Columnist Scott Dickensheets: Riffing on Marxism, teens and gorditas

SCOTT DICKENSHEETS' column appears Tuesdays, Fridays and Sundays. Reach him at 259-4082 or [email protected].

WHILE WE concentrate on debugging this column before the year 2000 -- 17 months should be just enough time -- stand by for one of the grabbiest, baggiest Tuesday grab bag columns ever. Shilling dogs of Marxism! High school horrors! Witty comment ... well, shilling dogs of Marxism and high school horrors, anyway.

Che what: As a proper liberal dupe of international communism, I naturally love the recent commercials for Taco Bell's gorditas, starring the talking Chihuahua as a Marxist revolutionary, a four-legged Che Guevara.

The ads come loaded with requisite iconography: dark berets, rippling red flags, a marching column of taco rebels, a jingle that sounds like socialist chanting. It shows how far we've come around the bend of history, from "are you now or have you ever been" to Red Menace as ad fad. Once, during what already seems like quaint ancient history -- how long before Disney gives us Cold War Land? -- careers were ruined by the slightest taint of communism. Now it's being used to shill tasty flatbread tacos. If Karl Marx were alive today, he'd surely die.

It's the latest in a wavelet of Marxism made cool. The publisher Verso recently re-released the book that started it all, the Communist Manifesto. With its slick red, minimalist cover, this version is more of a consumer fetish object than a manual for the radical redistribution of wealth and establishment of a proletarian whatever. And not long ago, the New Yorker published an essay lauding Marx's prowess as a theorizer of capitalism. John Lennon aside, I guess you can make it with someone now, carrying pictures of Chairman Mao.

It's just more evidence if you needed it of capitalism's voracious assimilative powers; short of certain sexual practices, there's hardly any lifestyle quirk or ideological bent that can't be converted to a sales pitch. I expect the commie ad campaigns to burgeon a while before flaring out: "Quit Stalin, buy Michelin tires today!" "You get Mao for your money at Lucky's!" "You'll be tickled pinko with your new Summerlin home!"

School daze: A new high school is going up a mere half-mile from where I live in Henderson. You know what that means: teenagers everywhere. At first, this imparted a feeling for which fear and rage may be too strong a description but an intense desire to fortify my house is not. After all, my doorstep is just a left, a right, a left and a right away, and I envisioned hearing the rattle of spray paint cans after every high-spirited home game. I was a teenager once, remember.

But then I talked to Capt. Richard Perkins of the Henderson Police Department, who told me that a rise in petty vandalism doesn't necessarily go hand in hand with a new high school. "That hasn't been the case at Green Valley," he said, largely, he speculated, because a major thoroughfare separates it from nearby dwellings. The new high school, too, will be set away from most surrounding neighborhoods. (A more pressing concern, Perkins said, will be students crossing Heather Drive, as the campus will straddle the street.) So my fears were eased, for now.

Anyway, it's possible that my alarmist tendencies have gotten the better of me. Perhaps teenagers aren't the roving bands of amoral vandals and terrorists I imagine them to be; perhaps they're largely decent kids who ... nah. I was a teenager once, remember.

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