Life on Dubya’s Animal Farm

Many disturbing comparisons have been drawn between the totalitarian society George Orwell
describes in 1984 and George Bush’s Amurika.

The similarities are easy to see, even if you’ve only read the Cliff’s Notes version of Orwell’s book:
Citizens are encouraged to spy on one another, there’s endless war with ever-changing enemies,
the media herald Big Dubya as the greatest leader in human history (while promptly dispatching his
many embarrassing gaffes down the memory hole), and, as we’ve seen in Portland recently,
dissent is coldly quashed with police-state tactics.

The parallels between 2002 and 1984 are obvious. However, as I listened to news reports
of the anti-Bush protest in Stockton, California on Friday, the book that came to mind was
Orwell’s other classic, Animal Farm.

With its obvious allusions to Soviet Russia, this dark satire about animals taking over and running a farm
isn’t usually associated with the cabal of rightwingers currently controlling this country in the same way 1984 is.
But aside from the striking correlations between members of the Bush regime and the avaricious pigs that run
Animal Farm (Ari Fliescher and Squealer the pig propagandist could easily have been separated at birth),
what happened in Stockton is something straight out of Orwell’s barnyard.

If you didn’t hear about the protest (and chances are you didn’t if you get your news from corporate media),
here’s what happened:

Bush came to Stockton on yet another of his Republican fund-raising appearances (if he put the same energy
into winning his war on terrorism as he does in raising money for his GOP cronies, the terrorists would be
vanquished by now). According to reports on KPFA FM and Indymedia (Click Here), up to 1,000
anti-Bush activists showed up, some of them bussed in from the northern California area.
They came to demonstrate opposition to the impending war with Iraq, among other issues.