<> Hopdance Linen Hall Library 1970 Linen Hall Library Tuesday, April 26, 2016 TIFF Parker008 Manuscript Consulate, Socialist English https://www.niliteraryarchive.com/content/parker008 Linen Hall Library Linen Hall Library Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike CC BY-NC-SA https://www.niliteraryarchive.com/sites/default/files/Parker008_0.jpg LHL Archive - 6 - The consulate flags hung limp in the rain, as if shamed by the moral force of their frail protest. You were given a placard to carry, reading Make Babies Not Freakshows, and you felt foolish. As though you had any acquaintance with babies, as though a sodden handful of students outside the U.S. consulate-general, in a dwarfish and absurd province, was likely to fend off nuclear armageddon, was not in itself a sad little freakshow, Falshaw, student journalist, fat and pustular, confronts you with his round red comedian face, on the picket line. -How’s the daemon lover, then? -Depends. Is it some daemon who loves me, or me who’s supposed to love some daemon? -Both in your case, I'd say. -How about the revolution? -Delayed for the time being, on account of industrial action, listen, you haven’t joined the Labour Club yet, people are beginning to talk. -I prefer writing to joining. -What you are, Toshy, is what I call a gut socialist. You feel it deep down but you don't think it through, that's okay, we need your type in the movement too. -I may have a couple of instincts that I'm prepared to credit. I'm not prepared to institutionalise them, though, not quite yet. -Bourgeois individualism very big danger, artistic types much prone to it. Beware. A gnarled and greasy man, his eyes balefully magnified by slablike glasses, passed by on a circuit of his own, counterclockwise to theirs, clad in a sandwich-board proclaiming Christ Said, Ye Must Be Born Again. -Christ was the first socialist, you know, Falshaw told the man as he Text