Cody's Books, which boasts of being the highest-profile and highest-quality bookstore in the City of Berkeley, reminds once more why that municipality is often referred to, by loyalists and defectors alike, as "The People's Republic of Berkeley." Whatever its offerings, Cody's is also, and always has been, a part-time intellectual rape room where genuine liberals are forced, willy-nilly, to copulate mentally with some of the most strident, most committed anti-American writers.
Fortunately, the changing nature of bookselling and Internet-era information distribution last year forced the original Cody's location -- a few blocks from the UC campus and, literally, a stone's throw from People's Park (right) -- to shut its doors for good after being in business for 50 years. I attended my share of left-wing author's events at the old Cody's, beginning with Rita Mae Brown in 1988 and ending, in 2006, with "Weatherson" Chavista, Chesa Boudin. (At the latter event I sat a just few feet away from Boudin's silver-spoon, earring-sporting, terrorist foster father, Bill Ayers.) Cody's has neither burned out nor faded away, however. In fact it has re-emerged in Berkeley's chic shopping center over on Fourth Street.
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This Saturday evening Cody's Fourth Street will host Nelson Peery (below), an otherwise obscure Black Communist who has a new memoir out. You probably have never heard of Nelson Peery, but that's no reason to continue to ignore him. For obscurity is no measure of the impact an individual or organization may have, not when the individual or organization, by definition, relies on stealth tactics to patiently and ruthlessly "bore from within." Then again, given that "these days being a conservative is cool," let's not hesitate to credit Communists like Peery with the other meaning of "bore"....
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With a CV that includes the following:
* Communist Party USA
* Provisional Organizing Committee to Reconstitute the Revolutionary Party
* Communist League
* Communist Labor Party
* League of Revolutionaries for a New America
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Nelson Peery is a grizzled poster child for a public relations campaign on behalf of a Paul Robeson/Joseph Stalin-brand of American Communist Viagra. Or should I say on behalf of prostate ("pro-state") cancer...? For unlike other Communists from previous generations who were made the profitable career move to, as the postmodernists say, "work within structures," Peery has remained an unrepentant, itinerant radical.
And Cody's plays it to the hilt. From its email announcement:
"Why am I who never harmed anyone, mistreated, segregated, assigned an unequal place in a country that promises equality?” Nelson Peery asks this question upon returning home to Minneapolis from fighting in the all-black 93rd Infantry Division in World War II....
“As I learned the truth,” Peery realizes in the face of rising tides of racist violence, “I became a communist, for I could do nothing else.”
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I became a communist, for I could do nothing else.
There you have it, straight from the Trojan horse's mouth: will-to-power, nihilism, and a bald-faced lie dressed in confessional clothing. If there truly was nothing else to do, how come the civil rights movement wasn't a Communist movement through and through? That's what its opponents -- Democrats, Republicans, and American Nazis alike -- alleged. Is Peery saying that those 60s reactionaries were right all along? That's his implication which, although absurd, is not without some basis in fact. For the complicated history of that era teaches that certain activists in the civil rights movement (although surpassed for the most part in influence by "anti-anti-Communist" New Left activists) either were Communists or had had tangental Communist ties -- including Rosa Parks.
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I became a communist, for I could do nothing else. Don't fall for it, Gentle Reader! That single sentence -- featured by Cody's Fourth Street to promote their anti-American author -- belies the pettiness, not greatness, of Peery's vision, and the stinginess, not generosity, of his spirit. We're all forged by the battles of our first adulthood, no matter what the battles and no matter what side we're on. Yet only certain of us re-temper ourselves by adding new elements to the alloy. Why does Peery advertise himself as if he's still living in 1946? Because he is. Committed to an antiquated, ideological segregation from the American mainstream, he understands reform only as a postponement of and, at the same time, a provocation for some dialectical advance toward "the Revolution." Peery can only spit in the face of the patriotic, liberal reforms -- hard-won by black and white alike -- of the post-war civil rights era. He can only spit in the face of the hard-fought reforms that remain to be won on the guilt-ridden, and unfinished, matter of race in America. Because Communists don't have dreams; instead they infiltrate other people's dreams, corrupting them so that they always end in nightmares.
In the post-civil rights, post-9/11 era, Free thinkers of the world, unite! -- unite against Nelson Peery and all other left-over, left-wing reactionaries.
