arts & ego blog
i’m a gnu

I found these minutes in a rubbish bin in Baghdad last year. Honest.

Date: 1989
Scene: The Kremlin
A secret meeting of the Communist Revolutionaries for the Advancement of Philosophy.

KGB Head:
Comrades, we have lost the Warsaw Pact countries and we will lose the cold war. The Soviet Union is at stake. Communism itself may fail. We must plan for total failure. We must find a way to spread communism without a Soviet Union.

Agricultural Commissar:
We have a dastardly plan to infiltrate the heart of capitalism with coffee stores and make the evil capitalists spend all their money on dreadful espresso. We will capitalist lackeys doubt their own system by showing them that what sounds good isn’t. Our dread plan is codenamed ”Starbucks“.

Artistic Commissar:
We will infiltrate the heart of the American propaganda industry and cause them to make films utterly dreadful and full of obvious lies, and we shall have the worst actor in the industry elected governor of California. We will make the entire West depressed with appalling movies.

KGB Head:
You’re looking at the 1950s plan, you idiot.

Artistic Commissar:
We’re recycling it. It worked once. It’ll work again.

Economic Commissar:
We’ve predicted the rise and rise of an American company which will become so powerful that it’ll take over the world and make reality itself bluescreen. We are fighting not just to restore communism, but to save the planet from the apes. We have planned and plotted our fight–back, and we shall take devious devices from Europe to the heart of America, and have American corporations depend on them to survive against the monster.

KGB Head:
What, that sounds like competition. That’s the basis of capitalism. Are you sure?

Economic Commissar:
This is where it is devious. Our device will only work by cooperation, by sharing from individuals and collectives, by collective communist principles. We shall remind them of their declaration of independence, “But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new guards for their future security.” The new guards shall be “Linux”, which will spread the philosophy of collectivisation amongst the heathen West. Communism is the only alternative to overwhelming capitalism, and they shall come to depend on it. Communism will survive and spread.

KGB Head:
Devious, devious, devious. I like it. How will you do it?

Economic Commissar:
Here, we need your help. We need a young innocent native of that lost Soviet State, Finland, who must be bright and clever enough to seem to be the creator of our weapon of mass construction, yet who will secretly carry out our dastardly plan by seeming to become an ordinary American, for he will go to the heart of capitalism and drive an SUV.

KGB Head:
Mmm, we’ll need a symbol.

Agricultural Commissar:
(singing to himself) “the g’nicest g’nicest g’nu”

KGB Head:
We’ll run all the plans.