Wow, it was just fourteen years ago when I left the school book business. I had been selling classroom reading paperbacks to schools for twenty years. But I had to get out of the book business because public schools were not using books in the classroom. They would cover a few pages of a book in the textbook anthology. Several reasons were given for this general lack of teaching whole books in the classroom. Standardized testing and shorter attention spans of students often were cited as reasons for this trend.
It's become apparent in this current political climate that a trio of my best sellers then needs to be read and taught now. Animal Farm, 1984, and Lord of the Flies read like today's headlines. These books are warnings, but in today's world, one might think that if they were read at all, they were taught and read as "how too" books.
Animal Farm lampooned socialism as self-destructive. The book tells the story of a group of farm animals who rebel against their human farmer, hoping to create a society where the animals can be equal, free, and happy. However, things don't go well as the ideal doesn't line up with the human or fictional animal heart, symbolized by the pig's power grab. Socialism flat out doesn't and didn't work. Or as the socialist today would postulate: hell is a good system just run by bad people.
Lord of the Flies is CHOP ar CHAZ or whatever the soy boys and other assorted spoiled brats in Antifa call it. It has almost imploded in a matter of weeks. "During five undercover days and nights in the zone, I witnessed a continuing experiment in anarchy, chaos and brute-force criminality," wrote Andy Ngo, an undercover journalist, just a few weeks into the temper-tantrum of ill-mannered and poorly raised children. Not unlike Lord of the Flies.
1984, wow, it reads like today's news headlines. Statues being removed, history is rewritten, words are being removed from the dictionary, and the Thought Police are everywhere. Just a few sample quotes:
“What can you do, thought Winston, against the lunatic who is more intelligent than yourself; who gives your arguments a fair hearing and simply persists in his lunacy?”
“Perhaps one did not want to be loved so much as to be understood.”
“The best books . . . are those that tell you what you know already.”
“If you want to keep a secret, you must also hide it from yourself.”
“Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.”
“Until they become conscious they will never rebel, and until after they have rebelled they cannot become conscious.”
“If you loved someone, you loved him, and when you had nothing else to give, you still gave him love.”
“Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing.”
“Big Brother is Watching You.”
“It's a beautiful thing, the destruction of words.”
“Of pain you could wish only one thing: that it should stop. Nothing in the world was so bad as physical pain. In the face of pain there are no heroes.”
“The object of terrorism is terrorism. The object of oppression is oppression. The object of torture is torture. The object of murder is murder. The object of power is power. Now do you begin to understand me?”
“One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship.”
“There was truth and there was untruth, and if you clung to the truth even against the whole world, you were not mad.”
“We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it.”
“The masses never revolt of their own accord, and they never revolt merely because they are oppressed. Indeed, so long as they are not permitted to have standards of comparison, they never even become aware that they are oppressed.”
Scarry right! Those that remain may not have any books to read, they must memorize them so they won't be lost like Fahrenheit 451.
