A couple years back, political satirist and scholar, A.D. Ultman, envisioned a contemporary take on George Orwell’s iconic _Animal Farm_, and the results read rather astutely for this unprecedented moment of pandemic strife and political tension.
[_Animal Town_](https://www.diangelopublications.com/books/animal-town) was released on January 18, 2021, and tells the story of animals that live in harmony in a democratic, capitalist society. Then, for the first time since any inhabitants can remember, a predator kills a prey. The event starts to trigger a series of political issues that threaten the existence and harmony of _Animal Town_. A series of collapses and calamity ensues.
Ultman holds a B.S. in Psychology and Political Science and an M.A. in Political Science, which surely lends him insight into cognitive science and political theory, and no doubt helped craft this humorous story.
Ultman used animals to create a distance between the reader and the events of the book, trying to find a way to showcase real-world issues like extremism in politics through a fictional lens. The cautionary tale warns readers about the dangers that occur when both political sides turn to extremism. His goal is to show what might happen if society isn’t willing to listen to the other side.
Ultman also spent a number of years working on Capitol Hill, an experience that provided him with unique insight on Washington DC and a view into the minds of prominent politicians and political figures, many of which he based characters around.
_Flaunt_ had the opportunity of speaking to Ultman about the current political climate, his debut novel, and extremism in politics.
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**How long did it take for you to fully finish your project? And did it ever change its course while you were writing, or did you have a pretty clear view that realized itself?**
If you read it, it seems like it was kind of ripped from the headlines. But the idea for the book is really a couple of years old, I first thought of it in early 2018. That's when I sort of first thought that it would be a good idea to satirize politics presently. I knew that it was useful to use animals, as a way of creating a critical distance between the reader and current politics.
People now tend to be so unwilling to hear from the other side, perhaps more than any time in recent memory. I wanted to use the same method as George Orwell in _Animal Farm_ to use animals and hopefully create a little bit of a gap between reality and the perception that sort of allows us to take an allegorical leap in our minds. If we're thinking about animals, that little metaphorical distance can usually be useful. I finished the first draft in late March of 2020. So really, just as the pandemic was starting to affect all of us. From there, it didn't change a whole lot. In fact, one of the crucial events in the book is the death of a prey, a prey animal in the hands of a predator animal. I had predicted that even down to the method of death, before the events of the spring and summer of 2020, which kind of followed a similar tragic event in our own country. So I actually, in a way, foresaw what was coming.
The reason I was able to do that is that we've sort of seen this movie before. When you have ascendant tribalism, based on immutable characteristics or aspects of one's identity, that is not susceptible to the argument, it leads to tragedy time and time again. We've seen this all over the world right up from the reformation, and much further back in time and all the way up to the present. For a person like me, who is really a student of history and political theory, it's all too clear where I think this all ends up. Let's just hope that the third act of my book is not borne out.
**You mentioned using animals as a way to distance the readers from the act. Was there another reason that you decided to go for a more satirical style, especially in modern times, when people are a little less likely to pick up certain things. Was that a way to make it more entertaining?**
That's right. I mean, I hope that through fiction, I could access potentially a wider audience. And also a more diverse audience. The genius of Orwell's work, especially in _Animal Farm_, is that it really reads as a fascinating fairy tale in a way that someone who is younger, say 12 or 13 and early teens can read and be entertained. They may not understand the complexities of the politics that are really being discussed or even be aware that _Animal Farm_ is about the Russian Revolution and that it’s being parodied. But nevertheless, they can draw some interesting conclusions from that text. That's what I sought to achieve, that same effect, by writing a book that, while the prose is approachable to someone young it still contains elements of political theory that professors of political science will recognize and be aware of. Moreover, it's just a bit more powerful to depict dramatic events than it is to write sort of a dry work of political theory. So my hope here is that it can satisfy both academics as well as pleasure reading audiences.
