Thursday, May 01, 2008

... and on May Day

Nudity. I still have a clipping from an October 1993 Nouvel Observateur, an opinion poll: twelve hundred people describing themselves as on the left were sent a list of two hundred ten words and asked to underline the ones that fascinated them, that appealed to them, that they found attractive and congenial; a few years earlier, the same poll had been taken: back then, of the same two hundred ten words there were eighteen on which left wingers agreed and which thereby confirmed the existence of a shared sensibility. In 1993, the beloved words were down to three. Only three words that the left can agree on? What a decline! What a collapse! And what three words are they? Listen to this: “revolt”; “red”; “nudity.” “Revolt” and “red,” those are obvious. But that, aside from those two words, only “nudity” quickens the heart of left-wingers, that only nudity still stands as their shared symbolic legacy, is astounding. Is this our total inheritance from the magnificent two-hundred-year history solemnly launched by the French Revolution, is this the legacy of Robespierre, Danton, Jaurès, Rosa Luxemburg, of Lenin, Gramsci, Aragon, Che Guevara? Nudity? The naked belly, naked balls, naked buttocks? Is that the last flag under which the final brigades of the left simulate their grand march through the centuries? 

-Milan Kundera, Slowness

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

naked balls. i like that.

JoseyWales said...

Thank God the legacy of the French Rev and all the nutballs listed here is fading.

As to "nudity", maybe it's the "sex" connection:

We all know that 83.6% of our leftist friends started reading Gramsci and Rosa Lux, or should I say just carried the books, for the sole purpose of using co-ed bathrooms at university sit-ins and getting laid.