My adult children and I amused ourselves recently with an absurd fictional scenario in which we reach Karl Marx by spectral telephone in the afterlife — where he is no doubt surprised to find himself — and try to explain that right-wing Americans of the 21st century, with no apparent sense of irony, sometimes accuse the pope of being a Marxist.
Hang on a sec, we imagine Karl saying, this connection is terrible. You don’t mean the actual pope, the gentleman in Rome with the costumes, the smoke and the deliberately mystifying rituals? That’s right, we say, that guy, although the current pope is actually from Chicago and loves baseball. Then the conversation peters out as we try to explain what “woke” means, which is difficult enough even when you’re not talking to a dead 19th-century philosopher.
