Scott Solomon's Trotskyish Parodies

I Am (A Trot)

I am (a Trot): what I am only loners care or know
Friends and family forsake me like a mediocrity lost
I am the non-consumerist self-consumer of my woes --
Degenerated and deformed worker states rise and vanish in oblivious host,
Like shadows in our sectarian, frenzied throes
And yet I am (a Trot), and live to sell newspapers

Amidst the nothingness of sectarian cult scorn and noise,
Into the dead sea of totalitarian dreams,
Where there is neither sense of non-cult life or joys,
But the vast shipwreck of a Trot's life's esteems;
Even ex-cult member "comrades" that I loved the best
Are strange -- nay, rather stranger than the rest.

I long for the Trot vision, where man hath never trod
A place where good looking women never smiled or wept --
There to abide with the son and savior Lev Sedov
And sleep as I through Trot speeches sweetly slept,
A nuisance, and reveling in my endless lies,
Trots will never be effective, despite their million tries.

It's the Hard-Trot Life

ORPHANS
It's the hard-knock life for Trots!
It's the hard-knock life for Trots!

ANNIE
'Steada earning,

ORPHANS
We work free

ANNIE
For our dead cult God

ORPHANS
Trotsky

ALL
It's the hard-Trot life!
Joined a Trot cult long ago
So it's the hard-Trot row we hoe!

ANNIE
Leading browbeatings

ORPHANS
'Steada strikes

ANNIE
Tell the cult leader

ORPHANS
What he likes

ALL
It's the hard-Trot life!

ANNIE
Don't it feel like no one's reading our bullshit cult newspaper?

KATE AND TESSIE
Don't it seem like there's never any money?

DUFFY AND JULIE
Once a day, don't you wanna admit Curtis is a child raper

MOLLY AND PEPPER
It's easier to kowtow in an authoritarian political cult than try to do
something worthwhile with your life.

ANNIE
No one's there when you realize Trots are creepy!
No one cares if the cult grows . . . of if it shrinks.
No one gets to drive the cult leaders expensive car.

ALL
>From all the hysteria you would think this place's a LaRouchite
ego-stripping session!
Ohhhhhh!

Newspaper selling life!
Browbeaten smelly life!
Full of sorrow life!
No tomorrow life!

MOLLY
Democracy we never see

ANNIE
A real payday, what's that, who's he?

ALL
It's just nobody's fault
That we joined a commie cult

MOLLY
(Making pretentious sounds and imitating the Trot cult leader)
You'll stay up till you have read all of my masterpiece "polemic" and have
my bombastic drivel memorized!

ORPHANS
Put our leader in the Detroit Zoo
Crash his BMW
Why has he organized so few?
Will he dream up something new?

MOLLY
(whistle)
Get to work!
(whistle)
Sell them newspapers
(whistle)
I said get to work!

ALL
It's the hard-knock life for Trots
It's the hard-knock life for Trots
It's just nobody's fault
That we joined a commie cult

It's the hard-Trot life
It's the hard-Trot life
It's the hard-Trot life!

Trotskyism

Should I be a Trot?  Should I be a loser?
Just like James Robertson, the Sparts' dissolute boozer?
Don't go to university -- sell the cult newspaper
talk about the bourgeois conspiracy and vote for Jerry White
and campaign for Mark Curtis, the Trots' favorite child raper
and watch my "comrades" get browbeaten and I understanding why
not giving up on the commie faith saying Take it on the chin!
It's great when our leaders stick it in!  Instead go to four hour
branch meetings and watch my bank account evaporate
so the cult leader can buy
a new BMW?

When I'm invited onto the commie general staff
after backroom discussions few have any knowledge why
should I slave loyally in their slave plantation printing plant
and not ask Where's this going?
How else to feel other than a lobotomized Branch Davidian
often thinking Super Trot comic books --
O how terrible it must be for a commie slave
seated before an aggregate meeting and the "comrades" thinking
Who is this middle class garbage really!  Maybe he'll quit!
After the cult leader's  two hour rant they ask what I think of the
cult's pet conspiracy theory.

Should I tell them?  Would they like me then?
Say All right comrade, how about editing the youth paper
that nobody reads --
And should I then ask Where's this going?

