Strings Attached: The Commie Puppet Museum
visiting the cabaret of the damned
Thank you to all who have served in the U.S. military. I appreciate your sacrifice and am grateful for your service. Happy Veterans Day!
Advisory on Comments and other Reader Responses
Comments for paid subs are now closed (normal during the workweek, as I’m still acclimating to my new job.) I got an interesting reply email that is emblematic of how crucial the fight against Communism—the active, daily, conscious fight against Communism—really is. A male reader (i.e. a member of the half of humanity for whom Communism used to be so horrifying that they proudly enlisted to protect their family, friends, and country from it) wrote to passive-aggressively inform me he was unsubscribing (female typical social media bullshit, ironically) due to my “hysteria.” Am I overly sensitive to grotesque imagery? Yes. It’s a personal weakness that I am responsible for working to improve. And I am.
But if what you’re about to see doesn’t disturb you at all, I suspect that you have a very serious problem with how deeply you’ve become desensitized to evil.
Josh’s voice interrupted my fugue.
“It’s like standing in a crypt.”
Yes.
I felt my heart rate slow, along with a reduction in the nervous signals that a panic attack was—no, not imminent—I'm stronger than that now.
But panic was within shouting distance, to be sure.
The relief of having my experience named, giving me language to categorize, frame, and hopefully understand it, lessened my anxiety and reduced my sense of visceral horror.
A little.
We were standing in the most intensely oppressive, nightmarishly surreal physical location I’ve stood as an adult.
I am an atheist-leaning agnostic, but the only word that feels strong enough is “demonic.”
My dear friend
and I were in the Northeast Kingdom, about twenty miles from the Canadian border. We had a lovely day, full of laughter and deep conversation, sharing the kind of relaxed, easy, comforting company that only gay dude/straight girl friendships typically reach.The absence of sexual tension and the shared terrain—both of us having dark backstories, being attracted to men, and having filthy senses of humor—makes our friend dates more fun than most people get to have as adults.
We know each other well enough to bring out the best in each other and hold each other accountable, and to pick the right time for such. He’s the only friend I’ve ever fully trusted to get the proportion of “tough” in “tough love” right, and I hope I do the same for him. I treasure our time together.
Today we went to fun places and did fun things that you, internet, don’t get to hear about. But then, since we were close to it anyway (by Vermont standards), we decided to go to a communist puppet museum.
Josh’s presence mattered. A lot. Because it was only his presence—his grounding, comforting, reliable, masculine presence—that kept me from leaving like a bat out of hell.
An Oppressive Force
Think about the feeling of depression.
The numbness, the veil of darkness, and the torpor that prevents getting things done no matter how badly you want to.
Remember that feeling of draining, pointless, exhausting, empty pain.
Now consider: depression comes from inside you.
Imagine that same numbness, darkness, and torpor coming from outside you, descending and changing everything instantly—exactly like getting caught in a downpour, going from dry to drenched in seconds.
That’s what it felt like to walk inside the communist puppet museum.
The Communist Puppet Museum
Primitive folk art can be both corny and creepy.
Primitive folk art can also be deeply revelatory and thought-provoking.
But above all, even when it’s done badly, it powerfully communicates the values, aesthetics, and priorities of the artist.
The communist puppet museum we toured today is full of Soviet folk art in a primitive, almost primal aesthetic. It starkly communicates the despair and horror of Marxism, but that horror is magnified by the knowledge that the originators see it—all of it—as aspirational.
They communicate their ideals; what their “radical resistance” aspires to achieve.
Situated in the Northeast Kingdom, less than half an hour from the Canadian border, the Bread and Puppet Museum is located on a farm in Glover. It hosts a commune, with lists of chore rotations on prominently placed signs.
The museum takes up two floors of a barn. Next to it stands an old farmhouse in disrepair, where the commune residents live. They have signs on every door advising that, due to COVID-19, they do not allow visitors inside.