**When talking about the capital riots and everything that's been going on politically, what do you think that's symbolic of in terms of the current sentiment, and the environment revolving around politics? And how does that relate to what you were talking about in your book?**
We've seen in the last year or 12 months, both peaceful protests and really organized violence coming from both ends of the political spectrum. That's something that we really haven't seen on this scale, since probably the Civil Rights era and the Vietnam War era of the 60s and early 70s. I think that's disconcerting to a lot of Americans. I think it's the natural consequence of a politics that rejects both sides, scientific objectivity, as well as meeting in the middle. That is based principally on immutable identities—a person can't choose what their color is or what their sex is, or their sexual orientation, and all these things that we're choosing to focus on so specifically are characteristics that we can't control. What I would hope is that we could return to and help further develop a politics that's based on different policy platforms and different ideas, as opposed to focusing on differences in how we look or who we love. To me, this is a real relic of our sort of tribal past and something that we in the 21st century should be over by now. That's all too clear to someone who's sort of a neutral observer, of what I think it's fair to call: the madness coming from both sides of the political spectrum.
**As a former Capitol Hill staffer, how did that role and your educational experiences aid you in writing the book and thinking critically about all these topics?**
I did work for a senator in 2006, which was during the George W. Bush presidency. That experience was both encouraging, and disheartening. It was encouraging in the sense that I had some small function in helping the government do its work. I was an entry-level staffer at that time, that was my first position out of college. But I worked for a United States senator and I was rubbing elbows with the current president, Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, these people were all senators at that time. I didn't have cause to work directly with them on a regular basis, but we might share a subway car to the Capitol or see each other in the cafeteria. It was really a wonderful experience to be exposed to that level, the corridors of power if you will. It also struck home personally, to see the Capitol really invaded, and to a degree ransacked last month, because that was where I worked. I mean, I was frequently in the Capitol, giving constituent tours or other passing messages or conducting other business. Although obviously, I was not actually on the floor very often. But I certainly observed the goings-on of the floor, on a regular basis. So it was extra concerning to see that space really violated.
Now, I would also say that the disheartening side of it was, I came to see that politics is kind of a dirty business. I grew up in the Great Plains in the Midwest. That was an inspiration for a lot of the characters in the book, they all are native to my home region or home state. Growing up in a place, really the provinces of the country, you kind of are given the impression that our politicians really do care about the little guy or the little girl and that each vote counts equally, and the public good is really what's important and that it's this austere, serious institution. But then when you actually get to the United States Senate, you kind of see behind that facade.
It's really just a bunch of 20-somethings that are doing most of the work for the senators who are controlling the flow of information, who are helping make the decisions in a lot of cases. These people are not necessarily motivated by the spirit of public service, in my opinion. Granted, some of them are. But the overriding view or mentality was I'm going to work on The Hill for a few years in order to make a lot of useful contacts, and then I'm going to go to the private sector, and then lobby on those issues that I used to work for the public on and get paid two or three times as much. It was a very utilitarian approach to governance. That was a disheartening thing to me to see.
Secondly, I also was exposed to the ruling class, for the first time, and this is really concentrated in Washington. It's not just the leaders who are elected, it's the lobbyists, it's the bankers, it's the lawyers, who are, again, getting those meetings with the senators and representatives, and influencing policy. I mean, they have much more access than the average constituent, because frankly, they command dollars and corporate donors. That was another really disheartening thing. I think that was part of the reason for choosing to study political theory because I could see that something we're doing is not working and I wanted to go and study and learn about that. So I pursued a graduate degree in political theory to try and get down to the core of what really a free political society is about, and what are the principles upon which such a society needs to be founded on. I'd like to think I spent about 14 years of my life, both as a student and then you know, in a part-time capacity in my subsequent life, pursuing those questions.
**Was it helpful to be separated from Washington DC and living in other areas when it comes to adding different perspectives to the book?**
Absolutely, I've had the good fortune to live all over the country. I've lived in the Great Plains where I grew up, Florida, California, Washington DC, I'm currently living in Ohio, I've lived in large cities, I've lived in small towns and medium-sized cities as well. But most of my adult life, 10 years was in Washington DC. Once I left, which was I want to say mid-2019, I left ultimately, for good. I had always sort of felt this tension between this urban and rural America, and this provincial cosmopolitan outlook. I think that's one of the major divides in this country that's often masquerading as a racial divide. The underlying causes of this real operative variable often are urban, rural, and sort of the competing mindsets that tend to go along with those geographic settings. So I've been always traveling back and forth between this urban, urban cosmopolitan, and rural sorts of provincial worlds. I sort of feel like I can bridge the gap between them and I can understand where their rural mindset comes from, what it’s based on, and I can understand the urban mindset as well. I feel like that's a gap, that's too seldom bridged, frankly. After having lived in DC for 10 years, really, right in the heart of the city, and just blocks from the White House for many of those years, I could feel myself being inundated with this sort of inside the beltway mindset. It made me a worse person, and it made me less happy, frankly.
