Rebelión en la granja

I have read so many things since I last posted What Tony is reading that I won’t list them. Life goes on. At home, where I actually concentrate, I am still reading Great Expectations. I had never read Dickens before, and I heard that this was his most complex novel. In the morning on the subway I am brushing up my German for a trip I expect to take this fall. On the way home I am dividing my time between reading things my friends wrote and some essays by George Orwell.

The other night I was reading Orwell's essay “The Prevention of Literature,” which he published in January of 1946. Orwell always has sentences that stand out: “There is no such thing as a genuinely non-political literature” and “To write in plain, vigorous language one has to think fearlessly, and if one thinks fearlessly one cannot be politically orthodox”--and if you don’t agree with such statements, they appear in a persuasive essay that you have the right to read. As so much of Orwell does--or, for that matter, good essay writing--the theme took me on a few unexpected turns, such as how liberals end up advancing totalitarianism. At over 60 years old, some of the paragraphs apply, intact, to civil liberties questions we face today in the ever-widening war on terror.

And then I heard the news about Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez’s latest constitutional reforms, I could only think of Orwell’s Animal Farm, which besides being a political fable is also a brilliant illustration of how one--a nation, let’s say--can find oneself at the bottom of a slippery slope with no idea how one got there. It is simply a matter of time before the Venezuelan people look in the window of the farmhouse and see that the pigs are living exactly as Mr. Jones did.