The Washington Post Magazine was unintentionally funny on Sunday, with a cover story raging against the idea that defenders of the Confederacy can't see history. The cover says: "The Confederacy was built on slavery. How can so many Southern whites still believe otherwise?"
And yet, the magazine's weekly "Date Lab" article finds its lead character just precious. The headline is "She's a communist. He avoided politics." The Post wasn't going to mess this up by asking Kim Leimkuhl if communism is a philosophy built on dictatorship.... "slavery," in a word. She wasn't asked whether under her ideal social system, um, "democracy dies in darkness."
Apparently, she's an "anarcho-communist," and somehow she shouldn't have to explain that head-scratching oxymoron:
The hearing was clearly on Kim’s mind. A 38-year-old self-described “law-school dropout,” she is temping at a nonprofit, identifies as an anarcho-communist, and is a proud member of Democratic Socialists of America. She says dating often “feels like work,” and the hearing put her in a bad mood on a day when she’d already woken up hung over. As the date started, she was still feeling the previous night’s drinking, and she told Bob as much soon after they sat down.
As Commentary's Noah Rothman tweeted out this article, he added: "'Anarcho-communist' is a contradiction in terms and we can stop pretending like it means anything other than the individual doesn't know what words mean."
Poor Bob Lynch, who was pressed into blind-dating a communist by the WashPost, messed up the date by trying to avoid the elephant in the room: his date had a deep streak of confused authoritarianism. Oops, no, the Post's Rich Juzwiak painted Bob as the sinner -- because he thinks talking politics on the first date is a No-No.
“Bob was very, very committed to keeping it very surface the whole time,” Kim said later.
“I avoided trying to talk about it, and I think she did, too,” said Bob, who believes that talking about politics on a first date is impolite. “I think I said, ‘Yeah, I watched that while I was at work today,’ and it was a kind of, let’s roll our eyes and talk about something else type of thing.”
Obviously, if he was interested in a second date with the communist, he should have suggested that under these last gasps of late capitalism, Kavanaugh should be sent to a concentration camp for re-education. Instead, he talked about his global travels. That was annoying:
She described Bob as “nice-looking,” but even though they tacitly agreed to bypass the Ford-Kavanaugh hearings, politics ended up interfering with attraction. She found herself clearly to the left of Bob, and “I just don’t care to do that kind of emotional labor of pretending that your very cagey views are interesting.” For example, when she brought up Metro Board Chairman Jack Evans having afforded white nationalists a private Metro car for a rally this past August, “it seemed like he felt it didn’t impact him directly, and that’s where my politics come from,” she said.
Jack Evans is a longtime liberal D.C. Democrat, so you'd have to be a communist to think he's some sort of white-supremacist enabler. Metro officials were pondering how to keep violence off the train system, and you can't exactly tell the racists that they can't take a public train.
The Post highlighted Bob's counter-revolutionary failures in a tweet:
These weekly "Date Lab" experiments almost never work to build an actual relationship. But what kind of "matchmaker" sets up a guns-blazing communist with someone who's "not very political"?