Because too much of our politics are both sides telling you what you should be angry about or who the enemy is. There's just so little constructive, actually forward-looking discourse coming from either side of the political divide, and it just makes for miserable living in Washington DC. You can't get away from it, even if you're not in politics. So getting away and getting back to a small college community where I live now, it's kind of just allowed me to have a bit more perspective on why it is that, you know, someone from rural America has such a hard time finding common ground or at least believing that they have common ground with someone from a from an inner-city. When in fact, in my opinion, their economic and political interests overlap almost 100%. So that's really the great sort of tragedy of our politics: the poor rural person feels like he's being set against the poor urban person, when in reality, and vice versa, their interests overlap.
**You mentioned that a lot of your characters were based on your hometown. Would you say that you crafted these characters, thinking of people and ideologies, or did you think of the animals they represent as well and how those are usually seen in mainstream media?**
There's definitely both so the characters, as in the animals and their species, usually have some meaning not always. Sometimes it's just a matter of convenience. But in some cases, you know, one of the characters is a fox and foxes have a reputation of being rather sly and perhaps deceitful. This character is and that's not a coincidence. There's an element of symbolic meaning to the choice of characters. They do represent, not necessarily people from where I grew up, but the species of the animals are from where I grew up. The actual characters are almost all taken from the cultural elites. I mean, some of them are based on bestselling authors, some of them are based on former presidents. The only one I explicitly acknowledged at the end is Martin Luther King Jr. who actually represents one of the characters that plays a similar function in _Animal Town_ as he did in the United States.
I would say both the species and their actions all have symbolic meaning, and the book is full of symbolism. That's the kind of thing that I think will appeal to those more learned readers that can appreciate that. It might initially go over the head of a 12 or 13-year-old, but then I think, hopefully, in the same way, that you can go back and read _Animal Farm_ again and always find something new, it's my hope that those different layers will become apparent, as one reads more about political theory or just becomes a more informed reader.
**With the connection to Animal Farm are there specific comparisons or big differences that you’s like to point out?**
In some ways, I feel like my book is a spiritual successor, if I may use that word, to _Animal Farm_ and not a literal sequel. So I'll spoil a bit of _Animal Farm_, hopefully, that won't offend too many. But _Animal Farm_ begins where animals are sort of just barnyard animals that have a lot of characteristics of animals, but they just can speak and it progresses. At the end, there's this really dramatic climax of the book where the pigs who really represent the communist party of _Animal Farm_ become human in a way that they're not even distinguishable from humans. That's sort of the dramatic climax. So in that story, you have animals going from animal characteristics to being human-like to characterize this sort of greed and totalitarianism in the book.
Whereas my book, we start out with animals that are very human-like, they're already in a civil capital, capitalist, democratic society that's enlightened. It's almost sort of a not too distant, idealized future where speciesism and magical thinking are all but forgotten. Crime is a thing of the past but it's not a utopia, there's still a lot of inequality. That's one of the things that plays a major role in the action of the plot. But they're already quite human-like, and through the action of the various sort of political agitators that are coming from our traditional left and right as they're represented in the book. We have animals that go from human-like civilized beings to quite savage beasts. So in a way, it's taking the narrative arc of _Animal Farm_ full circle, where the animals become like humans, and then they turn into savages again.
