{"id":650455,"date":"2013-04-03T13:41:27","date_gmt":"2013-04-03T17:41:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.ted.com\/?p=74168"},"modified":"2013-04-03T13:48:22","modified_gmt":"2013-04-03T17:48:22","slug":"5-great-stories-with-double-lives-as-allegories","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/650455","title":{"rendered":"5 great stories with double lives as allegories"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Lawrence-Lessig-at-TED2013\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Lawrence Lessig talks about a fundamental corruption at the core of the U.S.’s political system. Photo: James Duncan Davidson<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\u201cOnce upon a time, there was a place called Lesterland,\u201d Lawrence Lessig begins today\u2019s talk<\/a>. \u201cOf its 311 million people, it turns out 144,000 are called Lester,\u201d Lessig says.<\/p>\n

\"LawrenceLawrence Lessig: We the People, and the Republic we must reclaim<\/span><\/a>In Lesterland, this .05% of the population is granted extraordinary power. Each election cycle, there\u2019s a general election, in which the people get to vote, and a Lester election, in which only the Lesters can vote. \u201cIn order to run in the general election, you must do extremely well in the Lester election,\u201d Lessig explains. \u201cSo we have a democracy, no doubt, but it\u2019s dependent upon the Lesters and dependent upon the people. It has a competing dependency\u2014we could say a conflicting dependency\u2014depending on who the Lesters are.\u201d<\/p>\n

The trick: the United States is Lesterland, only instead of the Lester election, we have the \u201cmoney election.\u201d As in Lesterland, to run in the general election, you\u2019ve got to win with the funders first. The \u201crelevant funders\u201d comprise .05% of the population; in fact, Lessig says, just 132 Americans, or .000042% of the country, gave 60% of the latest Super PAC funds. So holding office has become about catering to the funders rather than the general public\u2014and sometimes the funders\u2019 interests run counter to everyone else\u2019s.<\/p>\n

Lesterland, then, provides a piercing allegory for what Lessig describes as our political system\u2019s fundamental corruption.\u00a0\u201cThe corruption I\u2019m talking about is perfectly legal. It\u2019s a corruption relative to the framers\u2019 baseline for this republic,\u201d Lessig says. \u201cIt\u2019s a pathological, democracy-destroying corruption.\u201d<\/p>\n

To hear what we can do to correct this corruption, watch Lessig\u2019s talk<\/a> or read the companion TED Book,\u00a0Lesterland<\/i><\/a>.<\/p>\n

Because we\u2019re so moved by Lessig\u2019s Lesterland analogy, below we\u2019re rounded up more examples of allegories that have described — sometimes brilliantly, sometimes less so — political and societal problems.<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. Whether or not L. Frank Baum intended<\/a> for The Wonderful Wizard of Oz<\/i><\/a> <\/i>to be read as an allegory, it\u2019s been interpreted as one for decades. Henry M. Littlefield wrote<\/a> in 1964, \u201cDorothy is Baum’s Miss Everyman. She is one of us, levelheaded and human, and she has a real problem. For all the attractions of Oz, Dorothy desires only to return to the gray plains and Aunt Em and Uncle Henry \u2026 Dorothy sets out on the Yellow Brick Road wearing the Witch of the East’s magic Silver Shoes. Silver shoes walking on a golden road; henceforth Dorothy becomes the innocent agent of Baum’s ironic view of the Silver issue.\u201d Littlefield continues dissecting the Oz<\/i> storyline for its parallels to late-1800s economics and Populism, writing, \u201cBaum created a children’s story with a symbolic allegory implicit within its story line and characterizations \u2026 The relationship and analogies outlined above are admittedly theoretical, but they are far too consistent to be coincidental.\u201d
    \n.<\/span><\/li>\n
  2. In James Cameron\u2019s 2009 film Avatar<\/i><\/a>, the Na\u2019vi — an alien race — is threatened by invading Earthlings. It\u2019s been analyzed as an allegory for a \u201csurprising\u201d range of situations, as Joshua Keating posted on Foreign Policy<\/a> at the time, from the exploitation of Chinese citizens to the exploitation of an indigenous tribe in India to a justification of Obama\u2019s Nobel Peace Prize.
    \n.<\/span><\/li>\n
  3. The new documentary Room 237<\/i><\/a> argues that Stanley Kubrik\u2019s 1980 film The Shining<\/i><\/a> wasn\u2019t just a horror film, but an intricate and meaning-laden work filled with \u201cimportant and, in some cases, truly dark meanings,\u201d per Bill Wyman on the New Yorker<\/i>\u2019s blog<\/a>. What meanings, exactly? Less clear: as Wyman has it, the supposed allegories involve \u201cthe Holocaust (stemming from Nicholson\u2019s German typewriter), the Apollo Space project, fairy tales, and more and more and more.\u201d
    \n.<\/span><\/li>\n
  4. Perhaps the paradigmatic political allegory is George Orwell\u2019s Animal Farm<\/i><\/a>, which uses, yes, a farm full of animals to depict and critique<\/a> the situation in 1940s Russia. \u201cAnimal Farm<\/i> was the first book in which I tried, with full consciousness of what I was doing, to fuse political purpose and artistic purpose into one whole,\u201d Orwell later wrote<\/a>.
    \n.<\/span><\/li>\n
  5. Fritz Lang\u2019s 1927 film Metropolis<\/i><\/a> depicts a city of \u201csoaring towers of glass and steel\u201d sustained by a working class \u201cfar below, in cellars and catacombs,\u201d as David Edelstein put it<\/a> in Slate <\/i>in 2002. Although the film is sometimes seen as a Marxist appeal, Edelstein argues that it\u2019s much more nuanced than that. \u201cPart of what makes Metropolis<\/em> such a complicated allegory is Lang’s fear of the fascism of the mob,\u201d Edelstein writes. \u201cLang understood why the mob would want to tear the city down. But he also believed that the technology it embodied promised a better life for people of all classes, and that only the innocent would suffer in the course of a revolt.\u201d<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    \"\"<\/a> \"\"<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    Lawrence Lessig talks about a fundamental corruption at the core of the U.S.’s political system. Photo: James Duncan Davidson \u201cOnce upon a time, there was a place called Lesterland,\u201d Lawrence Lessig begins today\u2019s talk. \u201cOf its 311 million people, it turns out 144,000 are called Lester,\u201d Lessig says. Lawrence Lessig: We the People, and the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7342,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-650455","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/650455","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7342"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=650455"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/650455\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=650455"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=650455"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=650455"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}