
Soon electricity not brains
Will do our thinking all for us!