I’ve been chipping away at a collection of George Orwell’s essays. They’re fascinating, whether he’s dissecting Charles Dickens’ faux-distaste of the gilded class or ruminating on the plight of unskilled laborers in Morocco, or, most vividly, reporting on his experience of shooting an elephant. At present I’m reading “England Your England”, and the following bit of wisdom stood out to me:

England is not the jewelled isle of Shakespeare’s much-quoted passage, nor is it the inferno depicted by Dr. Goebbels. More than either it resembles a family, a rather stuffy Victorian family, with not many black sheep in it but with all its cupboards bursting with skeletons. It has rich relations who have to be kow-towed to and poor relations who are horribly sat upon, and there is a deep conspiracy of silence about the source of the family income. It is a family in which the young are generally thwarted and most of the power is in the hands of irresponsible uncles and bedridden aunts. Still it is a family. It has its private language and its common memories, and at the approach of an enemy it closes its ranks.

Substitute Shakespeare with Mark Twain and Goebbels with, say, Glenn Beck, and I’d say this portrait makes for a pretty accurate assessment of the United States today.