I AM A COMMUNIST
I am a communist. Writer.
There is no such thing as brotherhood. Idealism is so yesterday. Journalists drink alone. All the journalism bars are closed.
Do you really think that any major American editor would publish an avowed communist voice. What planet do you live on.
David Brooks is right.
Before any protest demonstration, you have to go out there, and walk the walk. To know the streets. To smell the smells. To know which way the tear gas is going to. To not get pinned in by cops with no way out.
Before the demonstration. Not during.
I am a communist. I write. Communism is rooted in the past. Take a closer look. Marx was Jewish. His sense of community is evident in everything he writes.
I do not care.
I used to care. But life is too short to care about publishing. The animal has a set of spots that never change. It just goes out of business.
Community is a rut in the rain on a dirt road to hell.
When I write about community organizers putting together the structures that will facilitate them to see to it that the protest goes fluidly to wherever they want it to go, up and down specific streets, I would never use real organizers names.
What would be the point. You would not believe me if I did use real names. This breaks badly with the journalism rules. But I am not an English major. I never went to college. I was poor. I am still poor. I work with kids. Not journalists, not agents, not editors, not marketing experts, I take the kids I work with to protests and demonstrations.
Communism does not make me dangerous. The fact that I can and do indoctrinate the adolescent mind as my prerogative makes me more treacherous that you can possibly imagine. I take a long, broad view.
What’s in a name. Both the Feds and local police departments collect those names, and a whole lot more.
David Brooks hits a home run. The Eastern Publishing Oligarchy leaves out anyone who thinks differently or doesn’t tow a party yuppy line. Brooks is right again when he speaks to community about community. I do fear that Brooks will move to an Israeli Kibbutz and we will lose his steady voice.
The New York Times speaks to Eastern Publishing Oligarchy itself which it is a part of. This is not news, I don’t even care.
The people I know are all working people. Working means they work. Hard. I am told that writing is work, too. Until you’ve spent two days picking cucumbers with the barbs they have, which will turn any glove into a soaked in blood glove, you will never see writing as work ever again. I don’t work. I write. I don’t even care.
Communism is dead, discredited, the stuff of failure and deceit. China is not communism. The Sandinistas are not communists. There were no real communists in Chile. The Soviet Union was a devouring machine. These places played soldierships with monsters. The Soviet Union is not a union anymore. It has ceased to exist, but I am very much alive. Ideas, too, are hard to kill completely. It is easier to marginalize them, and me.
Who do you read that is a communist. No one. My voice is slapped around every day. I did get a Most Notable Book from the New York Times. But to say that book, far more controversial than anyone could possibly believe, was easy to publish is obscene. I had to change my name.
The guys at the used tire garage all know my real name. The women who do the childcare in the migrant camps, migrant workers themselves, watching kids picking crops from the corner of their eyes, all know my name. The Head Start teachers know my name. The sex worker organizers demanding rights all know my name. Walmart greeters know my name. The guys at the muffler shop know my name. The guys who sell chainsaws know my name. The motorcycle shop knows my name. That is where I buy all my clothes. Hackers know my name. Strippers know my name. Boys from detention with HIV know my name.
Dean Baquet does not know my name. David Brooks would not remember me.
I am forgettable. I am a writer. A communist writer who sometimes works the apple orchards and the titty bars. Half of what I write about is what happens in my bed here in the Blue Ridge Mountains. My book editors have forgotten my name.
My agents at ICM wouldn’t know me to pass me on the street. I have never seen an editor pick cucumbers. There is no pesticide sprayed everywhere, and on everyone, at the New York Times. There are no bars there to tend. There are no road construction dudes, shirtless with red flags, eating grit, at the New York Times. Where work is what you write. Work is the woman who at night comes around and empties your trash can.
I have had meetings at the New York Times. I don’t attend meetings anymore unless they’re about making 20,000 protest signs.
Men with paint on their chest crawling, exhausted, into my bed. While the Bolsheviks sleep. I do not care.
I was nominated for a National Magazine Award. But I had to stay in the South to pick tomatoes or we would go hungry. My editor at Esquire could not believe I could not come to New York even if Esquire paid for it.
But we had to can tomatoes in Mason Jars so we could store them in the cellar. My kitchen reeking of tomato sludge.
You are what you do. You are your history.
I used to have 10,000 followers who drove me crazy on Medium. I left. I’m back. I so prefer having five followers. Three are bots.
Us communists (our ranks number about twelve) can all teach history backwards, forwards, sideways, and we know who Emma Goldman was. How many students in any American High school can tell you who Emma Goldman was.
You can’t smell like a bullhorn at a protesting riot. But the smell of tear gas is rancid. Just throw your clothes away.
There were printers once at the New York Times of yesteryear who smelled like leadened ink when they climbed into my bed.
I have written for the New York Times. But do you think Dean Baquet would even consider publishing an avowed communist, Organizer, Act Up Protestor who not only writes but puts his body where his big mouth is. Different name again.
Socialist is a little more acceptable.
Communist makes people run for the hills. I do not care.
I have sources who are not unlike I am, who attend demonstrations, and meetings as to how to guide those protests, I am canceled by mainstream media. Twitter has reciprocity not a lack of dialogue.
In publishing, when people say “home” or “family,” develop wings and fly away to Paris as quickly as possible.
DEMONSTRATION ORGS INFILTRATED BY DEA is not a headline you will read. Because I covered it. A very dark story. You will never read it. One word.
Chicago.
The relationship between ideology, human beings, and blood. It’s coming. It’s here.
I know this: America is much darker with her secrets than anyone wants to admit.
When I tell East Coast People that I never really went to university — I simply read a lot — and that people would hire me because they needed what I could do (especially working with at-risk boys), what I am really saying is that there is no such thing as a brotherhood. It’s a marketing gimmick colleges make up. Just because you are privileged enough to go to an ivy league school does not mean you get invited to the club. Even the people who are in the club don’t think they are really in the club.
Go ahead, ask them.
There are too many writers in Connecticut. The reader pays when listening to the same people, the same voices, every day. I could reinvent myself again just by writing as a liberal, but I am not a liberal. You cannot know me. I am a communist writer. I am a communist.
— Tim Barrus