An avowed Republican hardliner and Pentecostal Christian during the Bush years, Dylan Nice evolved after encountering George Orwell's "Shooting an Elephant":
The essay was narrative: the story of a British police officer (Orwell) who was hated and jeered by the Burmese locals. One day he learns of an elephant that has gone mad with "must" and broken its chains. The elephant had already destroyed huts and overturned a van. Uncertain of what to do but curious, Orwell sets off with a gun he knows is too small. Accurate information is hard to find; some locals claim the elephant went one way, some say the opposite, some said they hadn’t heard of any elephant. But when Orwell finds a corpse ground into the dirt, things escalate. He sends for a larger gun, a crowd of locals gathers wanting to see a demonstration of power and so Orwell becomes lead player in a piece of theatre. He does not want to shoot the elephant, but he feels the force of the thousands of faces behind him, watching. Orwell grasps in that moment the futility of Britain’s domination in the east.
"When the white man turns tyrant," Orwell writes, "it is his own freedom he destroys."
The elephant is shot through many times but dies slowly and its bones are picked over for meat. This was not my first encounter with truth, but it was my first encounter with this kind of truth. The essay was a twenty minute read, but afterward the eighteen-year-old me was agitated, unnerved, ready to condemn Orwell for not being a braver man. I’d been raised in a culture that believed the world would be much simpler if the elite left quit trying to make it complicated. But here was an essay written by a troop on the ground in a seventy-year old occupation, who acknowledged the systems of control were far too complicated to remain wise, let alone noble.
The Dish 