**Since this is marketed as a cautionary tale, are there specific things about political extremism that you were hoping to warn the public about or main examples in your book that touch on that?**
Yes, absolutely there are many levels. I mean, one is this conflict between emotional extremism and emotional reasoning versus calm and scientific objectivity—rational, moderate, rational, moderate politics. That’s often when things start to go awry, the characters are overcome with emotions that lead them to do things that they might not otherwise do. There's parallels for this in psychology, which I studied in undergrad, so that's a real theme. There is calm, rational thinking versus emotional hasty thinking if you will. Another is the role of the media, so there's no role of social media per se in my book, but the role that the _Animal Times_, the town newspaper, plays is crucial. You see a publication that really prides itself on objectivity and reasoned analysis, but also sells papers poorly. The tragic incident shifts its focus to more, again, emotionally laden, sort of anecdotal reporting, and the role that it has in sort of charging the two sides against one another is also instructive.
So it's definitely a commentary on the role of the media. It's also a commentary on the urban-rural divide. I mean, in the book, most of the predator species are rural and involved in agriculture, while most of the prey species are urban and involved in industrial labor. Again, that's a clear symbolic overlap to the urban-rural divide in America.
There's one character who's sort of a wealthy weasel, and he really is sort of the man behind the curtain pulling the strings of both sides. That's a clear symbolism for what's going on in America today where the billionaire ownership class donates largely to both political parties, and whoever wins they do as well. Because, you know, both political parties are largely in the pocket of this ownership class ever since 2010 and the Citizens United ruling, especially. So that's one of the major messages is that politicians are really using identity politics to divide and rule.
**When it comes to bias, and political preferences and ideologies, did you find yourself ever having to step back to be more neutral when you were writing?**
Yeah, the point is to stay neutral. I'm not a character in the book, and none of the characters represent my views. I strove to have the narrator come across as more or less hands-off and objective, again, in much the same way that Orwell did. Of course, I have my own political views, frankly, they're moderate. But what I wanted to do with this book is different from what so much of our media is doing, and that includes publications: I wanted to treat our politics in an even-handed way. To me it's obvious that there's this sort of parallel absurdity with the right and left. I mean, they both have their conspiracy theories, they both have their grievances, they both have their sort of narratives that are not subject to discussion. Typically you'll have the right satirizing the left and the left satirizing the right. But rarely have I seen it, or if at all, anyone sort of doing that in an even-handed way saying, ‘Hey, you guys are really doing the same thing here.’ That's what I'm trying to do is sort of play a neutral arbiter that says, ‘Hey, you guys’ magical thinking is directly paralleled by the magical thinking over here; your hatred is parallel by the hatred over here; your rationality is paralleled by that irrationality.’
My message is that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.
**When it comes to the future, would you ever think of diving into something similar? Or would you go a different route? Or is it something that you still think there's a lot left to be said, at least on your part?**
Yeah. Well, I don't know that I have more to write specifically with these characters. Frankly, if you read the book, you'll know why. But I certainly have much more to say and really, this is sort of my debut as an author. Hopefully, and I expect, this is not the last you’ll hear from me. My intention is to continue to write political commentary, both in fiction and nonfiction formats. This is really just a sort of an introduction at a time when I think a book like this is badly needed. My hope is, with a book like this, I can access a wider audience and introduce them to some of the theoretical concepts that are underlying the arguments that are coming from both sides, as well as perhaps some alternatives that we really ought to be considering. So I consider this a debut. I would say, stay tuned, there will be more to come.
I just want to close with something positive. I mean, the book does take a dark turn. That's because I want to be very clear about just how serious the danger is of tribal politics. But that said, I am personally quite optimistic about the future of freedom and democracy in the West, and indeed, the wider world. I'll just cite Steven Pinker on this, who is an author I appreciate. I mean, if you actually look at objective measures of things like literacy, health, wealth, prosperity, political extremism, worldwide, these measures are really largely better than ever before. I mean, that's not to say that there aren't problems. But human beings as a species are actually doing quite well and certainly better than ever. It's a tragedy that we have convinced ourselves nevertheless, that it's all falling to pieces.
That's what I really think is the prop of our crisis of spirit. It's not a physical crisis, the flesh is quite strong, it's the spirit that's unwilling. So I'm hoping that while this is a stark warning, it's also a call to say, let's establish an articulate and more positive political discourse that's based on ideas and not based on you versus me, us versus them.
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