Almost as soon as the first reports of looting and violence came out of post-Katrina New Orleans, people were citing William Golding's novel
Lord of the Flies as an analogue. On Democratic Underground,
"It is like something out of 'The Lord of the Flies'" was one of at least a half dozen posts to draw the parallel. The Diane Rehm show will devote its September 21
"Reader's Review" segment to the book. Vail, Colorado, booksellers have picked the novel as this month's
Valley Read and will donate one dollar to hurricane relief for each copy purchased. As one of the booksellers explains, he "thought it could be used as an educational tool to explain how society breaks down when they don't have food, water or basic necessities."
Like most Americans, I suppose, I hadn't read Lord of the Flies since high school, so I reread it this week to see if it does in fact illuminate what happened after the hurricane. But what I found isn't what I expected. The novel is not a prefigurement of those few horrific days in New Orleans; instead, it is uncannily close to an allegory of the United States under the leadership of George W. Bush.
Lord of the Flies, as you'll recall, is about a group of British schoolboys marooned on an uninhabited Pacific isle while being airlifted away from some imagined post-WWII conflict; their mini-society degenerates from cheerful cooperation to savagery and warfare before a deus ex machina rescue narrowly saves them in the final pages of the book. (If you need a more detailed refresher on the plot, you might want to check the
Wikipedia entry before going on.)
I, like the Vail bookseller, had misremembered the basic situation in Lord of the Flies. It's not at all about response to a life-threatening emergency: the two dozen or so young British evacuees find themselves on a tropical island that Golding clearly intends to be Edenic. The weather is balmy; there's an abundance of fruit, shellfish, and even wild pigs to eat; no large predators or hostile indigenes live on the small island. The boys' compelling task is to constitute a society by building shelters, following a minimal set of rules for governance, taking care of the "little 'uns," and, above all, constantly tending a signal fire that can be fed to produce smoke in the event that a ship appears on the horizon. They fail at all this, and descend into barbarism, almost literally at their leisure, torn apart by internal pressures and their own choices rather than external disaster.
Golding's protagonists are all too easy to map onto the major players in post-2000 America. Blond-haired Ralph, initially the Chief of the survivors, the "fair boy" who embodies the spirit of the rules, democratic procedure, and Anglo-Saxon fair play, but whose dreaminess fatally turns into the absent-mindedness and dithering that allows his unscrupulous opponents to wrest power from him: who can he be but the hapless Democratic Party, undermined as much by our own acquiescence as by the viciousness of our opponents? Poor bespectacled Piggy, with his constant appeals to the authority of science and reason, is our enfeebled "reality-based community," the loose coalition of pragmatists, scientists, intellectuals, and technical geniuses who found themselves suddenly ostracized and ridiculed by the Bushian alliance of reactionary theology, jingoistic anti-intellectualism, and exploitative corporate greed that elevates party hacks and ideologues to positions of power over anyone who is merely an expert in his or her field.
And then there's Jack. Jack Merridew. The leader of choirboys who evolves into the blood-streaked head of a pack of hunters; the canny politician who starts out agreeing with Ralph ("We've got to have rules and obey them. After all, we're not savages. We're English ..."), moves on to open defiance ("Bollocks to the rules! We're strong—we hunt! If there's a beast, we'll hunt it down!"), and finally to the full-blown mania of fascist leadership ("You got to join the tribe. ... What d'you mean by not joining my tribe") with its blood-rite chants ("Kill the beast! Cut his throat! Spill his blood!"), its acceptance of torture and first-strike warfare as strategic tools, and its ultimate self-inflicted demise in the environmental disaster of burning the entire island in order to smoke out Ralph. Jack is, of course . . .
. . . but you already know. I don't have to name him. Or them, really, because Jack combines in one person the uncomplicated for-us-or-against-us dualism of GW Bush with the amoral political genius of Karl Rove.
The eeriest parallel between Lord of the Flies and our post-9/11 condition is the major subplot involving "the beast." Rumors spread from the youngest boys to the older ones that some kind of fearsome beast haunts the island: possibly an untrackable stalking predator, or a huge snake in the trees, or some unknown sea creature that comes ashore at night. Ralph confronts the rumors with Rooseveltian logic: "We've got to talk about this fear and decide there's nothing in it." Jack initially seems to agree: "You're a lot of cry-babies and sissies. ... Fear can't hurt you any more than a dream. There aren't any beasts to be afraid of on this island." But after the boys discover that there really is some mysterious horror (we know, but they don't, that it is only the corpse of a downed airman), Jack learns that he can use the fear to his advantage as an argument to expand his band of Hunters and keep them in tight order. Not that the Hunters ever go after the source of the fear; they choose the easy targets, a sow with suckling pigs, the other boys. Jack discovers, like every authoritarian ruler before and after him, that fear is one's most important ally, and that the last thing you want to do is to attack its root causes.
So Ralph's lament, after Jack has betrayed the clan, over the failure of their miniature civilization can also stand as the indictment of the blindness of a much larger one:
"Just an ordinary fire. You'd think we could do that, wouldn't you? Just a smoke signal so we can be rescued. Are we savages or what? Only now there's no signal going up. Ships may be passing. Do you remember how [Jack] went hunting and the fire went out and a ship passed by? And they all think he's best as chief."
We have, in the last three years, in the last two weeks especially, let our fire go out and let darkness come again. But we can hope the allegory ends here and now, in this month when at least sixty percent of our countrymen no longer believe "he's best as chief". Here and now, before we destroy and exile the best among us, before we abandon the weakest, before we set fire to our island earth. Here and now, we are Ralph, we are Piggy, we are Simon the mystic visionary, and together we are strong. Together we can keep Lord of the Flies a cautionary tale, not an inescapable prophecy.