Make America Great Again
Also known as “four legs good, two legs bad.”
I am a recent immigrant of America and I came in the year of election of the current sitting president. The importance of this time exponentially increases due to my exact location. I was a university student in the heart of the south, Tennessee. It was home to country music, good barbecue and most importantly, the confederate flag flying high alongside every American flag outside of each suburban household surrounding the campus. I was in the middle of rural predominantly white America and Trump’s strongest base. I was a black foreign person living in a space that was not mine and I realized that I was living Animal Farm in my daily life.
Animal Farm, written by George Orwell, gives the view of the animals on a farm and in the beginning highlights the hard work and terrible living conditions they undergo while the farmer is “lazing around”. The animals bond together and execute an uprising, thereby removing the apparent user. The changes in the power dynamics and the idea of who is deserving of power comes to the forefront and the way the book illustrates the new oppression resounded deeply in my spirit. I was twelve and my worldview of my country’s class structures and communities that I existed in changed. I was twelve and I could see that words not only carry weight but creates emotion and every day one must actively choose to reject herd mentality that creates more oppression so when I continuously heard the mantra “ Make America Great Again” I instantly remembered Snowball’s intentional reduction of the Seven Commandments of Animalism.
“Four legs good, two legs bad.”
A phrase repeated several times until it was the only thing the sheep remembered from Old Major’s speech on the need for animal unity in the face of human oppression and devolved into the simplicity of its very words. Orwell portrays this repeating example of how the elite class abuses language to control the lower classes. Although the slogan was at surface level helpful at first, enabling them to clarify the essential principles that they were fighting for, it soon becomes a meaningless sound bleated by the sheep (“two legs baa-d”), serving no purpose other than to drown out dissenting opinion. By the end of the novel, the pigs changed the mantra to “ four legs good, two legs better” in so doing, reverting to what the problem was once more. This was my issue with Make America great again. It was reductionist and incendiary and I could not do anything but exist in the farm.
I was boxer the horse, with my head down and since I was not personally affected by the issues African-Americans faced, I continued not noticing the issues with the community I lived in. this was until it directly affected me. The racism and unsheathed hatred that came with this mantra did not affect me within my micro ecosystem of my campus because I was foreign before I was black t those people but I was faced with this reality when I went hiking with my friends. We stopped at a gas station on our way to the hill and I didn’t get out the car along with my Muslim and Spanish friend because as we pulled in a couple of men on a truck stopped washing their cars and went to stand in front the store. My two white female friends went in and got our supplies but the tension for those few minutes was thick with aggression.
“All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others” perfectly describes what I experienced that day. There was a sense of entitlement and superiority laced with the aggression of these men’ actions. The word “equal” becomes a relative term rather than an absolute one, meaning that there can be different degrees of “equal”-ness. The small, almost imperceptible changes within the core ideals of Animal Farm allowed for gradual corruption. The speeches of trump allowed for this seeming uniqueness and self-appointed superiority of these men. This is our reality living in today’s society. History repeats itself but it’s a shame that there will be an animal farm part two.
