I was talking with George the other day about the significance of ‘Aramchek’ the current title to the fark-like news section of this site:
The pinko capital of the world was not surprised when Senator Fremont was named to a committee investigating un-American activities. It wasn’t surprised when the senator nailed several prominent liberals as Communist Party members. But it was surprised when Senator Fremont made the Aramchek accusation.
Nobody in Berkeley, including the Communist Party members living and working there, had ever heard of Aramchek. It mystified them. What was Aramchek? Senator Fremont claimed in his speech that a Communist Party member, an agent of the Politburo, had under pressure given him a document in which the CP-USA discussed the nature of Aramchek, and from this document it was evident that the CP-USA, the Communist Party of America, was itself merely a front, one among many, cannon fodder as it were, to mask the real enemy, the real agency of treason, Aramchek. There was no membership roll in Aramchek; it did not function in any normal way. Its members espoused no particular philosophy, either publicly or privately. Yet it was Aramchek that was stealthily taking over these United States. You’d have thought someone in the pinko capital would have heard of it. (Radio Free Albemuth, p. 16)
…
Bending down, Nicholas examined a word incised in the cement of the sidewalk, a very old word put there some time ago, when the sidewalk had been wet. It was professionally printed.
“Look!” Nicholas said.
I bent down and read the word.
ARAMCHEK
“That was the original name of this street,” Nicholas said, “evidently. Before they changed it. So that’s where Fremont got the name of that conspiratorial group: from his childhood. From finding it written on the sidewalk. He probably doesn’t even remember now. He must have played here.”
The idea of Ferris Fremont playing here as a little boy — the idea of Ferris Fremont as a little boy at all, anywhere — was too bizarre to be believed. He had rolled his tricycle by these very houses, skipped over the very cracks we had tripped on in the night; his mother probably warned him about cars passing along this street. The little boy playing here and inventing fantasies in his head about people passing, about the mysterious word ARAMCHEK inscribed in the cement under his feet, conjecturing over the weeks and months as to what it meant, discerning in a child’s mind secret and occult purposes in it that were to blossom later on in adulthood. Into full-blown, florid, paranoid delusions about a vast conspiratorial organization with no fixed beliefs and no actual membership but somehow a titanic enemy of society, to be hunted out and destroyed wherever found. I wonder how much of this had come into his head while he was still a child. Maybe he had imagined the entire thing then. As an adult he had merely voiced it.
“Could be the contractor’s name,” I said, “rather than the original street name. They inscribe that too, sometimes, when they’re done with a job.” (Radio Free Albemuth, p. 44)
We have our own ARAMCHEK of sorts here in Austin. There are a number of sidewalks around the older parts of central Austin inscribed with the name ‘MAUFRAIS’. When I first moved downtown to attend the University I found them very mysterious.
