Mark G. Malvasi
Cry Wolf: A Political Fable by Paul Lake
(Dallas, TX: Benbella Books, Inc., 2008)

MARK G. MALVASI teaches history at Randolph-Macon College in Ashland, VA. He is completing a study of the Southern novelist Andrew Lytle for the ISI Books.

Few books invite such potential misunderstanding
as Cry Wolf. Paul Lake’s
political allegory, the literary antecedents
of which include Aesop’s Fables, the medieval
bestiaries of Theobaldus and Phillippe
de Thaün, and Orwell’s Animal Farm, contrasts
the domestic animals who reside at
Green Pastures Farm with the wild animals
who inhabit the surrounding forest.
A strict code of law combines with an abiding
religious faith and an enduring respect
for the common good to render the farm
animals temperate, amiable, and civilized.
Freedom and toleration define their communal
life. In the forest, savagery prevails;
the world beyond the fence is divided
between predator and prey and is thus irredeemably
barbarous.

Trouble ensues when the citizens violate
their most hallowed commandment
(“NO TRESPASSING”) and permit an
injured doe to remain on the farm until
well enough to return home. A menagerie
that encompasses every species from raccoons
and possums to beavers and weasels
follows, straining the limited resources and
disrupting the civil order of the farm. The
struggle culminates in a war of all against
all in which survival of the fittest is the only
mandate. Amid the national debate over
immigration, the growing anxiety about
the presence of foreigners in American
society, and the chronic fear of terrorism,
Lake’s meaning could not seem clearer.
Outsiders who do not share the heritage,
culture, and values of the West, and who
cannot or will not assimilate them, constitute
the principal threat to civilized society
and the American way of life.

Would that Lake’s cautionary tale were
that simple! It might, after all, be reassuring
to imagine that Lake has identified the
source of, and the solution to, the most
urgent American social and political problems
of the new millennium, and that by
restricting or eliminating the immigration
of certain peoples, as occurred during
the 1920s, and by expelling other undesirable
aliens, Americans can again make
the United States, if not the world, safe
for democracy. Such a facile analysis, of
course, would also make Cry Wolf easier to
dismiss as a racist invective.

Lake has different intentions and a
more complex purpose. Although occupied
with the challenges of the moment,
he also raises perennial concerns about
the establishment of justice and the maintenance
of order that have troubled every
society, including those that did not aspire
to defend individual freedom and selfgovernment.
To quell the lawlessness and
turmoil that have invariably bred political
chaos and economic ruin, the citizens
of Green Pastures Farm have revived the
old idea of the commonwealth. Exalting
the public weal against the interests of private
individuals or corporate assemblies has
enabled them to avoid political fragmentation,
to keep the peace at home, to secure
their borders, and thereby to protect their
lands from internal and external foes. This
community of shared commitments and
responsibilities links field to pasture and
pigsty to chicken coop. “Many animals,
one farm,” explains Gertrude the goose,
the devout custodian of tradition. “A farm
is made up of many different species. . . .”
she continues:

By nature, each wants to associate
with its kind. It first looks out for its
own individual interest, and then the
interest of its species. But on a farm
we have to look past ourselves. We
have to learn to consider the interest
of others. . . . Individually we each
have our own strengths, but together,
we are something larger and more
powerful. Separately, our survival is
uncertain; as a farm, though, we are
powerful—and one.

Hoof, web, paw, claw,” she concludes,
on level ground, under one law.” By this
fortunate dispensation the animals enjoy
equality before the law and provide for the
common defense without at the same time
encroaching on cherished liberties.

Political stability has also quickened
the economic growth and development of
Green Pastures Farm. Comparatively exempt
from plunder, the animals savor a rich harvest
that keeps them well-fed through the
lean winter months. Yet, “lacking hands,”
they can collect only a small portion of the
fruit from the orchard. The horses pick the
peaches that hang on the lower branches
and shake the rest to the ground for the pigs
to gather. Blackbirds, however, steal with
impunity the cherries that are too high for
the horses to reach. When Rags, a racoon,
intrudes upon the farm, some of the animals,
notably the pigs and horses who love
cherries and can never get their fill, want
to disregard the law against trespassing
and admit him, provided he forswears his
wild nature, embraces their domesticated
ways, and consents to discharge the tasks
that other animals cannot or will not perform.
The debate that takes place in the
Animal Council recapitulates the tensions
that have been at the heart of American
national mythology and consciousness for
more than a century.

