What’s with Those ‘Socialist Summer Camps’ Anyway? Here’s the Truth
You all recall the following quote from Alvy Singer, Woody Allen’s character in Annie Hall:
You, you, you’re like New York, Jewish, left-wing, liberal, intellectual, Central Park West, Brandeis University, the socialist summer camps and the, the father with the Ben Shahn drawings, right, and the really, y’know, strike-oriented kind of, Red Diaper, stop me before I make a complete imbecile of myself.
Allen’s co-writer Marshall Brickman once quipped that these camps were places in which you scored points if your father was going to jail for violating the Smith Act.
Woody’s character was talking to his girlfriend, whom he easily identified as a bona fide Red Diaper baby, and who went to “socialist summer camps.” So what were these camps all about, anyway?
The issue has gone viral since The Daily Caller ran a story yesterday about President Obama’s nominee for head of The Bureau of Labor Statistics, Erica Groshen, who evidently sent her own children to Camp Kinderland sometime in the 1990s.
Sometimes some on the American Right like to make a fool of themselves, and this is one of those times. Her husband made the mistake in May 2011 of giving the gigantic sum of $20 to the Working People’s Party, an electoral spinoff of ACORN and company. But as for Ms. Groshen, as another story reveals, she has the backing of Diana Furchtgott-Roth, a senior fellow at the conservative Manhattan Institute who has stated for the record: “[Groshen is] a very, very good economist and I don’t think there’s anything wrong with her,” and adding “no-one could be more Republican than I am.”
She also said that no BLS commissioner could by herself skew the agency’s research or products. The BLS is “a vast bureaucracy with one person at the helm. … It’s just very difficult to change that vast group of technocrats,” she said.
If Ms. Groshen is good enough for Furchtgott-Roth, she’s good enough for me. Sure, Ms. Groshen is undoubtedly a leftist of some sort, but whom do you expect Obama would appoint to the BLS post, Mel Leffler? Any president is entitled to appoint someone he wants, and she has the solid credentials for what is essentially a bureaucratic management position.
But because Americans for Limited Government wants her investigated because she sent her own kids to Commie camp, the camp’s prettifiers have gone all out making jokes about how nutty the right is to think anything but camping went on there.
Wow. Never heard of these before.
And “the stage bedecked with the Soviet flag and hammer and sickle during World War II.”
SO much hidden history. Only those initiated into the Mysteries know.
Thanks, Mr. Radosh!
Let’s see, 69 Jamat-al-Fukrah camps, 24 Shahab camps, 8000 mosques (most built after 9/11)… and Columbia School of Journalism! So much hope for the future of administrative management.
thank you, Mr Radosh, for explaining why movies about camps with scrubby, anarchic little kids triumph over the camp with cared for, clean, tall, well-loved children.
and thank you for writing about the camps at all.
and, my, what lying. what lying, what wrapping in darkness, their deeds.
I send my kids to a religious camp. I expect it to help form them into religious adults. I know they sing hymns all day, I know they pray all over the place. Why wouldn’t camp songs to communism shape those youngsters, as well?
This makes them commies?
“Kinderlanders protesting pipelines, fracking, illegal frisking, Kinderlanders promoting fair wages, health care reform, union and workers rights.”
Wow! Got thru the PJM censors with my incendiary comment on only my 3rd try!
Nobody’s going to censor you; your idiocy is too entertaining.
She sent her children to Camp Kinderland. It was never alleged that she was subjected to the Camp that retains the vision of its communist founders (according to their own website)
Obviously, she wanted her kids to experience being enveloped in a “progressive” indoctrination camp, which leads any reasonable person to believe that she shares those values.
Imagine if it had been a camp founded by the KKK? Do you think anyone would be defending her decision to send her children there?
“Imagine if it had been a camp founded by the KKK? Do you think anyone would be defending her decision to send her children there?”
Who needs the KKK when you have the Boy Scouts?
My late, beloved father, for 46 years a superb professor
of chemistry at Brooklyn College, had been a
counselor at Camp Woodland and later one of
four partners at Camp Tunis Lake. At Tunis he
had a business partner named Brickman: any
relation to Marshall?
Disgusted by Stalinist groupthink and anti-
Semitism, my father left the CPUSA in the
late 1940s. Ever scholarly, in retirement he
taught himself enough serious economics to
read Keynes, Hayek and Friedman. And to appreciate
the refusal of postwar British Hong Kong
authorities to assemble too much data on
the economy: less temptation to intervene.
Just to be clear:
Jesusland = The evil heart of middle-America brainwashing innocent children to become racist haters of science.
Kinderland = Sunshine, s’mores and song.
“If Ms. Groshen is good enough for Furchtgott-Roth, she’s good enough for me.
That is a problem. It matters not whether Ms. Furchtgott-Roth is a card carrying Republican nor that the BLS is a vast bureaucracy that supposedly cannot be twisted to the whims of the director.
What matters is that anyone with an outlying ideology is in control of said agency will by subconscious action twist said agency to such out of control ideology. She is wholly unfit for the office.
Quit putting the fox in charge of the hen house.
People think that socialism is that bad. I really don’t think it’s THAT bad.