Across the canal and through the trees lies the Artists' Republic of Fremont.
I love Fremont. I love its "If that's all there is, then let's have another drink and dance, my friend" approach to life.
But I don't care much for Comrade Lenin.
So I was curious about the Lenin light-ing last Friday. At the Center of the Uni-verse no simple tree lighting will do.
I arrived at 6 p.m., an hour late. I'd misread the press notice. (My friends won't be shocked.)
Still, about 20 people were milling about in "Lenin Square" in front of Taco del Mar. Landowner and Fremont powerhouse Suzie Burke was there, of course, and so was her daughter Kirby. So was Santa.
"I wish they'd sell him and take him away," Kirby whispered, recalling some of the hard feelings the statue had caused.
The 7-ton bronze figure stood in a cloud of small white lights. A red star glowed from his cap. Good old Lenin, striding toward Queen Anne. Or is it Ballard? Toward the nonexistent future anyway. In case you hadn't heard, he's for sale. A cool $150,000 or so and Lenin's yours.
The Fremont Philharmonic - guitar, trombone, clarinet, drums, etc. - played some kind of proletarian ditty that sounded like a musical plea for more borscht. The atmosphere was playful and tongue-in-cheek. Very Fremont. I was sorry I'd arrived late. I wanted to see the valedictory speech by a chamber of commerce president, in this case Marco Tubic, talking about Lenin in the neighborhood.
Some quick background.
The piece, cast by Emil Venkov, took 10 years to finish and was put up in Poprad, Slovakia, in 1988. In Venkov's version, Lenin, instead of holding the usual book like a good revolutionary intellectual with clean hands, is surrounded by flames.
Lewis Carpenter, an Issaquah fellow teaching in Poprad, found the statue face down in 1989 after the Czech revolution. Carpenter mortgaged his Issaquah house and brought it home. Carpenter died in 1994, leaving Lenin to his family, who hope to sell it. Lenin has been arrested mid-stride in Fremont since 1995.
There is only one other Lenin statue in this country. It's in Freedom Park in Arlington, Va., and it's beheaded, reminding us of the hatred pointed Lenin's way when the Soviet Union fell in 1991. We, of course, aren't burdened with all that historical baggage.
Which is why I worry about our historical amnesia. We seem to be more in tune with the sins of Richard Nixon than the horrors of the Soviet Union in its 74-year run.
"The purpose of terror is to terrorize," Lenin, a master terrorist, once wrote. Before his death in 1924 he already had two dozen-concentration camps in place.
In a 1922 letter he urged the Politburo to put down an uprising by local clergy in a certain town: "The greater the number of representatives of the reactionary clergy and reactionary bourgeoisie we succeed in executing ... the better."
Lenin neither smoked nor drank. He was an iron-fisted Puritan who allowed no flowers in his room, was an inveterate micro-manager hardened to his own suffering and the suffering of others, and once said, after hearing a performance of Beethoven, "I cannot listen to music too often. It makes me want to say kind, stupid things, and pat the heads of people. But now you have to beat them on the head, beat them without mercy."
Lenin didn't trust Stalin, it's true. "Stalin is too rough," he once remarked, like a coach speaking of his rogue linebacker. But they were on the same team.
Leninism lies at the heart of Stalinism. Just for starters, Stalin starved more than 3 million kulaks to death in the Ukraine in the 1930s.
The Fremont Chamber has a statement on its Web site about the Lenin statue: "If art is supposed to make us feel, not just feel good, then this sculpture is a successful work of art. The challenge is to understand that this piece means different things to different people and to learn to listen to each other and respect different opinions. From an artist's standpoint, all points of view are valid and important."
Really?
What if that were Hitler up there? Frankly, I think the viewpoint of the neo-Nazis who would no doubt welcome it carries less validity than the Flat Earth Society.
I asked Suzie Burke, a good capitalist, after all, how she felt about the statue. As the Fremont Philharmonic switched to some kind of circus music behind us, she cracked a mischievous smile.
"Do you think Lenin is happy getting lit up and having all this happiness going on? I think, for him, it's a piece of Purgatory."
Not bad.
OK, so maybe I need to come down off my stilts, have a drink and do a little Russian kick-dance.
And yet...
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