Waiting for our table to be ready for lunch at a restaurant in Berkeley's fashionable Fourth Street Yuppie haven, we wandered over to Cody's Bookstore, a branch of the famed Telegraph Avenue emporium. Amidst the bleached oak bookshelves, we happened across an extraordinary collection of children's plush toys, sold under the brand name of 'Brainy Beanies.'

For a mere seventeen dollars, doting former red diaper babies could buy their grandchildren a stuffed Karl Marx or Che Guevara (in Fidelista uniform, but minus a cigar). Freud, Gandhi, Buddha, Einstein, Vincent Van Gogh (with detachable ear), and Virginia Woolf were some of the less controversial alternatives.

Strangely enough, a Google search failed to find any websites peddling the Marxist revolutionaries, although a number offered the less inflammatory literary and scientific figures. Probably, it is best to keep among friends plush toys depicting figures implicated in the deaths of the tens of millions of Twentieth Century victims of communism.

As for me, I am waiting for the Leo Strauss doll.

Posted by Thomas  03 16 04