Due to our chosen "radio silence" on all American news networks (yes, you too, fuckin' turncoat CNN), pretty much the only thing we can listen to is the BBC World Service on the satellite radio. Which, as you might guess, is totally excellent, albeit quirky: sometimes you can turn it on in the middle of a busy news day, and they'll be playing an hour of Westway, their honest-to-god radio soap opera.
Another kooky thing they do is suddenly stop all programming to read a book. Usually it is some sweeping coming-of-age saga set in Hertfordshire, but this week, for no apparent reason, they have Ben Kingsley reading Orwell's "Animal Farm." Upon hearing the first words, I was going to shut it off, but then I remembered how much I was transfixed by the book in 8th grade. I was pulling for Snowball, the only pig with a heart, as he battled the Draconian swine Napoleon, over control of the farm once owned by the dreaded Farmer Jones.
And then it hit me: BBC is airing this novel by no accident. As Kingsley intoned the scene where Napoleon takes over the farm by co-opting the three ravenous dogs and banishing Snowball, I realized what was going on - the BBC thinks that the United States is the Animal Farm.
And they're totally right. Snowball would be the voice of moderate leftists trying to build a windmill so that the world would be a fair, equal place. Napoleon is America, George Bush, and his cabinet of chickenhawks who, like the pig, only have one response to plans that they don't agree with: they urinate on them.
When Bush/Napoleon doesn't get his way, he wails for the three dogs to come in: Rumsfeld, Ashcroft and Wolfowitz. They threaten to destroy any of the animals that don't see things their way. While they're off-duty, the pig Squealer goes around to the other animals and tells them why Napoleon is always right (Ari Fleischer, obviously). And any time any the animals want to have a meeting and discuss things, the Napoleon/Squealer response is "do you want to go back to the way things were with Farmer Jones?" Orwell actually writes that "the animals thought that if another discussion might bring back Farmer Jones, they better not have one."
Jones is obviously September 11, which has been the excuse for every horror perpetrated by the Bush administration since September 12th. The book is so apt, so prescient, and so, well, obvious that the BBC should be commended for such an amazing act of subversion. I wouldn't be surprised that they thought Squealer was actually Tony Blair.
Yes, yes, I know it was written in 1946 about the Russian Revolution, but I swear to god, there has to be some teacher in middle school right now, some high-minded idealist who is assigning this book to her kids right now and praying that at least one kid realizes that this story is not just allegory, not just prophecy, but a blow-by-blow description of these awful times we're in right fucking now.
Posted by at June 13, 2003 12:48 AM