The political ideals of American Farm are no longer equality, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, but sacrifice in the service of American Farm.
by Joey Clark
“It was a pig walking on his hind legs.
Yes, it was Squealer. A little awkwardly, as though not quite used to supporting his considerable bulk in that position, but with perfect balance, he was strolling across the yard. And a moment later, out from the door of the farmhouse came a long file of pigs, all walking on their hind legs. Some did it better than others, one or two were even a trifle unsteady and looked as though they would have liked the support of a stick, but every one of them made his way right round the yard successfully. And finally there was a tremendous baying of dogs and a shrill crowing from the black cockerel, and out came Napoleon himself, majestically upright, casting haughty glances from side to side, and with his dogs gambolling round him.
He carried a whip in his trotter.”
George Orwell, Animal Farm
[dropcap size=big]T[/dropcap]his past weekend, in the middle of nomming on 3 slices of succulent thick-cut bacon, I looked up from the page of my allegorical morning read, and much like a revelatory pork-laden burp (yes, a burp can be revelatory,) this phrase popped out of my mouth, “It seems the pigs have been holding the whips for some time now, Mr. Orwell.”
Holding the whips, indeed, and it appears they won’t be relinquishing their grip anytime soon.
The Pigs of Washington, of course, grip the biggest whips, and when they aren’t using them on us lowly domesticated animals here at American Farm (a once enlightened republic, by the way, now devoted to the production of bananas,) they’re always ready (and some would say eager) to put the crack back in “cracker” and even unleash their dogs of war against their brothers in statecraft if necessary.
Thus, to this point and porpoise, let us take a swift look at the farms of the world today in relation to the D. C. Pigs–and paint a portrait of politics in general–through the lens of the cruel irony and lust for domination that lies behind a Pig’s beady little eyes.
Concerning the Pigs’ brothers in statecraft, there is a sort of continuum with three stops along the way: friends, frienemies, and enemies.
First stop: the many farms of the Anglosphere, the estates of Europe and her Imperial legacies in South America, Africa and the Middle East, the fisheries of the Eastern Pacific, a rejuvenated Zion–these, with a few exceptions, can be counted as friends.
Second stop: the frienemies list is consistently inconsistent (which I’ll come back to in a moment,) but for now, let us count among them the most prominent: the bears of Siberia and the Yellow River, the Hogs of Saud, the Golden Eagle Pharaohs of Egypt, the North Atlantic Wolves of Turkey, the Mountain Dwelling Markhors of Pakistan, and the farmless Kurds.
Third stop: the Pigs’ enemies list is not so simple to discuss. To hear the Pigs of Washington talk of the matter, there is an ever present peril–a general Terror worldwide–and in such a dangerous world, frienemies must be occasionally confused as enemies in public in order to keep up the perpetual threat of a hot stamping, that American Farm brand of enemy, as a means to secure the Pigs’–excuse me, American Farm’s–position of dominance.
Thus, from such a perspective, we have recently heard from a particular subset of our boarish leaders, the War Pigs, that the Russian Bear is stirring from its hibernation (“So, let’s poke it!” say the War Pigs,) that the Chinese Panda is on the verge of full-blown metamorphosis into its Dragon avatar (“So, let’s prepare to slay it!” say the War Pigs,) that the crackpot little piggy dictator of North Korea is forever wee-wee-weeing all the way home and all over himself and his people (“So, let’s choke him!” say the War Pigs,) that the totalitarian swine of Iran are apparently seeking to bring about the eschaton via nuclear war (“So, let’s roast ’em!” say the War Pigs,) and last, but certainly not least, that the swarms of Islamist killer bees grow stronger by the day despite the War Pigs’ decade long global extermination efforts.
Don’t be fooled into thinking their bellicose rhetoric is simply sound and fury signifying nothing. Remember, the War Pigs brought a swift end to the Butcher of Baghdad (Pigs understandably hate butchers,) they put down the Mad Dog of the Middle East with ease, and they nearly poached the clean-shaven Lion of the Levant; Assad most likely barely escaped with his life, and for the time being, his farm continues to be ravaged by war.
What have the War Pigs accomplished with all this? Well, they’ve traded the Butcher for a pit of vipers, exchanged the Mad Dog for a hornet’s nest, and fostered another brood of vipers to the north of the Levant’s Lion.
And now, nearly a decade and a half later, after the deaths of hundreds of thousands, the displacement of hundreds of thousands more, the spending of trillions of our confiscated money, we can see there are magnitudes more “terrorists” than when the Pigs began this bloody War on Terror, and now we are being told this will continue for another 30 years…if not longer.
I’m sorry, but I must ask respectfully: what the fuck are the Pigs doing exactly? I thought they were suppose to make things better for us. Safer for us. Freer for us. I thought things were suppose to get better under their leadership.
