Revolutionary Leader Pretend

In the southern Willamette Valley, something is afoot.

The flowers bud, the squirrels frolic, and the delicate scent of pepper spray fills the air.

That’s right: its springtime, and all across the city, young men’s thoughts turn to overthrowing patriarchal capitalist hegemony. Time, then, to pull on your very blackest T-shirt, paint up a fresh batch of signs, take your place in a convoy of hemp-fuelled Volvos, and putter down to Johnson Hall at a stately fifteen miles per hour. But on the way there are a few things you and your pals should be getting sorted out amongst yourselves — and the most important is a scheme, a vision, a blueprint for your future administration. Something wholesome and untainted by the gluttony and confusing ticker-tape machines of global capital. A word of warning, though: hammering out the details can take longer than you might have expected, and you can take it from me — if you skimp on preparation and just try to extemporize once you’ve seized the reins of power, you’ll end up with an ungodly mess of contradictory amendments, ill-advised polygamy, and a bloody, interminable civil war.

With this in mind, and to help you on your way, here’s a list of recommended alternative socioeconomic systems. Play friendly out there, you crazy kids, and we’ll see you in DC!

The One Where Everybody Lives In Trees (Hereafter, Arborism):

Pros: Aesthetically pleasing, at least until you try it.

Cons: It’s not easy to force people to live in trees when they don’t want to, and once you do manage it, they’ll constantly be sneaking back down again. (You could post sentries on the ground, but that would sort of defeat the point.) The country’s industry will also suffer, depending on how many suitably load-bearing cypresses you can find.

Likely Upshot: It’s also not easy to stop someone cutting a tree down if they’re really determined and you’re twenty feet up it. Also: capitalists have money with which to buy axes.

Blaxploitation:

Pros: Not only black T-shirts, but full-length leather dusters, big hair, wisecracking sidekicks, an epochal soundtrack, and respect in the community. For a bunch of scrawny, ridiculed white guys, this is definitely a step in the right direction.

Cons: Little in the way of a coherent political philosophy. Schedule of full-time pimpin’ likely to get in the way of the infrastructure necessary to ensure that nobody is doing anything that you disapprove of, like trying to get a job and support their family or anything like that. Ultimately, with no Man to rail against, ennui is liable to set in. And everyone will argue about who gets to be Shaft.

Likely Upshot: Having money to hire John Singleton and Andrew Dice Clay, the capitalists will have you remade. The results will be horrifying.

The One Where Everyone Lives On a Remote Island and Makes a Living By Doing Each Others’ Laundry:

Pros: At least your camo pants will be dependably lemon fresh.

Cons: Alas, they’re going to have to last you for the foreseeable future, since no nasty, icky production of consumer durables will be permitted. Likely Upshot: After six months of this, the nation’s best and brightest will resemble a gaggle of Rousseauean primitivists afflicted by a terrible obsessive-compulsive disorder. Then the capitalists will surreptitiously film a reality TV show about you, use it to relaunch the WB Network, and reconstruct their entire festering, bourgeois society around it — becoming even richer in the process, damn their eyes.

The Two Hundred Yard Reich:

Pros: A culture of fitness to rival that of the ancient Greeks.

Cons: The elderly and disabled, sad to say, are pretty much fucked under this plan. On the other hand, they’ve spent their entire lives as slaves of the Man, driven in chains before the great chariot of Mammon and forced to beg plump industrialists for table scraps. So it’s not like it makes a tremendous difference, right?

Likely Upshot: Using their sinister money-having powers to bribe timekeepers, hire personal trainers, and outfit themselves with bionic leg implants, the capitalists will quickly re-establish themselves as an elite, forcing you and your comrades to choose between a career fixing professional track meets and further pursuit of the cause of socioeconomic justice — for neither the first nor the last time.

Zimmerwaldism:

Pros: Will give everybody in the world the opportunity to use Tom Stoppard’s joke about “the last word in revolutionary politics.” Cons: Eventually this joke will get old, and you’ll have to start throwing people in prison when they tell you so.

Likely Upshot: The whole country goes to hell in a handbasket, yet again.

Brutal, Indiscriminate Slaughter:

Pros: Tried, tested, and proven to get results like few other social policies ever have.

Cons: Time-consuming, frequently messy, no gold stars coming your way from the Human Rights Commission any time soon.

Likely Upshot: Well, it’ll certainly teach those pesky capitalists a lesson. However, there may come a time — after you’ve forcibly disenfranchised, imprisoned, or executed everybody who irritates you in any way — when you may feel you’re slipping off the moral high ground. Do not allow your resolve to waver. Take a deep breath, remind yourself of your righteousness, and get back to the smiting of your ideological enemies and their venal, comfortable world. Olly Ruff, widely ignored author of “The Trace Of The Other On The Dishes Of The Same: Hierarchies Of Consumption In Postwar French Cuisine,” is often to be found at Clancy Thurber’s on weeknights.