Getting ahead of the Sullivan curve.
Well obviously this John Reed guy is an America hater.
What if Snowball had his chance? An American novelist has written a parody of “Animal Farm,” George Orwell’s 1945 allegory about the evils of communism, in which the exiled pig, Snowball, returns to the farm and sets up a capitalist state, leading to misery for all the animals. The book, “Snowball’s Chance” by John Reed, is being published this month by Roof Books, a small independent press in New York. And the estate of George Orwell is not happy about it
Here is where it will get fun:
Snowball’s Chance” is being published at a time when Orwell’s reputation has been under attack because of revelations that in the late 1940’s he gave the British Foreign Office a list of people he suspected of being “crypto-Communists and fellow travelers,” labeling some of them as Jews and homosexuals as well. One of those condemning Orwell has been the writer Alexander Cockburn, whose father, Claud, a British journalist and member of the Communist Party, was a bitter foe of Orwell’s.
“How quickly one learns to loathe the affectations of plain bluntishness,” Mr. Cockburn writes in an introduction to Mr. Reed’s novella. “The man of conscience turns out to be a whiner, and of course a snitch.”
Coming to Orwell’s defense in a book published in September, “Why Orwell Matters” (Basic Books), Christopher Hitchens calls Orwell “a great humanist” whose opinions still hold water. “It has lately proved possible to reprint every single letter, book review and essay composed by Orwell,” he writes, “without exposing him to any embarrassment.”
The debate is set to continue this evening, when Mr. Hitchens is scheduled to appear at Cooper Union with Simon Schama, James Miller and the New Yorker writer Bill Buford for “Orwell Now,” a symposium presented by the PEN American Center.
Mr. Reed said he was watching the aftermath of the terrorist attacks on television in his East Village apartment on Sept. 11 when the idea came to him to rewrite the Orwell classic. “I thought, `Why would they do this to us?’ ” he remembered. “The twin towers attack showed us that something is wrong with our system, too.”
After Sully gets over the vapors after reading that last comment, what do you think? Begala Award or Sontag Award? I can hear his power glutes tightening up from all the way across the country. Taking on American corporatism using Orwell? My god!. ..the depths to which the depraved, despicable, deluded, debauched (wait a minute, Sully likes debauched…) liberals will go to! Shame! Shame!
