Author Archives
David Walls-Kaufman
New Fiction: Dos & Hem in Spain’s Civil War, Part 2
And then war opened in Spain…
I went there, Hemingway went there, Gellhorn went there. All we Commies flocked there to be part of it. Gramsci was daring to call out Stalin and say that his Socialist genocide in Russia was not the method Communists should use for conquest in the future because the genocide wasn’t working. Communism was failing, Gramsci said, because of Christianity. Communists needed to take over the Means of Education in countries to supplant the Christian values with Communist values and, as I said, grow our crops in their fields. Gramsci showed the way to make elementary schools and entertainment our beachheads as we hid ourselves here to pivot to total psychological war. This peaceful approach gave me hope, because we were saying more that we could win by schooling rather than our usual promotion of hatred and murder for anyone who stood up to us.
Stalin talked about murdering Gramsci. But Gramsci was only talking these ideas at the time and his thinking mirrored the concerns of many who were afraid to speak out. And all of us in Spain waited on pins and needles. Remember, Stalin had called to Moscow the Swedish experts on race differences and Stalin listened intently to their findings. He asked them to stay in Moscow three days while he weighed their research. On the fourth day, Stalin announced his decision that Soviet-style Global Socialism would reject the race theories and that Global Socialists were superior to other people not by virtue of our race, but by virtue of our Marxist views. Acceptance of Marxism should determine who wins or loses, lives or dies, not race differences. All of us breathed a huge sigh of relief, because now we still had this clear distinction between us and Hitler’s Nazi Socialists. And Stalin, with his usual flourish, finalized his decision on race by executing all the Swedish experts whom he had invited to Moscow.
New Fiction: Dos & Hem in Spain’s Civil War, Part 1
Hemingway and I first crossed paths in 1918 as ambulance drivers in the Great War. I was an ambulance driver on the French side, and he was on his way to drive for the Italians fighting the Austrians. It took six weeks of training to learn how to operate all the levers and cranks in those old jalopies. I graduated Harvard cum Laude in 1916, and it was there that my politics became radicalized. I was the bastard son of a distant, rich New York corporate lawyer, and I felt then that the world could only be made fair for the poor through Communism.
Hem and I met again when we were both expats in Paris. He arrived in the Latin Quarter with his bride, Hadley, eight years his senior, with a small pension from her family that would help a struggling writer. Hem was a strapping matinee-idol with unbelievably straight white teeth and confidence that would make life just too easy. His lack of appreciation for others was going to be hard for the rest of us. I was medium sized with owlish eyes and e.e. always said no one looked more “foreign” at Harvard than did I.
1918, American Remembrance
World War I, The Great War, 1914-1918, really is one of the most poignant chapters in America’s extraordinary history.
1) Imagine – America gathers up a million troops and throws them at another continent where wages an atrocious, industrial war that Americans have no fight in.
New Science Fiction: Why Me?, 1987
In 1984 they arrested me.
In 1987 I got out of reeducation.
I didn’t actually learn anything in reeducation. Of course I could repeat by rote every lesson they “taught” me. It isn’t teaching. It is hearing the same things over and over. Until you cringe in all your being against anything different.
But me, I was overhandled past terror, to numbness. I really don’t care. Yes, I learned my lesson. But I also understand them now and know they have nothing to fear from me because I am broken by the experience of how cunning they are. I know they are reading these writings, these scratchings. I leave them out for them to find.
Caribbean Halloween Killing: A True Story
We never knew some things about my gentle Grandmother Loyd. She kept those things secret. Darkly secret. Black secret.
Halloween stories are ridiculous. And I say that as a man who has had probably four run-ins with ghosts, not including this one. But this all happened.
My earliest memory of her was of her sweet, loving face beaming at me when I was three and leaving with my friends to Trick or Treat down my suburban street in Austin. She wore a 1950s pleated sleeveless, collared dress and waved goodbye to me and said, with music light as a wind-chime in her voice, “I’ll see you again after you go around.” Only years later, after the unlikely deaths in Puerto Rico around our vacation home, her old home, did the prescience in those words strike me.
Netflix’s ‘Narcos’: Subtle Yet Deadly Anti-Americanism
As a writer, I’ve kept a close watch of Netflix dramas, keeping an eye on plot and dialogue while imagining what the script might look like on my own iPad. I’m doing this because I have the burning hope that Liberty Island and Taliesen Nexus arise like Netflix to become a cultural/entertainment colossus on the side of freedom and the American experiment of government serving the people.
I’ve greatly enjoyed watching Narcos, and thought the PC in the story was less nauseating than most… Until the other night, watching the close of season 3.
Frankenstein, Politician
Grand Prize Winner of the Spring Writing Contest: Fantastic Fathers & Magical Mothers
“Divide the realm! Let Oligarchs own the cesspool Cities! Common and Partisan shall take the rest. Let each govern as they see fit and prove to the other who governs best. Let Partisan crash the tax and sweep away the regulations.” Of course, Oligarchs would hear none of this. Well did they know the discouragement tyranny brings. When rulers are the winners at every turn. Could Oligarchs leave two gardens growing side by side for comparison? No, they must bite out both eyeballs to stop from being seen!
Frankenstein declared for martial law across the Realm. He launched his campaign with the brilliant speech on “The Cancer against Freedom”, given before the army in the Valley of Kings. He warned against disloyalty of not only the bureaucracy, but also some generals for fear the intellectuality of the Oligarchs had beguiled them. “Soft men bring hard times; hard men bring soft times,” Frankenstein quoted.
Roseanne Barr Vs. the World of Leftist Slights
I am hoping that Roseanne, like Trump, doesn’t give a damn
The Left is so uncharitable. Whenever I see the multi-symbol “coexist” bumper sticker I think the driver probably really means they want PC book burning.
Take Roxane Gay, for example, writing in the March 29, New York Times, about Roseanne Barr’s new show. Gay introduces Roseanne to the uncharitable slant she will face for as long as Barr uses her star power to humanize the enemies of the Left.
Ms. Gay admits she used to love the original Roseanne show. Back then, Ms. Gay found Roseanne “edgy and provocative”. The 1990s “Roseanne” was “a smart, hilarious and groundbreaking show that covered a lot of important ground in prime-time television.” But now, suddenly, Roseanne is “noxious, transphobic, racist and small-minded,” even “absurd and offensive.” Moreover, “Her views are muddled and incoherent.”
Fiction: Sex, Love and a Soviet Obituary
I guess I shouldn’t be surprised about how she died or where she died, bitter and surreal as the news struck me, and bare enough to make me feel cold, hollow, unclean. I’m really not sure if what I felt, or feel, for her is really what I would call love. Especially in light of what she did.
Could anything be more perverse and despicable?
We met at Columbia University before the War when we both majored in physics. I knew her from a class and we had spoken a few times and then I saw her at a jazz club and she held a cigarette aloft in the tight crowd, and we spoke over a drink, and then two drinks, over the course of hours, and even then she smoked too much. I realized all this after I made my way blearily back to my room on 112th and flopped into my lumpy bed seeing her lovely face in double vision wreathed in a dirty halo just like a movie shot.
