Words that carry me back to a deserted island
where a group of schoolboys tried to survive
as a civilized community without adult supervision
were the words the bully in the bully pulpit used
to silence a female reporter who asked a question
about the release of the Jeffrey Epstein files.
Right out of Golding’s novel, this country’s leader
is our Jack Merridew, a boy who relishes a life of
no rules, uncouth rhetoric and violence. His passion
centers on killing a pig. To accomplish this, he dons
a mask of savagery and attacking anyone who gets
in his way. Far from being a responsible leader,
Like our bully, Jack’s id controls his behavior.
In seeking his prey, whether a pig or Piggy, the
group’s intellectual, he lets the signal fire go out.
The boys’ main chance of being rescued no longer
important to Jack’s purpose of creating chaos.
In the novel’s climactic scene after Jack steals Piggy’s
glasses, a symbol of his ability to ‘see’ the downfall of
this civilized and democratic microcosm of society,
Piggy leads the last boys to Castle Rock, the setting
of Jack’s fort, in order to retrieve his glasses.
At that point, Piggy utters the book’s central questions:
“What are we civilized or savages? Which is better---
to have rules and agree or to hunt and kill?” With
the launching of a huge boulder from the mountaintop,
Piggy’s fate is doomed. All hope for democracy is lost.
Piggy’s question, like that of the reporter’s, followed by
the bully’s misogynistic, curt reply echoes Golding’s.
“Quiet, Piggy,” poses the same question about Amerika
as her shining light dims to a flicker. Sadly, in these times,
a country being hi-jacked, held hostage by fear, offers silence.
Ron Shapiro, an award-winning teacher, has published over 20 poems in publications including Nova Bards 24 & 25, Virginia Writers Project, The New Verse News, Poetry X Hunger, Minute Musings, Backchannels, Gezer Kibbutz Gallery, All Your Poems, Paper Cranes Literary Magazine, Zest of the Lemon and twochapbooks: Sacred Spaces, Wonderings and Understory, a collection of nature poetry.