Does that surprise you? It shouldn’t. Masks and ongoing COVID precautions are now a social signifier of tribal status for socialists and other commies.
The Bread and Puppet theater is over sixty years old, and has been in Vermont for fifty of those years. The founder is now ninety years old, a native of Germany who became an American Vermont hippie with a Wikipedia page. They bring in apprentices, who pay to live in a tent and work on their puppet shows — an experience during which they have no internet access (unless they leave the premises; it’s a dead spot and the wi-fi is not available to apprentices).
They give out bread at their shows because “food and art should be available to everyone for free; they are too good to be sold.”
Their museum is in a barn, where each room holds their giant, papier-mache puppets. The exhibits are dark and cramped. The barn is huge, but it’s filled with so many dark, creepy puppets that the space feels tiny.
It feels closed-in, oppressive, and hopeless.
Josh nailed it. It’s a crypt.
Neither Josh nor I saw the second floor exhibits, where the biggest and creepiest puppets are kept.
We knew that we probably already well into nightmare territory for me, and didn’t want to risk the same for him.
The Bread and Puppet Press
The Bread and Puppet press publishes their Commie bullshit, including material meant to radicalize children into a socialist worldview.
I knew this shit was going on in the local public schools, so it was not a surprise to find that one of the highly recommended local entities that people bring their kids to is just as communist as the public schools are.
Still, despite not being surprised, I was horrified to see it in person.
If I had a young child with me, I’d have left very quickly. If for some reason that wasn’t an option, I’d have been carrying the child in front of me, with one arm under the child’s bottom and the other arm gently holding the child’s face into my neck. I’d have been softly telling him or her, “Keep your eyes closed until we can leave,” and then talking about the happiest, brightest, lightest things I could imagine, to counteract the horror of the crypt-like surroundings.
Nobody should be surprised to learn that Communism is a death cult. Nor that there are communists here in America. The Democratic nominee so recently defeated has been using Marxist signal-words as far back as 2020.
But goddamn, what I saw today brought home the horror of this worldview.
We must never rest.
We must defeat it daily.
That gives us all work to do on the societal level, but it also gives us work to do on the personal level.
I’m going to start with this: I reject the concept of community that is based around identity markers.
I will try very hard to never again think of myself “as a member of the (identity marker) community.”
I will embrace the privileges and responsibilities of community if and only if it’s something I consciously chose myself, as an autonomous individual who is a fully functioning moral agent in this world.
Individualism — responsibility and freedom combined — defeats this collectivist bullshit.
We must not be complacent.
Complacency risks everything that matters.
Everything.
Photo Gallery
I didn’t feel like taking photos, because I didn’t want to remember what I was seeing. It was such an overwhelming experience, to stand there and reflect on the many ways that Marxism is a death cult, all of which were expressed in three dimensions around me. It was only the impetus to write about these things that made me take a few pictures. They do not come close to communicating how creepy, oppressive, dark, and disturbed the atmosphere and aura are — nor the obvious derangement of the minds that create these things.
The most treasured object of childhood is my scout badge, I kept it all these years. It dates to the mid-80s before I emigrated to Australia with my mum. Scouts in the People's Republic of Poland were required to make an oath - which of course included the obligation to uphold socialism. So even that innocent memory is tainted. Regimes cannot leave children alone because indoctrination for ideologies is kind of a political reproduction.
Holly's right. The feeling of dark was oppressive; unusually so. It felt like it felt as a kid watching Twilight Zone episodes that scared me. If I were a believer in the supernatural, I'd describe it as a psychic impingement of some sort; it was that kind of subjective experience.
Holly has done as well as a writer can to get this across, but believe me, you don't really get it because you haven't been there. Some of you will have visited similar places, I'm betting.
People are variously sensitive to this type of stimuli; Holly and I both are certainly over-sensitive, but typical of badly abused kids. I think, though, that even "normal" people would have felt some level of off-putting creepiness.