E.B. White is likely best known for the children’s classic, “Charlotte’s Web.” White was inspired to write children’s stories by his niece, Janice Hart White, which is the powerful force behind many a great storyteller.
In 1945, his first children’s story published was “Stuart Little,” which as become an established figure in the compendium of children’s entertainment. “Charlotte’s Web” followed in 1952, a slow and wise story that has consistently maintained a spot in children’s libraries. In 1970, White’s third children’s story, “The Trumpet of the Swan” entered the world. You will find the whimsical story of Louis the mute swan in most libraries, but it does not have the broad appeal of White’s other works.
The story begins slowly and proceeds unexpectedly with bizarre twists and turns. The mute swan acquires a slate and learns to write at school with the help of a boy he meets in the wild, allowing him to communicate with people although he cannot communicate with his fellow swans. His father steals a trumpet in a dramatic act of desperation to give his son a voice, incurring a debt which Louis must repay. Amid all this drama, Louis falls madly in love on a lake in Montana with the beautiful swan, Serena.
Louis’s character development is remarkably dignified, like that of many anthropomorphized animals in children’s stories who teach us about human dignity. He is an honorable swan. Louis, in partnership with the boy he met by the lake as a cygnet, seeks to learn to communicate, to repay the debt his father unwittingly acquired, and to marry the love of his life, Serena.
There is a wonderful deadpan quality to the novel as this absurdly talented swan ventures around the world meeting people, writing on his slate, and playing an ever-expanding repertoire of music on his ill-gotten trumpet. But the character of Louis is not absurd; he is downright admirable.
Take the exchange with the head of the Philadelphia Zoo. In a thrilling twist of fate, Serena has been blown by a gale into the Philadelphia Zoo and reunites with Louis after he flies in for a nightclub gig. The zookeepers conspire to clip Serena’s wing to trap the pair there as a permanent spectacle. Louis thwarts their plan, but it is only a matter of time before they try again. He meets with the head zookeeper, who is worth quoting at length. He tells Louis:
“The Zoo can’t afford to lose a young, beautiful, valuable Trumpeter Swan just because you happened to be in love. Besides, I think you’re making a great mistake. If you and Serena stay here, you’ll be safe. You’ll have no enemies. You’ll have no worries about your children. No fox, no otter, no coyote will ever attack you with intent to kill. You’ll never go hungry. You’ll never get shot. You’ll never die of lead poisoning from eating the shotgun pellets that are on the bottom of all natural lakes and ponds. Your cygnets will be hatched each spring and will live a long life in perfect ease and comfort. What more can a young cob ask?”
“Freedom,” replied Louis on his slate. “Safety is all well and good: I prefer freedom.” With that, he picked up his trumpet and played “Button up your overcoat, when the the wind blows free…”
Isn’t that the trade-off so many of us make? Surrendering freedom for the sake of perceived safety and security. In the abstract, we may scoff at the notion, yet we all know people who willingly give up privacy and liberty for even a thin promise of safety or, worse yet, convenience.
An illustration of this temptation comes in the premise of the 2003 film “Good-bye, Lenin.” Even for someone who hasn’t watched the work, the premise is thought-provoking. A mother, Christiane, committed to the East German communist regime, witnesses her son getting arrested in a counter-government demonstration. The shock precipitates a heart attack, which leaves her in a coma. When she unexpectedly awakes from the coma months later, the Wall has fallen, and East Germany is no more.
Because of her fragile state, doctors warn, any shock could lead to another heart attack, likely fatal. Consequently, Christiane’s son and daughter redecorate the apartment with drab, communist-era furniture and play fake East German broadcasts from a hidden VCR to explain the current state of things (like a Coca-Cola sign on a neighboring building). For many of us, such a premise seems laughable. Who would opt for the deprivations of Communist-era totalitarianism instead of the splendor of free markets? Are we oversimplifying things by pitying Christiane and siding with her children who enjoy the spoils of the Western regime?
Western capitalism is not without its problems, as the Green Left is eager to remind you. Granted, it is distressing to behold the piles of plastic packaging that accompany everything from the purchase of fresh produce to bulky electronics. When one of those electronics malfunction, it seems that the latest factory method of production has so reduced the cost of buying new that there is no viable alternative to pitching the thing in a landfill. You can’t repair it on your own, no one else wants to, no one cares to recycle it, and no one will try to fiddle with it. Not to mention, there’s no clear sense of where the materials to create all this soon-to-be garbage came from. Whose hands crafted these things we so quickly demolish and pitch? What are their lives like? Do our friends on the Green Left have the answer?
Decidedly not. Green Left will rage in radicalism and talk a big game about the evils of capitalism. However, as previously discussed, there are no solutions, only trade-offs. The challenges of capitalism are real and deserve a pragmatic response to mitigate the virtual slave labor, overproduction, consumerism, and waste. That being said, Communism is an unwieldy system of oppression and control that led to the death and starvation (forced or otherwise) of untold millions of men, women, and children.
The Green Left ignores this disturbing reality and romanticizes Christiane’s cowardice. He writes that the nostalgia for the Eastern Bloc is a reasonable response by people who really benefitted from the way things were. He writes about this nostalgic feeling, “Ostalgie”:
It is the memory of Easterners that the old system guaranteed cheap rents, a job, medical care and low crime. With “globalisation” turning most of the planet into an ever more ruthless competition for disappearing jobs, such a past might retain some appeal. Indeed, a Lexis-Nexis search on “East Germany” and “nostalgia” returned 529 articles, many with headlines like “Wealth and freedom? No thanks, we’d rather have a Trabant” (referring to the defunct East German automobile).
There is no denying that living as an adult is a tad more complicated than a simple children’s book, but the principles remain the same. We should not be distracted by the complexity of living in the world and abandon the true principles found so plainly spoken in the story of Louis, the swan.
Having cheap rent and crummy cars at little to no cost is not worth the mind-numbing, spirit-crushing exercise of Communism. The loss of human life owed to Lenin and his successors should never be forgotten or brushed aside in favor of laziness and fear. Remember Louis, the fearless swan. He was not real, but his plight is nonetheless like ours. Do we choose the illusion of control or enter the pursuit of freedom in the arena of reality. As Helen Keller observed:
“Security is mostly a superstition. It does not exist in nature, nor do the children of men as a whole experience it. Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. Life is either a daring adventure, or nothing.”
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