The Communist Manifesto

The Communist Manifesto
Orlando Lujan Martinez
Yes, I’ll admit that I’m extremely wealthy and have enough money to buy anything my heart desires. I have possessions piled up in my Westchester mansion that I brought from exclusive shops and art galleries on Rodeo Drive and Park Avenue. When I’m bored I go shopping and always remember a saying that I read in the autobiography of socialite Doris Duke, “If you have to ask the price you can’t afford it.”
One day Ibough a book I was sure would shock and delight my friends. It was a recent printing of Karl Marx’s The Communist Manifesto. Its bright red enameled cover, with black sickle and hammer, was the idea of the books publisher. The proprietor of the book store said the historical significant book was selling exceptionally well as a novelty, a tea table book, and a conversation piece. I brought one and put it in an easy-to-notice place on the tea table next to a very expensive vase that I purchased on shopping sortie in Palm Beach.
When my friends saw the “The Communist Manifesto” they laugh and said “How clever of you, I must get one myself.” Are you a bad Communist they ask and giggle. When I said yes, to go along with the joke, they broke out into gales of laughter. We had a lot of fun. You see we have in this country, I learned in American Government 103 in high school, a ideal called freedom that allows me to posses this bad book full of some really craze nonsense like “Workers of the world rise and break your chains ” and the class struggle, whatever that means.
One day I went to New York to attended an art reception for Fabrizo Plessi at the Guggenheim First Floor Gallery. I was thinking of buying one of his fabulous painting and was willing to go as high as 200,000 dollars. I stayed at the fabulous Sherry Netherland, one of the favorite haunts of Doris Duke, may the sweet dear rest in peace, and it was such a beautiful afternoon that I decided not to call my chauffeur and walk to the Guggenheim gallery.
I turned here and there, mingling with the common folks, and after taking a wrong turn I got lost and I found myself in a strange part of the city that looked like an third world country or Africa. It was definately not a place to be after the sun went down. I blinked my eyes in disbelief. There were signs of pervasive poverty everywhere old cars, dilapidated tenements and hordes of poor people of a darker shade milling about for as far as the eye could see. It was a very depressing place and was definitely not the New York that Frank Sinatra, “Old blue eyes,” celebrated in the song New York New York.
I was frighten and wondered why, oh, why did they want to live in such terrible poverty. I couldn’t believe that such a place existed in our beautiful country, sweet land of liberty, the land of Lincoln and Jefferson and the birth place of democracy. Where were the manicured lawns and the rose bushes of the American dream? How could this happened in the land of the free and opportunity.
You can’t imagine how relieved I was when I finally got to the Guggenheim, Everyone who was someone was there. Even Hillary Clinton was there that wonderful charming woman who someone called a carpetbager and opportunist on television. I stood drinking a cocktail, which God knows I needed after my ordeal in the heart of darkness, and chatting with the delightful Katherine {Bunny} Barrington attired in a dress designed by Alfonso, the rage of Costa Bravo, that can only be described in the words of Cole Porter as “Too marvelous for words. “
Bunny proceeded to tell me about a wonderful week in the Bahamas with the cream of society where the food was scrumptious, and the conversation divine. It was heaven you must go she said in that wonderfully modulate voice of a Vassar graduate and professional socialite. Her father, you must know, left her 500 million dollars. She is an American success story.
That evening while sitting in the great room of my twenty room mansion, with horse stables, four car garage, evening and morning patio, basement exorcise room and lap pool, admiring the Fabrizo Plessi’s painting I had purchased for 180,000 dollars, I looked down at “The Communist Manifesto” on the tea . table and wondered why on earth would Karl Marx write such a weird book