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." -------- That last sentence is nonsense. -------- He decided, he said, that the world had a new form of evil to deal with, and it was not communism. It was the evil, he said, within American corporate capitalism itself, and American arrogance in protecting its interests in the Middle East oil fields. To Mr. Reed, "Animal Farm" was the ultimate expression of pro-capitalist ideology. "It has inoculated generations of schoolchildren against the evils of communism," Mr. Reed said. -------- New form of evil? What's so new about it? Perhaps the NYTimes is trying to make him look silly. I think of Ayn Rand or Horatio Algier stories as the ultimate capitalist ideological expressions. Animal Farm predicted governements like Saddam's and North Korea. It dramatized the idea that those who gain power often sell out. I read it in a suburban school in 1984 during the height of Raygunmania and learned from it that power corrupts.
Peter