One argument insists that the United
States is a “melting pot,” “God’s Crucible”
as the playwright Israel Zangwill described
it in 1908, in which all are welcome, where
the weary and careworn masses can jettison
the past, begin life afresh, and fashion a new
identity. According to this view, America is
a redemptive nation founded on the propositions
that “all men are created equal, that
they are endowed by their Creator with
certain unalienable rights, that among these
are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.”
Although the principles, institutions,
and values that sustain this creed are
distinctly American, they can, given the
proper climate, flourish anywhere and be
taken up by anyone. The assurance that
everyone can become an American, that
everyone can take advantage of the economic
opportunity and political freedom
that America offers as a gift to the world,
now constitutes the official ideology of the
United States government, articulated to
each new citizen:

Americans are united across the generations
by grand and enduring ideals.
The grandest of these ideals is
an unfolding promise that everyone
belongs, that everyone deserves a
chance, and that no insignificant person
was ever born. Our country has
never been united by blood or birth or
soil. We are bound by principles that
move us beyond our backgrounds, lift
us above our interests, and teach us
what it means to be citizens. Every
citizen must uphold these principles.
And every citizen, by embracing these
ideals, makes our country more, not
less, American.1

Alternately, Americans have conceived
of themselves as a homogeneous people
bound together by a common heritage and
a common blood, which uniquely prepared
them to appreciate the benefits of freedom,
progress, and self-government. This doctrine
cast Asians, Africans, and Hispanics,
along with most Southern and Eastern
Europeans, as inferior to those of Anglo-
Saxon ancestry. No amount of education
or discipline could transform such “mongrel
races” into useful and virtuous citizens
of the Republic. They must, as a consequence,
be excluded from the American
polity, or, at the very least, subjugated to
their social, cultural, and natural betters.

Confusion about these two points of
view leads to tragedy at Green Pastures
Farm. Entertaining inconsistent, if not
contradictory, ideas, the citizens do not
know what is best, or even what they really
believe. Doubt about the legitimacy of
their outlook torments those determined
to respect the law, for they have no wish to
be “xenaphobic breedists” intent on withholding
equal rights from minorities.2 The
Professor, a barn owl sinister in his ambition
and cunning, manages to persuade
many of his compatriots that “the distinction
between tame and wild is an illusory
construct.” More sophistical than wise,
the owl ridicules the traditions, customs,
and practices of the farm as discriminatory
and unjust, substituting in their place
such abstract doctrines as “Biodiversity” and
“Many-Animalism,” the great principles
of nature that will set the world aright.
“Biodiversity,” the Professor intones, “is
the idea that the more various forms of
life there are in a given environment, the
better the chances are that all will thrive
and be happily interdependent.” Similarly,
“Many-Animalism” implies an appreciation
of differences without also succumbing
to the temptation to presume that one
species is in any way superior to another.
The owl teaches, as one of his students
recounts in the annual commemorative
pageant, that “Green Pastures Farm is not
built on laws and customs, but on the idea
that housecat and cougar, grizzly and billy
goat, heron and hen are all brothers and
sisters beneath their skin and feathers.”

Lake, though, is careful not to equate
the sort of racial nationalism that the Professor
decries with racial purity. The farm,
Lake shows, was long home to a diverse
population before the immigrants arrived.
Tameness is thus not a racial inheritance
or characteristic; it is, on the contrary, “a
spiritual achievement” that requires many
generations to complete and perfect. Differences
among the animals prove complementary,
as they achieve inclusion and
forge unity through their struggles to cultivate,
defend, and preserve the land they
have come to love.

Is, then, the welfare of Green Pastures
Farm predicated on the exclusion of certain
species, or can the animals survive by
implementing a more flexible and expansive
immigration policy? By turns reluctant
and impatient to embrace newcomers,
Americans in the twentieth century fol
lowed no uniform course of action. The
Johnson Act of 1921 and the Johnson-Reed
(National Origins) Act of 1924, passed in
the wake of World War I and the first Red
Scare, established quotas that favored “Nordics”
over “Mediterraneans,” excluded the
Japanese, and virtually eliminated immigration
from anywhere save Northern and
Western Europe.3 At the height of the Cold
War, European political radicals also faced
intolerance and persecution, although such
treatment was not reserved for the foreignborn.
Simultaneously, members of some
ostracized groups, such as the Irish, Poles,
Italians, Slavs, Jews, and others, hitherto
disqualified from complete participation in
American life, gradually won acceptance.

