WILLIAM F. GAVIN
The New York Times Book Review on Sunday, September 7, carried an interview with best-selling novelist Ken Follett. He was asked: “What’s the one book you wish someone else would write?”
His reply: “Now that Communism is over, and we’re not obliged to have that argument any longer, someone should analyze the achievement of Karl Marx as a philosopher. Like Freud and Darwin, he changed the way we all think, even conservatives.”
What follows is what might have been said in an international conference call on the same day. The participants are: Raul Castro of Cuba, Xi Jinping of China, and Kim Jong-un of North Korea:
Kim Jong-un: Did you guys read the New York Times Book Review? A Brit writer named Ken Follett said that Communism is over.
Xi: Over what?
Kim: Over. Finished. Done. Kaput. What’s going on? Nobody told me. I thought we’re still in business. I got a lot of labor camps to run, I got people to starve, and now I’m being told it’s all over.
Xi: Look, kid, all I got to say is this: I got one billion, three hundred fifty million Chinese people under party control. You got 21 million, Raul’s got 11 million, and Vietnam has 93 million. Does that look as if Communism is over? Relax, sonny, we’re still a growing concern. The democracies have short memories. We used to be the bad guys, but now their big worry is those Islamic nut-cases chopping off heads. To the United States, communism is yesterday’s news. We can stay under the radar and just go about our business, persecuting Christians, controlling the press, and doing what we want. We got lot of friends in the West, and– I got to do a little boasting here–we’re doing all right in China these days. Hong Kong is a problem—they get uppity– but we’ll take care of that in due time and nobody will do anything about it. Try to impose sanctions on China and see how far you get! And just remember we got a KGB guy running Russia and he’s kicking Ukrainian fanny all over the place and nobody can stop him. That don’t sound like “over” to me.
Kim: Easy for you to say. Everybody else’s nuclear stockpile is bigger than mine, I get visits from Dennis Rodman, and now some Brit says Communism is over.
Raul: You think you got troubles? My brother Fidel is on the way out, we got cars that are sixty years old, and I’m losing baseball players to the Americans. So stop with the self-pity. We’re still around and, like Xi said, it’s good to know some western liberals think we’re gone. We absolutely have nothing to worry about. Trust me on this, kid
Kim: Well . . . I guess so. I’d hate for it to be over. It’s not only the absolute power. To me it’s just been a lot of fun.
Raul: I know what you mean. I never could figure out how the anti-communists missed the fun part.
Kim: One more thing: did you know that conservatives are influenced by the philosophy of Karl Marx? Ken Follett said so.
Raul: That explains it.
Xi: Explains what?
Raul: I never could understand what Bill Buckley was talking about on Firing Line. All those big words. It turns out he was apparently trying to speak Marxist but didn’t know his dialectic materialism from his radical neo-Hegelianism.
Kim: Who is Bill Buckley?
Xi: (he chuckles) These kids these days!
Editor’s Note: William F. Gavin was a speech writer for President Richard Nixon and long-time aide to former House Republican Leader Bob Michel. Among his books is his latest, Speechwright, published by Michigan State University Press.