Thank goodness for Tucker Carlson's The Daily Caller for shedding light on the ugly reality of socialism in Obama's America, still thriving in leftist Jewish summer camps. As reported this morning by that intrepid outlet, a new report has revealed "for the first time" that President Obama's nominee to head the bureau of labor statistics has been sending her kids to Camp Kinderland, a Jewish summer camp with a leftist pedigree. I myself am a survivor of a Jewish summer camp, having attended Camp Tel Yehudah (TY) in upstate New York in the early 1980s. After reading the Caller's chilling account of the red stain that continues to suffuse Camp Kinderland, I was overcome by painful memories of the horrible collectivism that pervaded my own camping experience.
What follows is a far from exhaustive list of the nature of summer-camp induced leftist subversion, as I lived it:
1) all of the kids were forced to live in collective housing, euphemistically called "bunks." Sometimes there were as many as 15 of us in one of these dull, drab, Soviet-like housing units. We had to share bathrooms (!) and, a theme I will return to, it didn't matter whether your parents had the means to secure for you better accommodations. Everybody, and I mean everybody, had to sleep in the same kind of bed, put their clothes in the same kind of cubby and go to bed at the exact same time.
2) If the sleeping arrangements weren't bad enough, the hundreds of campers who languished in socialist misery each summer at TY had to eat in one huge dining room. I am not making that up -- we actually had one big dining room where everybody had to eat. I know. Crazy. The food was mediocre at best, a product of the unimaginative minds of the chefs who, though they were traditional orthodox Jews, had clearly been afflicted by the same imagination-destroying leftist ideology that infected all other aspects of camp life. But the food wasn't the worst part. Before every meal, some campers had to actually go to the dining room to perform a service -- the word in Hebrew is toranut -- helping the staff set up the tables and place settings. And everybody got the same silverware and the same dull light green, or light blue, or peach colored plates. (as an aside, doesn't it just burn you up that the forces of political correctness, all the way back in 1962, bullied Crayola into changing the name of their "flesh" colored crayon to "peach?")
In other words, a centralized bureaucracy, sitting on high, dictated to free individuals when they would work, what jobs they would do and how they would do them. The parallel with Stalinist central planning needs no elaboration, I trust.
3) The campers had other work responsibilities, too and, of course, we were never given the opportunity to sell our labor freely in a free market where freedom makes everybody free (the Hebrew word for work is avodah. The camp overlords somehow thought that using Hebrew words to describe our oppression would transmogrify such oppression into a meaningful educational experience). I am certain that, given my unique talents, I could have bartered cleaning the bathrooms, say, for some Charleston Chews or Marathon Bars. But, no. I had to toil in the hot sun (only a Communist could be so devious as to make sure that summer camp took place during the summer), for the "greater good," rather than for my own benefit, just praying to all that is good in America that somehow we would be liberated from our burdens.
4) The worst part, which I have already alluded to, is not that I had to suffer as I did through a drab regimen of sports, educational and cultural activities and more sports. It is that my natural betters, the kids whose parents made tons more money than did my single working mom, were subjected to the same tyranny that I was. As nightmarish as the soul-destroying regimen of socialist-communist summer camp -- fomenting as it did class warfare, envy and moral turpitude through the promotion of "equality" -- was for me, it must have been unbearable for these poor young rich campers to bear. I can only guess at the extraordinary good these future job creators could have done had they been allowed to unleash the energy generated by their hard-earned luck as the offspring of wealthy parents, the way God and the Constitution intended it.
Well, I guess I do have some idea. Those campers might have gone on to create great enterprises like the Daily Caller, product of the fertile and liberated mind of Tucker Carlson. Carlson, the oh-so-deserving son of rich parents, has channeled his own hard-earned dumb luck into pushing crucially important stories like the one about a government official who sends a child to a summer camp that, decades ago, had -- sort of -- communist influences and was dragged, sixty years ago, before that most objective and credible arbiter of subversion in the United States -- the House Un-American Activities Committee.
Thank you, Tucker. Thank you, Daily Caller.
And for an in-your-face to the (obviously) socialist individual nominated by our obviously socialist president to head the BLS, here's a little play on the words that we were (all but, except not really at all) forced to utter before bed every night:
Job creators of America unite. You have nothing to lose but your supply chains.