Can the farm be similarly accommodating?
If, at times, Lake suggests not, if
in his effort to caricature diversity, multiculturalism,
and other liberal nostrums,
he occasionally goes too far in positing
an unbridgeable divide between the animals
of the forest and the animals of the
farm, his critique is not innately racial.
It is, rather, political. More specifically,
it is Aristotelian, inasmuch as Lake, like
Aristotle, contends that virtue derives
from instruction, habit, and experience.
“None of the moral virtues is engendered
in us by nature,” Aristotle declares, “since
nothing that is what it is by nature can
be made to behave differently by habituation.”
4 The fate of Green Pastures Farm
rests not on the defective genetic makeup
of the immigrants but instead on bad
political judgment.

In the end, expediency triumphs over
law, and the animals decide to welcome
Rags the raccoon, his family, and other
immigrants not primarily from a sense of
magnanimity or justice, but because of the
chores they can execute, from picking fruit
to milking cows. They soon come to regret
their decision. The venerable cow Eudora
implores her fellows “to remember how
clear and simple their lives used to be before
the wild animals arrived. . . . We used to
do these jobs ourselves,” she reminds them.

Maybe we didn’t pick every apple
or pear, but we never starved. Hard
work builds character, it gives us
pride in who we are. In performing
our daily tasks, we learn to trust and
depend upon each other–because our
own success depends on our service
to the farm. Turning our jobs over to
others might seem like a bargain at
first, but it makes us weak.

At the urging of the Professor, the initial
acceptance of, and even homage to, difference
that the animals exhibit soon passes
into a denunciation of the farm as hopelessly
breedist and oppressive. The deluge
follows in which, just as Eudora predicted,
the domesticated animals lose control of
their beloved community, and many also
forfeit their lives.

A destructive “hard” Many-Animalism
that pronounces the farm beyond salvation
replaces the more conciliatory “soft”
Many-Animalism that valued the cohesion
of the farm in all its variety.5 However
well-intentioned, all programs of assimilation,
the Professor submits, “are informed
and upheld by violence.” The Constitution
is a “mask to hide . . . privileged status. Its
purpose is to uphold the binary division of
animals into wild and tame; to privilege
the ideology of tameness to the exclusion
of other equally valid perspectives. . . . It
also fails to take into consideration historic
injustices.” Dogmatic and coercive,
the traditional order of the farm inhibits
the aspirations of immigrants and must,
therefore, be condemned and discarded.

The Professor assumes that, in its truth,
purity, strength, and resilience, immigrant
culture will inaugurate a revolution that
abolishes exploitation and transforms the
farm into a model of social justice. Lake
writes:

In their two weeks under the owl’s
tutelage, the farm animals . . . learned
that their system of government—
and indeed their entire way of life—
was an insult to nature and reason.
Defending their former customs and
habits was also considered offensive
since it demonstrated a continued
desire to dominate and exclude.
Progressive opinion on the farm
now held that the status quo was
unacceptable. Radical changes were
needed to make the farm more suitable
to its rapidly growing population
of f orest-born citizens. . . . [These]
sweeping changes were necessary to
ensure justice and make them feel
more comfortable.

To expose as fraudulent the pretense to freedom
and to contest the lingering breedism
that infects Green Pastures Farm, the
Professor revises the school curriculum
to include “required courses on Many-
Animalism,” such as “Raccoon Studies,”
so that all breeds can “celebrate their
own . . . special qualities and contributions
to the farm.” He also eliminates mandatory
attendance at chapel for students and orders
the crèche used in the Winter Festival
held to worship the Spirit-Shepherd permanently
removed to the basement of the
barn. Such initiatives are designed to curtail
or eradicate the impulse to venerate the
myths and history of the farm and to replace
them with narratives of minority anguish,
oppression, perseverance, and success.

