Animal Farm

George Orwell's Animal Farm is a great book for high school students to read in the present political climate. Most Americans have woken up recently to a world in which they have a lot less savings and will have to work a lot harder. We're all feeling like someone has deceived us, but we're too dumb to understand exactly who or how. The easiest thing is to be like the sheep in the book and chant whatever political slogans we've been taught. My gut reaction to the economic stimulus package is to start bleeting, "Big deficit bad! Big deficit bad!" It looks a lot like a magnificent but flimsy windmill. Still, I've had to step back and wonder if I really know what's best. I'm in a situation where, being too dumb to understand, I'm having to trust others who may or may not have my best interests in mind.

The animals on the farm are smart enough to question the deception when "Four legs good, two legs bad" is changed to "Four legs good, two legs better," but they never question the integrity of the original slogan. Four legs are no better than two legs; they've been boondoggled by their own kind. This really resonates with me, a good Republican who trusted my daughter's college money with a "Christian" firm that lied to us about where they were investing our money. Now we're having to decide whether to join a class action suit based on a two-hundred and some page legal document that reads like the instructions on your DVD player. It really does seem like the easiest thing to do would be to throw the document in the trash, trust that these people always meant well, and say, "I will work harder."

Of course, Animal Farm is meant to satirize Soviet communism. Snowball is to Trostky as Napoleon is to Stalin. A glorious revolution devolves into a dreary totalitarian state. The seven original principles by which the new society will function are one by one altered to suit those in power. In the preface to my edition, Russell Baker says that Orwell believed in Socialism and was outraged that the Soviets had twisted it in their country into a murderous hierarchical society. I think nothing irked Orwell more than misinformation. The great tragedy in the book is not that the animals rebelled against their human oppressor and tried to set up an ideal society based on Old Major's speech, but that the pigs derailed the revolution for their personal gain. C. S. Lewis says in The Great Divorce, "It's not out of bad mice or bad fleas you make demons, but out of bad archangels." If Animal Farm has anything to teach, it's this: beware when you are trying to do something truly revolutionary and make changes, and everyone is yelling, "Yes we can." Great good can come out of these times, but so can great evil if people in charge start controlling the press.

The only one in the book who isn't duped is the cranky old donkey, Benjamin, but he is the ultimate political agnostic who thinks it doesn't really matter who's in charge. Life will be miserable. I'm tempted to think he's the hero, but he is totally ineffectual. I wonder if he is a frustrated Orwell incarnate. In the preface, Baker says, "There is an aloneness about Orwell, an insistence on being his own man, on not playing along with the team as the loyal politician is so often expected to do, or else." That's Benjamin. So here's the last lesson. If you're one of those cranky old guys that no one seems to listen to, give it some time, and the world may call you a prophet.