Well, according to the Pigs, the question to ask about their leadership isn’t “are things getting better?” The question to ask is, “are things getting worse?” Secure, maintain, and react even if it means reacting preemptively and creating more problems. As long as the you can claim the problem you created is a lesser evil than the problem you are solving, then everything is just peachy or at least, not quite as shitty. When you allow the idea that evil is necessary to enter one’s mind, anything is possible. And when you have Pigs like Steven Hayes of the Weekly Standard asking the question, “And is it really the case that a diplomatic settlement is always better than war?” without batting an eye, I think it is safe to say things are shittier and sloppier than we thought. Only a Pig would want such a situation.
With all this in mind, I have come to conclude, my fellow American Farm animals, that the Pigs are in it for themselves at our expense.
The Pigs’ promises of “progress” and “safety” are now only hollow abstractions, an opium the Pigs proffer to us to keep us dreaming. The political ideals of American Farm are no longer equality, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, but sacrifice in the service of American Farm.
Wake up my fellows! Wake up! I am by no means calling for a revolution; revolutions usually only end up with a new set of Pigs and a new need of another revolution. I am by no means calling for utopia. Utopian dreams when taken literally often end in a nightmare of orthodoxy and disappointment. As a wise old animal, a primate named Orwell, once said,“To exchange one orthodoxy for another is not necessarily an advance.”
In that spirit, I do not claim to offer any particular ideology or creed. I personally long for liberty, equality, and solidarity for all of you, but I cannot force you to agree nor would I wish to do so.
My message, if you have the ears to hear it, is simply this: use your mind!
Engage in politics skeptically. Skeptical of the cynic and the sentimentalist. Skeptical of these very words. Beware the lure of political authority. Beware political parties and their ideals. Do not trust their false promises.
Political parties, especially those with a farmhouse full of mammalian pride, are about power. Nothing more, nothing less. They stand for ideals only when they are not sitting on a seat of power. And with power as the goal, any political project of any political party runs the almost certain risk of strong leaders and their cults of personality treating other people, even their comrades, as a means to their ends, as disposable tools, as experimental objects, as sacrificial animals, as broken eggs for their big omelet breakfast.
If you don’t believe this warning or find it overblown, then I suppose you also don’t believe the horror stories lived by our fellow animals: have you not heard the story that the shepherd loves his flock only for the sake of the future fleecing? Or, that the hog farmer mixes up his slop not for his love of pigs but because of the bacon, ham, and smoked racks of little piggy baby backs? Or that, as Woody Allen once said, “The lion will lay down with the lamb, but the lamb won’t get much sleep.”?
Politics, 9 times out of 10, is a march to slaughter; some animals just know it better than others and accordingly, make it to the dinner table alive at the expense of the ignorant who provide the meat at a very high price.
No matter what type of political animal–whether a pig, a fox, a wolf, a sheep, or dog; a jackass, a pachyderm, a lion, tiger, bear, hawk, dove, or even hedgehog–we are caught up in the trappings of power…often against our will. Whatever role it is you play, the trick is to not become too domesticated, too fat and happy in the service of some master (who is usually a pig, but sometimes a dog, a bear, or even a primate,) for if you become too reliant on or too fearful of or too fatalistic in the face of the ever-present whip of authority, prepare for it someday to be used against you, as you sheepishly say Kevin Bacon style, “Thank you, sir. May I have another?”
Beware those who talk only of loyalty, love, and sacrifice as they all the while hold a firm grip on the whip, for they most likely do not love you for you and your talents but as a resource to be rendered and controlled.
Beware the followers; their wooden tongues, preaching obedience, promises, and unearned pride, are worse than any crack of the whip. They are the folksy face of power. They bring power to the common man like the plague: unintentional, unsolicited, very contagious, and deadly to healthy traditions.
Beware your lust to rule over others. Fear the day you look in the mirror and begin to see piggish qualities and feel the urge to dominate your fellows. Man has no business reigning over man. Predation is corrupting to the soul of a person and a people. Don’t you know the tyrant in you is the tyrant in me?
It is the tyrant within you and your own voluntary amnesia, a carelessness when it comes to remembering important facts, that engenders perversions of the law and enables the ruthless tyrant without.
The Pigs of Washington and the Pig within you are hoping you do not know these things. You personally may very well find my description of our American Farm and my warning regarding political power too severe. If so, I hope and humbly suggest you reconsider.
My point is not to smear. My point is not to belittle those who engage in politics. My point is plain and simple: as Lord Acton said long ago, “Power tends to corrupt and absolute power tends to corrupt absolutely.”
Don’t be corrupted, for we are not pigs but human beings with minds that grant us the ability to set ourselves free from the war of all against all. It is up to you to use your mind for the good of all, to stand against those Pigs within and without who will most certainly try to exploit and prey upon you and your fellows. Let the closing words of George Orwell’s Animal Farm be a final word of woe that even when things seem to be going well, it only takes one wrong move–in this case done by two cheats–to cause a great calamity and make people forget what it means to live a beautiful and dignified life as a free human being:
Twelve voices were shouting in anger, and they were all alike. No question, now, what had happened to the faces of the pigs. The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
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