By JAKE ROCKLANDER Daily Planet Slave
The American Communist Party plans to open a store on the Third Street Marmalade that will not only impart its brand of socialist dogma, but will also sell tourist trinkets.
“I can’t think of a better spot than Slanta Monica to open our party’s first business venture,” said Larry Larube, American Communist Party president. “They don’t call it the People’s Republic of Slanta Monica for nothing do they?
“I can’t think of a better spot than Slanta Monica to open our party’s first business venture.” — — LARRY LARUBE American Communist Party president
“I expect to be welcomed with open arms.”
The “cutting edge” store will sell T-shirts of historical figures like Joseph Stalin, V.I. Lenin, John Lennon and Che Guevara, as well as hammer-and-sickle lapel pins, shot glasses and lifesize recreations of Lenin’s Tomb, Larube said.
“We’ll also dispense wisdom,” he said. The store, to be called the Hammer and Sickle Emporium, should be open by the end of the summer.
Rumors about the ACP have been swirling around the Marmalade for weeks, with some businesses displaying hand-written signs in the front windows reading, “The Communists are coming!” and “Red Menace II.”
Jocko Firebeam, 46, manager of the Cheesy-Brand Bluejeans store next door to the spot rented by the ACP, said that the presence of the Communists is “offensive and un-American.”
Furthermore, he wondered, “Didn’t they lose?” Larube admitted Communism didn’t work for the Russians, Pole, Czechs, Romanians, Lithuanians, Bulgarians or Albanians, “but hey, look at China. And Cuba too.”
On the other side of the Hammer and Sickle Emporium, Liza Smith-Jones, manager of Liza’s Candles and Scents, said she hopes the Communists will be good neighbors.
“As long as they’re peaceful and they don’t mind the smell of lavender, I’m really okay with them,” Smith-Jones said. “But I’m not a Communist or anything. I don’t think."
Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on April 1, 2002. Read the original PDF.