When Skateboards Are Free

What you have is a classical Marxist household with the Father deserting the family, the Mother so inculcated in the movement that she couldn't put her son's welfare before that of the party's. The interesting thing about this is that people having read this might think that socialism is no longer the boogeyman it once was because one corner of the International movement is no longer as active, or credited with as much historical significance as it appears.

If these organizations are no longer relevant or as active as they once were, it is because the Communists have successfully infiltrated for a long time significant portions of the government, media, military and education to have accomplished virtually all of the goals set forth by Karl Marx in the first place.

One of the few things it hasn't accomplished is the effective dismantling of the Catholic Church, which still stands in its way those issues which it considers practically above holding political power itself.

A month after novelist Zoe Heller’s The Believers sketched a family of sniping New York socialists, Said Sayrafiezadeh is coming out with the real thing. When Skateboards Will Be Free is the 40-year-old playwright’s unsparing memoir of growing up in the shadow of the Trotskyite Socialist Workers Party — an Iranian-born father who abandoned him and Mom in the name of permanent revolution (and for another woman), and an American-Jewish mother who gave decades of her life and happiness to the party before finally breaking ties. Sayrafiezadeh, who hasn’t heard from his father since first telling all in Granta, spoke with Vulture about his father fixation, his battle with kleptomania, and his well-earned political apathy.

Do you think your life might have turned out differently if your parents hadn’t become Trotskyites?

I think it would have been the same. They were just two young, incomplete people who didn’t know what they were doing, had their own demons, and then were being inflamed by a political philosophy that says family is not important, home is not important, the only thing that matters in this world is the worker’s revolution.

Read more...