The Revenge of FrankenStalin and Other Russiagate Folktales

by JOHN ESKOW

In an attempt to understand the rich and mysterious folk-culture of American corporate newsmedia, I have begun to collect fables from that fascinating world. I will present these folk-tales without judgement, followed by insightful, smart-guy analysis of each one, like you see in books by serious intellectual chrome-domes.

This popular folktale, an Origin Myth called “How We Fell,” has been observed as far “left” as The New York Times and MSNBC, and as far “right” as The New York Times and MSNBC. The telling of the folktale on TV is often accompanied by the sudden appearance of scary Cyrillic type-fonts and the hypnotic droning of “ex-spooks.” The hypnotic droning of the spooks and the foreboding non-English type-font combine to create an aura of profound and unsettling menace.

Nonetheless, among members of “The Resistance,” this tale is often told as a bedtime story, or to comfort troubled elders.  Its long-term effectiveness is unknown. It is never to be shared with outsiders, and a death-curse has been placed on me by Debby Wasserman-Schultz for even daring to share it. (The version below is a loose translation from the original MSNBC.)

HOW WE FELL: AN ORIGIN MYTH

Way back in the year of 2016, America made sense,
and except for a few minor quibbles
Americans were united
in pursuit of a common good–
And then Russia had to go and invent dissent!
And this is how it happened.
On a black and frigid Communist night in Red Square,
at the stroke of midnight, in a raging Soviet blizzard,
Joseph Stalin himself—
electrically re-animated by Kremlin scientist-ghouls—
sat bolt upright in his crypt,
his evil Communist eyes a-gleam
and his Soviet hair all Bride-of-Frankenstein-y…
it was a fearsome sight.
But the Communist worst was yet to come!
All of a sudden, this electrically-reanimated monster dictator–
this FrankenStalin, if you will–
terrified even his bloodless, robotic Soviet scientists
by smashing his way, hammer-and-sickle style,
out of that cold, cold grave;
and then the hulking FrankenStalin,
his genocidal moustache studded with gravestone pebbles,
stalked Red Square, moving all Frankenstein-stiff;
and in a voice like a thousand electrocuted crickets
he commanded his thousands of Comsymp minions
to run to their substandard Moscow computer terminals
and start attacking Hillary Clinton
with 17-cent Facebook ads.
Why?  Come on!  You know why!
To keep the glass ceiling intact!

INTELLECTUAL SMART-GUY ANALYSIS OF FOLKTALE:

Yes, 2016–that’s when America really lost its innocence. Putin took it from us, and we’ll never get it back.  Fucking Leninist bastard.  Of course, if you want to nitpick, America had already lost its innocence a good twenty or thirty times before this whole Russian invention-of-dissent thing; actually, the USA is constantly paying cosmetic surgeons to restore its maidenhood, so that it can flirt with the world in the guise of a blushing virgin. We lost our innocence at Gettysburg; then we visited the cosmetic clinic for a quick zip-up; then we lost it again at Wounded Knee; more surgical repair; then the JFK assassination, and….Well, long story short–My Lai, etc.–who can remember every lost virginity, for crying out loud?–we’ve made those cosmetic surgeons very rich.

But they still prefer to be called “the news media.”

John Eskow is a writer and musician. He wrote or co-wrote the movies Air America, The Mask of Zorro, and Pink Cadillac, as well as the novel Smokestack Lightning. He is a contributor to Killing Trayvons: an Anthology of American Violence. He can be reached at: johneskow@yahoo.com

https://www.counterpunch.org/2018/03/09/the-revenge-of-frankenstalin-and-other-russiagate-folktales-of-russiagate/