Move fast, break things, kill the pig

by David Benjamin

“Aren’t there any grownups at all?” — Piggy

PARIS—One of the blessings of a liberal arts education is the ability to discern timeless themes from the turmoil of the moment. The return of Donald Trump to his Second Reich at the Resolute Desk, attended by a menagerie of suckups and vandals, has begun to haunt me with parallels in literature.

For example, as I lamented the elevation of overage juvenile delinquents to leadership at the FBI, the office of National Intelligence, the Health Department and the Pentagon, I couldn’t escape intimations of William Golding.

Washington had become the desert island in Lord of the Flies.

First, a plane wreck. Next, there’s a shaky incumbent in charge. In Golding’s tale, it’s a kid named Ralph who, ever so tenuously, tries to form a vestige of the orderly institutions that governed his school and the lives of all the stranded boys before the plane went down.

The plllars of Ralph’s polity are a high stone platform on the beach (the seat of government), the conch without which no one’s allowed to speak (the rule of law), the care and feeding of the helpless “littluns” (social welfare) and the constant tending of a signal fire (civic duty) that embodies the only hope for rescue.

Ralph mounts this “deep state” on a ticking bomb. His futile mission is to impose order on a rabble of children who seethe with raw emotion. Ralph’s antagonist, the sore loser of the leadership election, is Jack, who instills his separate gang of followers with a lust for blood and power. They declare themselves hunters.
Jack’s hunters are the DOGE bros of modern fiction.

The fragility of Ralph’s grip on civilization is the status of his wisest advisor, whom Ralph and all the others assail with mockery. They reduce him to near irrelevance by naming him Piggy.

Piggy is the Democratic Party of the desert island. He is Hakeem Jeffries, Chuck Schumer, Elizabeth Warren and Jasmine Crockett all rolled together into one myopic fat boy, whose voice of reason is overwhelmed by the clamor of the hunters, chanting, “Kill the pig! Cut her throat! Spill her blood.”

For a while, because these desert-island exiles are well-drilled, upper middle-class, lily-white British schoolboys, there reigns a semblance of order and a deference to the authority symbolized by the conch. Ragged and leaky shelters go up, food is foraged, the signal fire is tended—until Jack lures its tenders into the hunt. The fire dies. A ship passes. The fabric begins to unravel. Darkness descends.

The darkness, of course, is a creeping, insidious fear. It is the force that eventually consumes the boys and tears away Ralph’s grip on civilization. It is the the raw, blind, visceral fear that empowers Jack and the hunters to claim their right to rule, their mandate to smear their faces with war paint—like Trump cultists in MAGA hats—and run wild through their jungle. It is the Beast.

As the reader knows but the stranded boys do not, the Beast is not corporeal. It is a specter, an illusion, a boogeything conjured into a palpable, menacing, ravenous being by the passions and ignorance that shroud the minds of these once-sheltered and socially homogeneous children. They know so little of reality that they can pass through the darkness into an unreality that fulfills their fears. They enter a twilight world populated by monsters, ruled over by predators and quarry, by tooth, claw, terror and blood.

We are immersed today in our own spearbearing throng of deluded schoolboys, hunting society for the black without “merit” and the brown without papers, for females who don’t know their place, for teachers who secretly school innocents in the practice of fellatio and sodomy, for hulking hermaphrodites lurking in the stalls of the girls room, and for religious zealots who worship graven idols and a terrorist Prophet, for the Mengeles who slaughter live-born fetuses and for the army of dusky aliens who stalk the campus and rape our college girls.

Our Beast, as we’ve learned from a million lies on X, and a thousand mornings on “Fox & Friends, is the Other, a horror as nebulous as the thing in the jungle, as pervasive and menacing as the jungle itself.

The only possible outcome in the story, of course, is for the once obedient and orderly community of outcast boys to be absorbed into the Beast. This transformation is foreshadowed by Simon’s slipping into a trance—oblivious to the hoard of flies surrounding him—in the presence of the pig’s head, mounted on a stick in the depths of the jungle.

“They were black and iridescent green and without number; and in front of Simon, the Lord of the Flies hung on his stick and grinned. At last Simon gave up and looked back; saw the white teeth and dim eyes, the blood—and his gaze was held by that ancient, inescapable recognition. In Simon’s temple, a pulse began to beat on the brain.”

Simon, who had lingered with the Beast, never believed in it. So he had to die. As did Piggy. The Beast’s believers, those who saw in their minds its vast monstrosity and feared it madly, became the Beast. They took up arms. They smashed the conch. They ranged the jungle in quest for meat. They painted themselves and expected all to follow suit. They shunned and threatened unbelievers. Finally, like the minions of Trump after a “stolen” election, they set fire to everything that might sustain them and launched a murderous hunt for the last vestige of decency and reason—Ralph himself.

“There was no Piggy to talk sense. There was no solemn assembly for debate nor dignity of the conch.”

Our national Beast, if it’s not obvious to its believers, is not a wild animal in the forest or a phantom diabolically vivified into monstrous physical form. He stands before cheering, fearing throngs of thousands who swirl like bluebottles around a pig’s head on a stick. Donald Trump—the white teeth and dim eyes—is our Lord of the Flies. He’s the dark heart of an island waiting for a ship to drop anchor and grownups to save us.

But as Piggy said, there are no grownups—unless we choose to grow up, until someone raises high the conch and calls for order.

As Walt Kelly would advise, we have found the Beast and he is us.