Savoring our land of plenty
Second of three parts
We continue the comparison of America to the despotic regime of Stalin’s USSR and other places presently in existence. I will also continue to use the food analogy to make some points. We spent one evening at a Japanese steak house — one of those places where 10 people sit around a grill and watch the cook prepare the meal while he tells jokes.
We awaited the arrival of our cook. In he came, a brown-skinned man, thus of suspicious origins to certain political colors. “Good evening, everyone. My name is Maha-Shen-Ra. But you can call me Chuck.”
Smart move. Chuck was foreign-looking, but we white-skinned patrons accepted the adopted name of Chuck as being All-American. His moniker put us at ease. He was not going to poison our egg roll. Speaking of which, as we were eating our appetizers: first, soup; second, salad; third, grilled shrimp, Chuck began to prepare our fried rice. He rolled an egg down his spatula onto the grill, and then offered, “The origin of ‘egg roll.’”
I was already full. My stomach stretched far beyond Stalin’s restrictions, as well as those stomachs of the starving people in current day Aleppo, Syria. Yet the main course was still to come.
Perhaps because I had recently read some books about the Soviet Gulag, during this meal I marveled at the abundance of the bounty of America. I kept thinking about the plight of Solzhenitsyn and his fellow Gulag convicts, as he said, “It was impossible to try to keep nourished on Gulag norms [for] anyone who worked out in the bitter cold for thirteen or fourteen hours. And it was completely impossible once the basic ration had been plundered [by the camp keepers].”
Back to Chuck and our fine meal. After polishing off the fried rice, we moved to the main course. Mine was steak and more shrimp. But once served to me, I could not eat it. I was filled to capacity.
I could not help but think about Solzhenitsyn again. I thought about his description of an inmate rebellion at one of the Gulag camps. After years of abuse, deprivation, and torture, after prolonged periods of desperate hunger, the inmates staged a hunger strike. Yes, a hunger strike orchestrated by starving people. Solzhenitsyn describes this macabre scene:
“This was a hunger strike called not by well-fed people with reserves of subcutaneous fat, but by gaunt, emaciated men, who had felt the whip of hunger daily for years on end, who had achieved with difficulty some sort of physical equilibrium, and who suffered acute distress if they were deprived of a single 100-gram ration. Even the goners starved with the rest, although a three-day fast might tip them into irreversible and fatal decline. The food, which we had refused, and which we had always thought so beggarly, was a mirage of plenty in the feverish dreams of famished men.”
As Chuck flipped a huge chunk of butter onto the grill for our steaks, he offered, “The origin of the word, butterfly.” As he cut up the orders for beef fillet, he asked, “What do you call a cow with no legs?” Answer, “Ground beef.”
We sat back in our chairs, sipping our wine while savoring Chuck’s jokes and food, marveling at his dexterity with a spatula and his rhythmic beats on the grill. But I could not put aside Solzhenitsyn’s images of humans being treated as if they had no worth, no dignity. To assuage my funk, I ordered another glass of wine as I mulled over what I had read a couple hours earlier about the Gulag:
“You are reduced to a frazzle by intense envy and alarm lest [someone] behind your back [is] right now dividing up that bread which could be yours, that somewhere on the other side of the wall a tiny potato is being ladled out of the pot, which could have ended up in your own bowl.”
We snowbirds could not resist returning to the Parker Hotel for breakfast.
The chef took almost an hour to cook our waffles at the coffee shop, but upon delivery, Holly and I understood why. My waffles were stacked almost five inches high, sculpted to resemble a work of art. They were covered with fresh blueberries, strawberries, and unknown berries. I pushed piles of these delicacies off to the side of the dish in order to saturate my food with syrup. Mother Nature’s natural sweeteners were not up to the task of irrigating the waffle’s canals.
Holly is an understanding mate. She recognizes and accepts my inclinations toward Foreign Affairs and International Relations (the periodicals, of course), and often listens to my diatribes about world events. On this occasion ... the bountiful breakfast at the Parker Hotel ... I was still thinking about Gucci Gulch, the Gulag, and the abundance of my country.
As I chomped down on my waffles, I asked Holly why the Gulag system and Stalin’s programs became so vast. By the 1950s, their camps housed hundreds of thousands of inmates and spanned the wide expanse of the Soviet Union. Then, I recalled passages in the Gulag books. To a great extent, the number of arrests was based on a quota system.
Yes, quota! The Communist prison apparatus operated on a “specific quota of arrests carried out by a stipulated time.” What were the reasons for an arrest? Almost anything: Irritating your neighbor, who reported you to the local Communist unit. Belief in a religion. Belief in Mendel’s genetic theories. Praise of American democracy or technology.
Granted, I’m not the ideal breakfast dining partner, as I don’t talk much about the weather. I asked Holly: How bizarre can such a situation be? Rounding up productive citizens to deprive them of a life because a jailor had to meet a quota? Orwell’s 1984 is small potatoes when compared to Stalin’s 1937. Orwell’s ruminations were a deadly dream. Stalin’s practices were a deadly nightmare.
If one wants productivity, it is a good idea to keep the producers actually producing. Locking them up in a prison camp is somewhat counterproductive to productivity. Time and again, the Gulag slaves sabotaged projects designed to transform the Soviet Union into a Communist state. Yet, this very handicapping — not necessarily quotas, but certainly restrictions on freedom — is a hallmark of many societies today.
Holly, the ever-patient mate, nodded in acknowledgment of my observations and questions.
The third and last article in this series reflects on America’s freedom and affluence, and offers some thoughts for dealing with the next set of politicians in Washington.
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Uyless Black is registered as an Independent in the state of Idaho. He may or may not contest the outcome of the Presidential election, depending on who wins. Uyless resides in Hayden, Idaho and Palm Springs, Calif.