Who Caused the Russian Revolution?

            On Saturday morning I finished working out the guitar chords for Serge Gainbourg’s 1969 song “La vie est une belle tartine”, which is a weird song because the title sarcastically declares that “life is a beautiful slice” while each verse describes a different failed suicide attempt on the part of the singer. My English adaptation has the title, “Life Is A Beautiful Turdburger”.

            The food bank line-up that morning was short as I expected it to be. The tall, slim man that looks like a gentle Charles Manson walked past me to the end of the line while I was locking my bike and so I was behind him.

Three places ahead was the Polish man with whom I’d had the conversation about milk the week before. Since we hadn’t had the time before for me to point out his misunderstand about what the percentage means on milk labels, I explained this time that 1% milk doesn’t mean 1% of milk but of butter fat.

            I told him that when I was young I used to drink milk straight from the cow. I offered the view that raw milk is much more nutritious. I think that I’m a healthier than average person but I would be only speculating if I were to claim that it has something to do with drinking raw milk while I was growing. I might simply be genetically healthier than average.

            I’d brought with me a beat up copy of George Orwell's 1984 with the intention of leaving it someplace near the line-up for someone that interested person to find. I put the book down on the edge of the base of one of the columns in front of 1501 Queen Street West. My Polish acquaintance was curious about the book and I was surprised that he’d never heard of 1984. I explained that even though the book is describing a possible future it’s really about what was happening in 1948 in Russia with a totalitarian regime run by a supposedly adored ruler and government propaganda actually rewriting the history of society and changing the meaning of words.

            Then my Polish friend started telling me what he thought caused the Russian Revolution (and I really wasn’t surprised all that much at all that this would be what this guy believed). First of all he declared that both Stalin and Lenin were Jews and then he expanded on that to claim that the entire Russian Revolution had been a struggle between Jews and god. Yeesh! That conspiracy theory is almost as old as the one about Jews kidnapping Christian children and using them for blood sacrifices. Very few countries treated Jews as badly in the early 20^th Century as the Russian Empire, so obviously when revolutionary movements began to form there would be some Jews that would support them, but only about 1.6% of the revolutionaries were actually Jewish. For the next ten years, before the Communist government began persecuting Jews all over again the number of Jewish members of the party had grown to about 6%. Hitler and the rest of the Nazis were the biggest believers in the canard of Jewish Bolshevism so it's very sad that there are dumb people still keeping the conspiracy alive. As for the claim that Lenin and Stalin were Jewish, the closest that comes to being true is that Lenin had a Jewish great grandfather. There's no evidence that Stalin had any Jewish ancestry at all.

            Then my companion moved the talk to South Africa and the claim that white farmers are being killed and their land is being taken away. He assured me that he knows this is true because he gets his news from Europe and European news is more accurate. That would depend on which news source one is getting one’s news from. Most of the people attacking the farms are looters and the violence is not politically or racially motivated. Black farmers and Black farm workers in South Africa are also victims of violent robberies.

            I told him that he could have the George Orwell book if he wanted it and I think he took it. I wonder if he’ll read it and use it to fuel his racist theories. I have noticed over the last few years people from the far right quoting 1984 and claiming that the totalitarian society depicted in the story is the direction that the left rather than the right is going. That idea fits on the same shelf as the modern conservative notion that the Nazis were also left wing.

            I went back to reading William Wordsworth’s poem in the Preludes about crossing the Alps on foot during his summer vacation from college.

            Although it was a cool day I was comfortable in a hoody with my leather jacket on top but the guy who looked like a gentle Charles Manson was sitting on the steps of 1501 Queen hugging himself and shivering in a t-shirt with his jacket across his lap. I asked him if he was deliberately trying to make himself cold but he shook his head.

“So why don’t you put your jacket on?”

He explained that his skin gets itchy when he’s wearing anything over his arms. I asked if it’s a specific fabric that causes the problem but he said any clothing does it. I inquired as to whether he’d gone to a dermatologist and he nodded. "So it's not an allergy?" "No" "You don't have psoriasis?" "No, I just have irritable skin.” He sat there shivering and scratching his arms.

For a first time in a couple of weeks, the food bank opened on time. After the line started moving, a young man and a young woman came out of the door of 1499 Queen, each pushing a three-tiered cart full of stacks of the kind of stainless steel divided dinner plates that they use in hospitals. These I assumed were what they use to serve meals at PARC but I’d never seen them bring them out on the street. Suddenly the woman's cart spilled about fifty of its plates onto the sidewalk. As she stooped to pick them up I commented that it was a good thing they weren’t real plates. The Charles Manson looking guy said, “That’s why they use those”.

I got downstairs at around 11:00. My volunteer at the shelves was a friendly young woman of East Asian descent.

From the top shelf I grabbed a hand-filled bag of coffee beans. There were also bottles of red sesame oil, which I assumed were red because they were infused with hot pepper, but I didn’t take any.

Lower down was a variety of health bars. I took three white chocolate and macadamia nut Clif bars and three sweet and salty peanut butter coated granola bars. She gave me three more of the latter. I also picked a box of four Love Crunch gourmet chocolate and berry granola bars.

At the very bottom there was no cereal but there were some bags of sunflower seeds in the shell. I was feeling too lazy to de-shell sunflower seeds and so I didn’t take any.

The next set of shelves had mostly canned beans and some large jars of peanut butter. I took one can of chickpeas but my volunteer gave me two more.

I didn’t take anything from the rice and pasta shelves.

Angie’s dairy and meat station was unoccupied because just before I’d gotten there she went away to do something on the other side of the room. I waited about a minute before a young man temporarily took charge of her section. I didn’t take any milk, but there was a 750-gram container of organic Greek yogourt that I grabbed. He gave me two bags of three eggs instead on one but as usual I turned down the generic frozen ground chicken and hot dogs.

I had just moved on to get vegetables from Sylvia when Angie returned to ask, “Have you been taken care of young man?” I thanked her and said I had.

Sylvia gave me three potatoes, three carrots with interestingly branched roots, two red peppers, three large tomatoes, a cauliflower and a hand-filled bag of chopped green onions.

The bread that was on offer didn’t appeal to me and so I just left. It was nice to be done with the food bank early for a change.