Stalin

I once wrote a poem titled "Why I Am the Last Living Stalinist in America" - about "Rockefeller's Ludlow dream" & how universities are selling it "retail". I read it at a small college in Wisconsin. I'm not sure anyone got the point. Maybe, maybe not, it doesn't really matter. Then tonight sitting under a gray sky, we really need the rain, listening to Leonard Cohen's wonderful Closing Time, I came across this article via Arts & Letters Daily. Here's the interesting, at least to me, part:

"The meeting was cordial and consisted primarily of Stalin’s welcoming the President to Yalta and making sure that he was comfortably settled. Since it was about cocktail hour, the President repeated a ritual he regularly performed at the White House: He made a pitcher of dry martinis. As he passed a glass to Stalin, he said apologetically that a good martini really should have a twist of lemon.

The President made Stalin a martini, apologizing for the lack of a twist. The next morning I was astonished to see a full-grown lemon tree that Stalin had had flown in.

"At six o’clock the following morning, when I came down to the main entrance hall, I was astonished to find, just outside the door to the anteroom, a huge lemon tree—I counted some 200 pieces of fruit on it—which Stalin had ordered flown in from his native Georgia so the President could serve his martinis with a twist."

Now does anyone feel better about Stalin now? Or not?