As I was working on this comic about one of the lousy jobs I had in my youth and twirling around its storyline, I began to see the chicken coop and its horrendous conditions as allegories.
While George Orwell wrote “Animal Farm” as an allegory about Soviet Russia under Stalin, the abusively cruel conditions of a factory egg farm could be an analogy for humanity under oligarchy, which I fear our country has now slipped into thanks to evil, sociopathic billionaires like Elon Musk being allowed to hold far too much power over our government.
That’s unfortunately why this analogy works so well.
Oligarchs want the majority of humanity to stay in their little cages, eating what meager sustenance keeps them going to keep squeezing out those precious eggs of profit for the Oligarch; be it through lousy working conditions and low wages he’ll profit from, or scams that pilfered a chicken’s life-savings, or any number of debt traps constructed to make sure those chickens stay subserviently in their cages. The Oligarch wants those birds to keep spitting out those wonderful golden eggs until one batch of used-up, dead chickens is cleaned out of the cage and replaced with a fresh batch of hens to abuse. It’s a vicious unending cycle.
Another way to look at this is to call it a return to Feudalism.
It makes one wonder if people in the United States have become indolent and forgotten the past. For example, how have people forgotten the founding of our country? When our country was a small string of colonies struggling to break free from the rule of a Mad King and the oligarchical corporation that was squeezing the colonialists of every crown they could produce.
My how history repeats, but on a larger, more nightmarish scale.
I tend to think that one of the ways to fight back against the dark future that confronts us is to refuse the chicken cage they want to trap you in.
Instead, be the difficult stubborn hen that’s escaped the coop and lives in the nearby field. Be the hen who likes to hide its eggs under thorn-laden bushes, so if the Oligarch wants the eggs they’ll get bloodied in the process.
You may have heard the history that Ben Franklin once suggested we choose the Turkey instead of the Eagle as our national bird. But it’s rumored that one day, while looking at his backyard chicken coop, he initially considered the rooster. Then he noticed how the rooster cowered before the hens and later suggested they be the choice during conversations with Thomas Jefferson.
Jefferson told him to stop sniffing chicken manure.
But give this a momentary thought. If we had chosen the humble chicken as our national bird maybe it would have discouraged abusive factory farming, and by extension, greedy capitalism or corrupt government, or any predilections for a return to feudalism.
Hmm, I wonder.
It seems like a chicken or egg causality dilemma to mull over while I try to be as free-range as possible during these times.