CSotD: Two Books, Two Possible Endings
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Cartoonists and other satiric commentators have been borrowing quotes from Orwell since the first Trump administration, but it has often meant finding general observations about dictatorships that could apply to most governments, or extreme examples that had to be toned down to apply to our current situation.
Here Matson borrows the 1984 example of declaring a false fact that fits the government’s interest — “Oceania was at war with Eurasia; therefore Oceania had always been at war with Eurasia” — and it applies well to the insane trade war Trump has declared on Canada.
When I say “insane,” I mean “insane.” The notion that Canada has been ripping us off, the idea that Canada should be part of the United States, the claims that Canada is our enemy are absolute lunacy. You don’t have to be old to remember when these claims didn’t apply. They didn’t apply six months ago. They don’t even apply now.
Nobody of any intelligence or sanity could possibly believe them.
The difference between 1984 and Animal Farm matters: In 1984, Orwell portrays a civilization in which everyone has long been programmed to accept the government’s dictates. Winston Smith is upset by them in part because he works in a place where these claims originate, and also because he’s bright enough to see the illogic in them. However, the system is constructed such that it can deal with the occasional Winston Smith and bring him to heel.
By contrast, in Animal Farm the animals rise up and form a new society, so that, as the pigs turn it into a dictatorship, there are animals who remember their revolution and the principles they adopted. Many are so pliable and frankly stupid that they accept the changes without question, but others are bothered by faint memories of something better.
At the end of 1984, Winston Smith has been reprogrammed into compliancy.
At the end of Animal Farm, the animals can see how wrong things have gone, but seem helpless to do anything about it.
Chappatte asks which ending we prefer, assuming we’ll achieve one or the other with the next set of elections. He suggests a next chapter to Animal Farm, in which the animals either rise up and reclaim their farm, or one in which they slink back to the lives of subservience and exploitation they had before the revolution.
Chappatte is an internationalist who has been involved with cartooning as an element of press freedom and overall liberty. We should probably listen to his warning, assuming we’d rather be in the horrific but still dynamic world of Animal Farm, and not in the conquered, complicit world of 1984.
Dear Leader has offered voters a bribe of $5,000 to vote Republican, though he avoided the actual term “bribe.”
But there’s no getting around the reality: If we vote the way he wants us to, he will give each of us $5,000, which also means that, if you vote for Democrats, you are hurting your fellow Americans by risking the loss of that money.
It’s not just an incentive. It is a bare-faced bribe.
German points out that it’s also financially reckless, illogical and all but impossible. He attributes the plan to Trump’s stupidity, which, given the trail of bankruptcies in Trump’s wake, is not impossible.
But then again, Trump has been elected president twice. He is not stupid. As a young tyro, he repeatedly lost millions and had to go back to his father for more, but he has learned how to survive and even thrive, and the fact that this bribery makes no economic sense doesn’t matter, since it won’t happen anyway.
It won’t be his first broken promise. We were going to get checks to refund his illegal tariffs, but we never did. For that matter, people who bought into his crypto plans lost their shirts in exchange for imaginary currency that promptly dropped through the floor.
Why would these $5,000 bribes be any more on the level?
Joe Martin gets laughs over Willy’s persistent gullibility, and it’s funny in a comic strip. But Willy is employing in all seriousness the same sort of absurd math that German employed in his cartoon, but we laugh at Willy because we recognize his incredible, illogical foolishness. Ethel has to live with the results of his stupidity, but she’s a fictional character, so we can sympathize with her and still laugh.
One of my favorites, but only because it’s fictional. In real life, Willy was misinformed about the size of the crowd at Dear Leader’s first inauguration and, according to the Washington Post, he was misinformed 30,572 additional times in the four years of that first administration.
But among the things he believed was that the fake news was lying, and that Dear Leader was telling the truth. Trump only had to get that lie across to the pigeons and everything else would fall into place.
Speaking of being misinformed about horses, Trump’s promise of low-cost beef has been shrouded in secrecy. He’s finally said the beef comes from Brazil and Argentina and “a couple of other places.” He has also, in a separate action, decided to lower inspection requirements and let beef ranchers slaughter their own animals rather than send them to inspected facilities.
The secrecy — even Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins didn’t know the source of this mystery meat — has led people to fill in whatever factoids they could imagine, including that it is horse, not beef.
Meanwhile, English majors are remembering Upton Sinclair’s classic muckraker, The Jungle, while history majors are recalling the Army Beef scandals. Both brought about the inspection system Dear Leader is relaxing in the name of efficiency.
His trusting followers will eat this mystery meat. Perhaps we all will, if it’s mixed into the regular flow of meat without being labeled separately.
Some of us may need those $5,000 bribes, plus those delayed repayments of Trump’s illegal tariffs, because he’s risking well-paying manufacturing jobs with his bizarre threats to Bombardier, a Canadian company with thousands of employees in the United States.
Once they’re out on the street, they’ll find that he’s cut the SNAP benefits that could have fed their kids.
They just might stop trusting him.
Mike Peterson has posted his "Comic Strip of the Day" column every day since 2010. His opinions are his own, but we welcome comments either agreeing or in opposition.
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