Cry Wolf: A Political Fable

By pure luck, I stumbled into author Paul Lake, the poetry editor of First Things, and then read his novel Cry Wolf: A Political Fable.

Cry Wolf is a 21st-century update on George Orwell’s Animal Farm. Political correctness, upside-down notions of “fairness,” and the prodding of the sophistical Owl (“the Professor”) lead the orderly “Green Pastures Farm” from good intentions to a total breakdown of society and a return to the wild. Any one who inhabits academia, with its identity politics and speech police, will appreciate this fast-paced novel.

But you don’t have to be in higher education to appreciate how Cry Wolf satirizes larger trends in American society. The peddler of iPhones, Steve Jobs, insists that “people don’t read anymore.” For those who do read books, check out Cry Wolf at Amazon or your local bookstore.*

*I do take exception to the Booklist quote that this is an “anti-immigration” fable. As a proponent of open borders, I also believe that free immigration can only work when detached from identity politics that forces itself on others. That is the message of Cry Wolf and quite in line with free immigration advocacy dating back to the 19th century. I’ll let the reader decide. But free immigration with acceptance of others (call it “assimilation”) is the dominant tradition of American classical liberalism. For more on that subject, see my forthcoming Race and Liberty in America: The Essential Reader (University Press of Kentucky and The Independent Institute, Spring 2009).