He's the one who likes all our pretty songs
And he likes to sing along
And he likes to shoot his gun
But he don’t know what it means
-Nirvana, ‘In Bloom’
Perhaps one of the only truly great outcomes of my public high school education in metro Atlanta was that my class in ninth grade was forced to read George Orwell’s classic allegorical fairy tale, “Animal Farm.”
To the extent I ever had any faith in large governing institutions, or large man-made ones of any kind, “Animal Farm” shattered it irrevocably.
On a long enough timeline, every government, without fail, including the United States federal government, will descend into despotism. This is the exact reason, of course, that Thomas Jefferson prescribed a “refreshing of the tree of liberty with the blood of patriots and tyrants” from time to time.
(This understanding, by the way, is a prerequisite for any kind of decent journalism. No high office holder, regardless of party affiliation, deserves blind faith. The assumption should always be that they are spinning or outright lying before independent confirmation can be made.)
Within the plot of “Animal Farm,” I identified, on the first reading, and not because of his name, with the donkey Benjamin, who at no points allows the frenzied excitement of the revolution to shake his grip on reality:
Old Benjamin, the donkey, seemed quite unchanged since the Rebellion. He did his work in the same slow obstinate way as he had done it in Jones's time, never shirking and never volunteering for extra work either. About the Rebellion and its results, he would express no opinion. When asked whether he was not happier now that Jones was gone, he would say only ‘Donkeys live a long time. None of you has ever seen a dead donkey,’ and the others had to be content with this cryptic answer.
All that to say: the book occupies a special place in my heart.
So imagine my emotional anguish at discovering that MSNBC ran a segment replete with non-sequitur references to Trump’s fascism on the work.
Avi Velshi, who would surely have been anthropomorphized as a turtle propagandist for the pigs in the story, with seemingly no self-awareness of the deceptive propaganda machine that he services for money, presented his weekly “Banned Book Club” segment, this one focused on Orwell’s classic.
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The irony here, of course, is rich almost beyond comprehension.
Historical revisionism, championing of race-based policies (“some animals are more equal than others,” after all), brutal censorship in the slavish service of maintaining narrative dominance, gleefully cheerleading the targeting of right-wing political opponents and branding them as “domestic terrorists” — this is the bread and butter of de facto state media outlet MSNBC.
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Naturally, I suffered no illusion that defiling the legacy of Orwell in the service of its propaganda would be below MSNBC.
Rolling around in filth is what pigs do; it comes naturally to them.
Still, I found the display jarring and revolting in equal measure.
