VLVL backgrd reading

[Mike Weaver]

A book which might be of interest to VLers concerning the history of the left
in the US this century is The Radical Soap Opera by David Zane Mairowitz
(1974). 
	A cheerfully jaundiced view of the subject. The back cover blurb quotes
thus:
"American Leftists, whether old, new, Marxist-Leninists, Trotskyites, Maoists
 or freaks, are Americans first and foremost.  And despite its
internationalist 
claims and lip-service  to an occasional theoretical approach, the U.S left, 
in all its incarnations, owes as much homage to the B-Movie as to Karl Marx."
	
With reference to V and Herbert Stencil in particular I offer the following
quote.  
Mairowitz describes a courtesy audience of the Moscow Art Theatre led by 
Stanislavsky with President Coolidge. A serious non-event.  
"Coolidge embodies the idea of revealing nothing of your inner self [...]
in the 
jargon of the Russian players, he would have represented the "stencil," the
duplicated personality without distinguishing attributes [...]"

Cheers 
Mike