With “whole phyla of resentments every
day” giving “status to the wild men of the
world,” the owl also incites a politics of
envy.6 The partisan mistreatment and economic
adversity that the “forest-born precitizens,”
as the wild animals must now be
called, have suffered in an unfair and corrupt
system justifies their devising a furtive
government and a subterranean economy.
Resorting to violence and crime as political
weapons, they foster an atmosphere of
intimidation and mayhem throughout the
farm, which the natives deem an affront to
civility. Such organizations as the Breed,
the Marsupial Militia, and the Canine
Brotherhood constitute a strident and
uncompromising criminal element that is
less-than-animal, immune to correction
and enlightenment, and unfit for inclusion
in the society of dog and horse, cow and
pig, duck and chicken. Robbery, assault,
blackmail, and murder follow, as the oncetranquil
community of Green Pastures
Farm spirals toward destruction.

The finale is apocalyptic. An abortive
uprising leaves the tame animals dead,
locked in mortal combat, or fleeing for their
lives. Civilization as they have known it is
finished. Recovery is impossible. Unfolding
from events with a dramatic but inexorable
logic, Lake’s conclusion to the saga
of Green Pastures Farm is extravagantly
pessimistic, a shortcoming that torments
many conservatives. Although he is eager
to sound the tocsin of impending crisis,
Lake’s sense of inevitable defeat mutes his
call to arms. By the end, any gestures of
defiance and restoration seem impossible
and pointless. They have come too late.
Charlemagne will not arrive in time, if,
indeed, he has even heard the summons.
All is lost.

Lake’s vision of the American future is
conceivable, and may yet prove accurate,
but it is also unlikely. Two more realistic
possibilities, short of an American Götterdämmerung,
are the resurgence of a truculent
bigotry or the decline of national
cohesion. Neither prospect bodes well for
the fate of the United States. The first reaffirms the opinion that some peoples are
unworthy of inclusion in American life;
the second endorses the primacy of racial,
ethnic, religious, local, or cosmopolitan
allegiances at the expense of national identity.
For those yearning to preserve a nation
that is both powerful and benevolent, such
disagreeable alternatives only heighten the
responsibility to acknowledge the historic
complications that encumber the American
tradition.

In Cry Wolf, Lake has undertaken that
demanding assignment, tacitly posing
the momentous questions that will, or
that ought to, determine the nature and
quality of American life in the twentyfirst century. He wonders aloud whether
American civilization is any longer distinct
not from that of the Old but from
that of the Third World, and whether the
American people retain the vigor and the
competence to preserve their birthright.
Despite his suggestion that they do not,
that the case is already terminal, the questions
remain open. “What eye can pierce
the depths in which the character and fate
of nations are determined?” asks Jacob
Burckhardt. “For the people that seems to
be most sick the cure may be at hand; and
one that appears to be healthy may bear
within it the ripening germs of death,
which the hour of danger will bring forth
from their hiding-place.”7 Vital to the
fitness and longevity of men and nations
are the judgment to discern the presence
of illness before the symptoms become
acute and the will to effect a cure before
the affliction turns deadly.

NOTES

  1. Quoted from the form letter, written over the
    signature of George W. Bush, presented to all naturalized
    citizens. I wish to thank David Jun Yong,
    a recent graduate of Randolph-Macon College
    who also recently became a citizen of the United
    States, for providing me with a copy.

  2. Xena is
    the name the Professor gives to the injured doe.
    He tells the other animals that the name means
    “Guest.” Later when the Professor denounces
    the animals’ supposed xenophobia, they confuse
    the word with “the name of their old friend, the
    doe” to whom no one wished to seem inhospitable.
    Hence, the term “xenaphobia” enters their
    language. See Cry Wolf, 21–22, 39.

  3. The Chinese
    Exclusion Act of 1882 had already prohibited
    Chinese immigration. The National Origins Act
    did not apply to the peoples of the Western Hemisphere.

  4. Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics, trans. J.
    A. K. Thompson (New York: Penguin Books,
    1978), 91.

  5. For the distinction between “hard”
    and “soft” multiculturalism, see Gordon Wood,
    “The Losable Past,” The New Republic (November
    7, 1994), 48–49.

  6. W. H. Auden, “Canzone,” Collected
    Poems, ed. Edward Mendelson (New York:
    Vintage International, 1991), 256.

  7. Jacob Burckhardt,
    The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy
    (New York: Modern Library, 1954), 319.