Khrushchev Came to America
Mar 23 2010


Khrushchev came to America
to the city of immigrants, and fixers
and limitless ambition,
who, like him
were also descendants of Russian peasants,
fattening pigs on feudal farms,
conscripts
in the Czar’s Imperial Army.

When this dogged apparatchik
with his earthy charm, and bullying manner
started hammering his shoe on the table,
people wondered —
was this the omnipotent ruler
or a dangerous buffoon?
Childish tantrum
or shrewdly calculated tactic?

He was sure the Supermarket
was an elaborate sham,
or at least strictly restricted
to the capitalist nomenclatura.
After all, what self-respecting grain-fed Ukrainian peasant
wouldn’t suspect,
led past dazzling rainbows of exotic fruit
overflowing stalls of produce;
gleaming coolers of meat,
and row-on-row of gaudy cans
wrapped in mouth-watering promises.

And then a family farm
with tractors, combines, harvesters,
glossy cows, and well-bred pigs
contented chicks.
Surely a show-piece, a Potemkin village,
and he’d be the village idiot
to believe all this.

Nevertheless, he wondered
if the capitalists might just be winning the war
of conspicuous consumption.
So he returned
to his grey sullen country
of heavy machinery, and rocket science
and launched a dog into space,
smugly triumphant.
They got him up, all right
but had no plans to bring him back,
so the dog was left to die —
its dead body circling the planet
in a small steel canister;
a hero
of the patriotic motherland.

Khrushchev was not a sentimental man
did not find this troubling.
But what did haunt
this successful peasant’s son
were visions of fat contented livestock
and eye-glazing abundance;
and he knew there and then
the great socialist experiment
was lost.

But he was wrong.
Because it had nothing to do with stuff.
It was because, in America
any politician who abandoned a dog
with such cold-blooded cruelty
would soon find himself in a tacky smock
bagging groceries back home in Peoria,
grabbing his mop as the speakers fizz
“spill on aisle 6”.