Yes, David Mitchell is a very smart man… a very smart English man. (That isn’t to say that his genius is any less genius than an American Genius. Just that he is a genius who also happens to be English)
And I, of course, don’t mean this David Mitchell either, though this David Mitchell is also a genius and also from England. I have to tell you, though I have always loved British humor, this particular tongue of silver fascinates me enough to make me binge on hoards of old episodes of “Would I Lie to You?” from the BBC on YouTube. He’s a quick-wit, Brit-wit, smooth-talking bit-wit who can make you laugh even when he’s playing a thick-wit… which he is certainly not.
Anyway, that is the wrong English genius David Mitchell.
I mean the other English genius David Mitchell. The one who wrote Cloud Atlas. Also the one who wrote The Bone Clocks. And, of course, the one whose book Black Swan Green which I just finished reading early this morning.
Yes, I mean this David Mitchell. The absolute genius writer who creates exactly the kind of books that I long to read.
Now, this post should probably be more of a traditional book report than it is. This book I just read is swimmingly, swannishly excellent in a David-Mitchell-is-GENIUS! sort of way. It is about an English boy from Malvern, England undergoing the trials and tribulations of his thirteenth year of life. The boy is a stutterer and secretly a poet. The girl he pines for is the girlfriend of his greatest enemy, the boy who relentlessly bullies and taunts him. One even suspects that this portrait of a Margaret Thatcher-era boyhood written in exquisitely horrible detail might be based on the author’s own boyhood somehow, so vivid is its detailing.
But this is already too cacked-up to be a proper book report just because of the two David-Mitchell-English-genius thing. If you really want that sort of book review, read it elsewhere, or read the danged book yourself. This report is more of a vow of fealty. I must now turn my hoarding disorder sufferer’s exacting zeal on the matter of reading everything this living author writes. I did the same thing to both Michael Crichton and Terry Pratchett because they are geniuses too. But they are both now no longer living and writing new books, at least, not unless there is new meaning to the term ghost writing that I don’t know anything about. So now it is David Mitchell’s turn to be the object of my intense fan-boy love of good writing.
Here are some David Mitchell books that I now must stalk and make my own;
And hopefully, there are many more yet to come.
*****
During my middle-school teaching years I also bought and read copies of The Prince and the Pauper, Roughing It, and Life on the Mississippi. I would later use a selection from Roughing It as part of a thematic unit on Mark Twain where I used Will Vinton’s glorious clay-mation movie, The Adventures of Mark Twain as a way to painlessly introduce my kids to the notion that Mark Twain was funny and complex and wise.
Catch a Falling Star 
Liars Run the Animal Farm
Napoleon the PIG.
Napoleon the Pig makes himself ruler of the Animal Farm in Orwell’s 1945 book by lying about Snowball, his rival Pig, and blaming the destructive acts of the former human Farmer Jones on poor Snowball. He is driven away from the farm by the farm dogs whom Napoleon has taught to think since they were puppies. This, even though Snowball was actually the hero of the animal rebellion that drove the humans away. Collusion? Perhaps. But definitely a lie. And the PIG Napoleon, once in power begins to keep all improvements to living conditions for the PIGs. Other animals, he says, are happier with a simpler, hard-working life. The PIGs begin to dress like men and walk upright and wear long red ties.
Keith Olbermann in the video is very much like Benjamin the Donkey, who is cynical and skeptical about Napoleon’s methods. He also reads as well as any Pig. When Boxer the workhorse is wounded defending the farm against neighboring farmers who attack and destroy the windmill, he shrugs off the the wound and works at rebuilding the windmill until he collapses. Then Napoleon declares Boxer will only get better if he’s taken to the vet’s animal hospital. But he calls the Knacker (the man who renders dead horses into glue) to take Boxer away. Benjamin calls him out. He points out that it says “Knacker” on the van that takes Boxer away, not “veterinarian”. He points out that Russian Facebook trolls used targeted troll-posts to help get Napoleon his position of power. But Napoleon gets away with his lies. Boxer apparently dies in the so-called animal hospital.
Now, I am not sure which tiny animal on the farm Robert Reich is like, but he is pointing out in this video that once the PIGS got themselves into power on the animal farm, they lie in order to get their agenda operating, enriching all PIGs (or is that GOPs?) and their political donors. They are doing it all by LYING. Pigs lie. We should have learned that lesson by now. They don’t care who dies and gets rendered into glue.
In 1945 Orwell intended Napoleon to be a satire of Joseph Stalin in communist Russia. But I truly believe, as we are living on the Animal Farm now as the hard-working farm animals, that he has a bad wig on his head with whippy straw-yellow hair, and a distinctly orange face, with the same little piggy eyes he always had. And he is in power because he tells lies. And what’s worse, he gets away with the lies. As long as the PIGs are in power, controlling both houses of congress and the Supreme Court, he will not lose his lying grip on the farm. We are all doomed to continue being hard-working animals who eventually get rendered into glue.
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Tagged as Animal Farm, George Orwell, GOP, lying, Napoleon, PIGs, Trump