States of the mindless.(happy warrior)(Essay)

THERE was a sad little interview in the New York Times the other day. Carmen Pelaez is a playwright and, therefore, a liberal, but she's also a Cuban-American, and she was a little disappointed in her ideological soulmates' reaction to her latest play. Rum & Coke examines in part the West's cultural fascination with Castro and the revolution that time forgot. You know the sort of thing--the Che posters decorating the Obama campaign offices in Houston; Michael Moore's paean to Cuban health care, though it doesn't seem to have worked out so great for Fidel. The enduring sheen of revolutionary chic is in forlorn contrast to the decrepitude of the real thing. "When I started writing the play, I thought people just didn't know what was happening in Cuba," Miss Pelaez told the Times. "But the longer I live here, the more I realized, they don't care.... They would rather keep their little pop revolution instead of saying it is a dictatorship. I had somebody come to me after a show and say, 'Don't ruin Cuba for me!'Well, why not? They're holding on to a fantasy."

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"Don't ruin Cuba for me" the way the Vietnamese ruined Vietnam for Tom Hayden. The old leftosaurus went back for the first time in 32 years to see the country he and his then-wife, fair Hanoi Jane, had saved for Communism. Alas and alack, he found the ingrate natives in the midst of a capitalist frenzy. It's been like that awhile on the Ho Chi Minh Trail. A few years back in South Kensington, I ran into Mrs. Thatcher's daughter Carol looking for a taxi to Heathrow. This was in the grey days following the Conservatives' act of matricide, when the Iron Lady's wan successor, John Major, was trying to keep the party's ramshackle show on the road. "I'm off to Hanoi," said Carol, cheerily. "It's a boom town. These Vietnamese chaps seem to have got the hang of capitalism a lot better than the Tories." As he glumly informed readers of The Nation, Tom Hayden did not enjoy hearing his old revolutionary chums regaling him with a lot of stuff about GDP per capita: Don't ruin Vietnam for me.

"Pop revolution" is a fine coinage. Pop stars have been peddling revolution for nigh on half a century, and they're still doing it. At the Live 8 all-star gala for Africa a couple of years back, Madonna urged us to "start a revolution." Like Africa hasn't had enough of those? Along with her fellow members of the aristorockracy, Madonna lives in a whirl of hyper-capitalism--agents, managers, lawyers, accountants, publishers, all tussling over rights to her songs, her children's books of recent years, her sex book of earlier years with the nude photographs of her bottom hanging over the garden wall while a gay black dance ...