Slouching Towards Bethlehem

This essay is a portrait of Michael “M.I.” Laski. He is a 26-year-old professional organizer for the Communist Party of the United States of America (Marxist-Leninist), a splinter group that found the more mainstream C.P.U.S.A. to be a tool of the liberal elite. He is a devoted idealogue and revolutionary who is working in Watts and Harlem. Didion meets with him at the party headquarters, noting his fastidiousness and his compulsion for order. His beliefs are out of step with the American Left; he thinks that violence is the answer and that an organized force of workers will rise up.

Didion reflects on her comfort with outsiders like Laski, who she sees as something of a kindred spirit in the way their worldview is built on dread. Laski is not comfortable with her, though. He sees her as a tool and likely co-conspirator of the government. He is unwilling to provide her details about the party’s operation, but she does have free reign of headquarters, which is a bookstore with a few beds in it under armed guard.

Didion surmises that, although Laski says he has nothing to offer someone who joins the cause, his worldview offers him a great deal of purpose of “labyrinthine intricacy and immaculate clarity” (65).