O Man, and those summer camps!  The international comrade flavors
of the year all scroungy, you know nothing about them,
like how the English cult leader smacked his daughter when she told him
that a cult member molested her, he's our buddy, and everyone's
all jacked up to hear the _lider maximo_ in his leather 3/4 length coat.
And the national editor of the cult newspaper! he looking as if Number One
just caught him masturbating, mouthing his agreed upon script "Yes,
internationalism is the cutting edge of socialism," and most loser cult
members trembling what to say say Pabloite Glue!
I faithfully saunter up to denounce the internal enemy of the moment
He's adapted to  revisionism, Comrades! Bad-bad-bad!
And in the leader's eyes you could see some psychotic, megalomaniacal
fantasy going on -- St. Petersburg!  1903!  I'm Vladimir 
Lenin!  There will be Hordes of us!  I will lead!
All streaming in to hear the cult leader
All thinking exactly the same thing, exactly what Number One
wants them to think
The big fat editor, he "thinking" what Number One wants
The Moony zombie labor editor he "thinking"
The chief of ideological purity "thinking"
Brown noser #1, he "thinking"
All the cult members thinking the same think!  Number One can't
believe it!  There must be a revisionist there somewhere!
Stay up all night!  Stare the whole Central Committee in the eyes
(except for the guy with the glass eye, that is)
Screaming:  I deny the renegades!  I deny capitalism!
barely skirting the climactic threat of expelling EVERYBODY
yelling  Trot belch!  Coyoacan dust!
O I'd stay in the cult forever! in a single room in a
run down house in Oak Park, Michigan, with three forty-six year old men,
beneath the overpass by the expressway
I'd sit there, the Mad Sectarian
devising ways to defeat Pabloism, a scourge of Morenoism
saint of the split--

But I should be a Trot I should be a loser
How nice it'd be to come home with my fifty bucks per week
to some "comrade" screaming at another "comrade" about some imagined
political failing, and the branch secretary screaming,
"I'm more politically advanced than you!"
And the treasurer so happy I sold twenty newspapers she pays
me this week's wages in dollar bills and quarters instead
of nickels and dimes and getting to see our "Presidential Candidate" yell
at some rival cult member at Circle Campus Sylvia Franklin! GPU Hansen!
Agent Barnes!  Man, what a cult member I'd make!  Yes, I should
be a Trot!  So much to do!  Like showing up at strikes, not
knowing what the hell's going on, covering the workers with
leaflets calling their leaders sellouts
Like getting spit on by workers trying to sell them
commie newspapers
like taking a Marxism class and screaming at the professor
he's a Stalinist  like when some rival Trot cult's newspaper woman
comes to the house selling subscriptions
grab her and tell her You killed our martyr in the 1970's!
Like showing up at headquarters for a job as a "reporter,"
and finding out you're going to be a slave in the slave plantation
printing plant instead!

Yet if I should be a Trot cult member and they send me to
Manhattan, and I get to hang out outside the New York Marxist
School selling cult newspapers, even going inside after the
lecture gets going, and I get to hear Daniel Singer and a panel
of zombies drone on for three hours and say nothing
Finding myself in the most glorious of commie situations
bored out of my mind, exchanging dirty looks with
some Spart selling cookies who said Gorbachev should be lynched
O what would that be like!
Surely I'd sell some worker making $9,000/year a lecture
by Vadim Rogovin, or draw his attention to a review of
the Toronto Film Festival, or follow the cult leader's scintillating
"exchanges" with Richard Pipes.

No, I doubt I'd be that kind of cult member
Not Manhattan Leonard Street but hot, smelly
tight South Side of Chicago, right down wind from
a sewage treatment plant, seven flights up,
roaches and roach spray and an old cult member political candidate
having a stroke right there in the bedroom
The Fat Reichian editor screaming over 'Cheers'
on the TV set, "My sister sucks!  She went to Swarthmore!"
And five Australian "comrades" all telling me that
a rival Australian Trot cult membership is just a bunch of perverts
The branch secretary wants me write up some bullshit political failing
Impossible to go to some South Sea Island and have
sex with the one good looking student member in the whole sect.
No!  I should not be a Trot cult member I should
never be a Trot cult member
But -- imagine if I got to go hit up John Belushi
for a $10,000 donation to the Vanessa Redgrave campaign
Like Number One and the editor did awhile back
Or what if the revolution succeeded, and all the people hated us
but it didn't matter because we were powerful
and I got a great job in the massive, totalitarian state
apparatus until Number One got
sick of our faction and had us all thrown into a Gulag
or outright murdered?

O but what about permanent revolution?  I forget permanent
revolution, not that the world commie fantasy is actually possible
it's just that the idea is as odd as an acid trip
I never really wanted to be a lumpenized, ex-middle class
loser like Spart members, SEP'ers, SWP'ers, ISO'ers, WWP'ers
And being Number One with a trust fund and
a new BMW was always impossible
And maybe there's Vanessa Redgrave, but she's really wacky,
old, and inaccessible
And the Freedom Socialist Party is totally full of losers
But there's got to be some commie political cult!
Because what if I'm 60 years old and not
a member of a commie political cult
all alone in a furnished room with pee stains on my underwear
and .001% of the population is in commie political cults?
All losers in a commie political cult except me?

Ah, yet well I know that were Leon Trotsky possible as I am
possible then being a commie loser would be possible --
Like LENIN in his lonely alien tomb waiting to come back
to life if our cult leader tells him to
so I wait -- bereft of the Trotskyite commie mindfuck
and a country chock full of concentration camps.