Just read Jack London's The Call of the Wild again. This book is great on many levels. But in my middle age I seem to enjoy taking these classic books to deeper levels, and perhaps finding some insights into what is going on in our own times.
It's a book written in third person but most decidedly from the dog Buck's point of view. Interestingly, he is more of a person than a dog, the author giving all sorts of human attributes and feelings to him: pride, greed, pity, bravery, loyalty, morality, not that dogs don't possess or tend toward some of these.
A strong, domesticated dog, descended from the wolf, given the circumstances, might degenerate into a wild animal if given the chance in the wilderness of Alaska, no harm done. London himself said The Call of the Wild was a story about a dog devolving. Was he also asking a question about human beings? For a human being, is a call to the wild side of life a good thing or not? Will it cause harm?
There is a quirky movie from 1968 called Wild in the Streets. It is about young people taking over the world according to their hedonistic whims and putting everybody over the stodgy age of 30 in nature camps where they are kept drugged and lethargic. The end of the movie hints at what is going to happen when the hippies in charge start to become tiresome and the 12-year-olds decide to take over.
My mind turns to the developments in Seattle, Washington happening as I write, where a group of disillusioned people have taken over a section of the city and declared it to be an independent nation, at the same time making all sorts of unrealistic and irrational and outrageous demands of the state of Washington. These include releasing all sorts of prisoners from jails,removing historical materials relating to the Civil War, providing free food and sanitary facilities for them, black doctors for black patients, and abolishing the Seattle police department. Such whims based on incomplete information and shallow thinking and ignorance end up doing the very opposite of what may have been sincerely intended. It's Lord of the Flies all over again, an anarchy void of wisdom, leadership, high purpose, ideals, and justice, to name a few principles necessary to civilized society.
Sometimes authors are deeper than we think. And sometimes they stumble on eternal truths that are almost impossible to miss if you care at all about reality and human nature.
