Sara Stevenson was a middle school teacher and librarian in Austin, Texas, for many years. She wrote this post in response to the current crisis, which reminded her of Lord of the Flies.
She begins like this:
Several editorialists have compared recent events to the 1954 classic and bane of high school students for decades, The Lord of the Flies by William Golding. As a former high school English teacher, I taught the novel about a group of British school boys, early teens and younger, whose plane wreck lands them on a deserted island with no adult supervision.
Watching the images of the Trump mob assaulting the Capitol, the parallels with the novel stood out sharply, especially images of Jake Angeli, the face-painted “warrior” in a Viking hat, also known as QAnon Shaman.
In The Lord of the Flies, when the boys first realize there are no adults, they are jubilant. Soon the boys choose their first leader, Ralph. Piggy, the bespectacled intellectual, advises the naturally popular Ralph as the boys create their own parliamentary rules of order and assign roles for keeping a signal fire burning and hunting pigs for meat.
Jack, the charismatic bully, leads the group of hunters who gradually defect from Ralph’s rule. Jack’s pig hunts morph into hunts for an imagined Beast, a shared hallucination the boys all fear. Simon, the “Christ figure,” warns Ralph and the others that there is no beast, that “the Beast is us.” When Simon appears alone on the beach in a mist, the boys in a frenzy, mistake him for the Beast, shout “Kill the Beast, spill his blood,” and murder him.
Later Roger, the sadist, becomes Jack’s henchman and levers a giant stone to crush Piggy, the voice of reason, who is trying to make peace as all but some “littluns” have defected from Ralph’s leadership.
When a Royal Navy crew finally discovers the boys, Ralph is being chased to death by Roger and the other boys with their sharpened spears. The naval officers shake their heads at the idea that British boys had turned into such savages.
And the book ends with a visual allusion every post-WWII reader got: The ship bringing the rescue is piloted by those just finishing its own Lord of the Flies moment. golding meant for his book to be a comment on the world.
Excellent analogy. I am also reminded of the final scene in “The Day of the Locust,” by Nathaniel West. Celebrity mania in the person of DT and the desire to be famous—all those social media posts!—drove much of this insanity.
Did you see that an occupation therapist at a public school was one of the rioters? One of my colleagues shared a Qanon video and wrote “View this video with an open mind.” Such a shame that even teachers lack critical thinking skills.
School board members and teachers are participants in “uncivil” conduct and speech. There is no pretense of civility. See these examples https://www.edweek.org/leadership/disciplining-educators-how-schools-should-tackle-conduct-concerns-after-the-insurrection/2021/01
What a powerful description.
No one would ever think this 4 year saga – – with day after day and tweet after tweet foreshadowing – – could occur in America.
History AND the arts suggest otherwise.
Lord of the Flies may be the most on target. Reading that is chilling.
Others…
A Few Good Men “Mr. President – Did you order the Code Red”
Caine Mutiny – (is the president searching the WH for the key to the missing strawberries)
Moby Dick (oh, so many suggestions as to who or what is the white whale in this president’s mind)
Obviously why they self name all their groups ‘boys’ as they follow the man-toddler. At the border babies separated from their parents. Meanwhile the 30 year old who lives with his mother in AZ who attacked the capitol, and his mother is begging he gets organic food. Give me a break.
When born, every human is a wild beast until his or her parents civilize them, teach them to follow the rules and laws that exist to protect us from the wild beasts that lurk inside every human all of their lives.
Prisons are supposed to lock up humans that were not tamed/civilized by their parents and/or civilization. Prisons and hospitals for the mentally ill (were supposed to protect the rest of us from the barbarians among us.
Who is responsible for the mental health system in the US? Read on to discover the answer.
One president attempted to improve the system. He was a Democrat.
The GEP president that replaced the Democrat, pulled a Trump and repealed those improvements.
“The Mental Health Systems Act of 1980 (MHSA) was United States legislation signed by President Jimmy Carter which provided grants to community mental health centers. In 1981 President Ronald Reagan and the U.S. Congress repealed most of the law.”
Great post! Thank you, Sara Stevenson!
Put this in moderation, WordPress.
Well, gee. Everything I write is not now being placed in moderation, just every other thing. LOL.
The Ascendancy of the Machines
Some thought intelligence artificial
would be for humans quite beneficial.
First it placed texts in moderation,
but then it placed lives in termination.
Lord of the flies is a horrifying read; maybe I have this memory since I read it in Hungarian when I was 16. My mother gave it to me after we had decided with my swim mates to shoot out with sling-shots all the light bulbs from the street lamps in a beautiful park. The idea came from nowhere as we were walking, talking, and all initial objections went away within minutes.
Charismatic leadership and peer pressure take all responsiblity off your shoulders, and you feel relieved that you do not have to struggle with thinking and making decisions. You may even feel ecstatic. Once the influence is over, you wake up, horrified, not being able to find an explanation for what you did and what you were thinking while doing it.
I’d never read that book again.
I just finished reading Steven King’s 2007 novel, over 1,000 pages long, Under the Dome, and I noticed some of the same parallels with the books mentioned and the events of January 6. (I wanted to read one book by this author and choose this particular one, because I understood it to be different from his usual blood and gore writing.) Wow! Even adults, who are cut off from the rest of civilization, can easily be presuaded to follow a tyrant under the guise of following a loving and all knowing God. Unbelievable! This book will stay in my mind for a long time.
I do not think the main issue is the unique to human civilization, as Jane Goodall originally reported. Also, the $15 min wage will ease tensions a great deal.