POLITICS, PIGS AND the news

The story of how a fictional pig became a real-life role model David Hayes

My favourite children’s book character, Freddy the Pig, often had his newsy reports about the animals on the Bean farm published in the local paper, The Centerboro Guardian. That is, until the paper was purchased by the imperious, and very rich, Mrs. Humphrey Underdunk, who replaced his friend, the editor Mr. Dimsey, with her no-good nephew, Mr. Garble, and began using the paper to promote her choice to replace the town’s much-liked sheriff and campaign for repressive laws against the local animals.

I can trace the roots of my interest in journalism to what happened next in Freddy and the Bean Home News, the tenth of Walter R. Brooks’ 26 books in the Freddy series, published between 1927 and 1958. In a move familiar to everyone in today’s era of selfpublishing, Freddy, with the help of Mr. Dimsey, launches his own paper, The Bean Home News.

The book was published in 1943, when the U.S. was at war, so it opens with Freddy rallying all the barnyard animals to participate in a scrap metal drive. This will become a lead story in the first issue of his paper.

“He locked himself in the pigpen and pounded his old typewriter for two days, and on the third, he took what he had written in to Centerboro, and he and Mr. Dimsey spent the day setting it up in type and printing it… ‘Extra! Extra!’ shouted Freddy. ‘First issue of The Bean Home News! Get your copies here. Read all about the big scrap iron drive.’ ”

Brooks, who had worked in advertising and as a journalist (he worked for a spell at The New Yorker), loved language. (He also wrote a number of short stories about a talking horse named Ed, which was adapted into the 1960s TV series, Mister Ed.) The dialogue in the series — it’s never remarked upon, just accepted, that animals and humans talk to each other — is playful and often slyly subversive. When Freddy is being pursued by Mr. Garble at a society event for visiting dignitary, Senator Blunder, he hides in the senator’s room and, putting on the man’s long black coat and black hat, sits at his desk.

Opening the door, Mr. Garble says, “’Sorry to bother you, Senator, but have you seen a pig anywhere around?’

“’A pig!’ boomed Freddy. ‘Sir, I am writing a speech which will shake the country. What have I to do with pigs? Go away.’”

Freddy impersonating a politician is funny because Brooks is no fan of politics, as he makes clear in this exchange between Freddy and the farm owner, Mr. Bean. When Mr. Bean first sees The Bean Home News, he says, “’There’s a paper that’s got some sense to it.’

“’What do you mean, Mr. B?’ asked Mrs. Bean.

“’I mean, Mrs. B,’ he replied, ‘there ain’t any politics in it.’ He peered at Freddy over his spectacles. ‘Politics,’ he said, ‘ain’t news. Remember that.’”

But politics is mostly what Freddy and The Bean Home News is about, although I didn’t think of it that way at the time. I identified with Freddy only as a writer, a player with words, and even wrote my own Freddy the Pig stories in a series of looseleaf pages stapled together with a homemade cover. In some vague way, I understood that I aspired to be a writer, not a hockey player or astronaut, like so many of my friends. I’m not even sure whether I understood the distinction between nonfiction and fiction, but the same could be said of our culture today.

Around the time I was in Grades 3 and 4, I’d read all of the Freddy books. Freddy was, in different books, a detective, pilot, explorer, cowboy, banker, football player, baseball coach, magician and politician. (Freddy the Politician is arguably as sharp a satire as Orwell’s Animal Farm, but published six years earlier.) But of them all, I kept returning to Freddy at his typewriter, his trotters pecking out words that would entertain as well as right wrongs.

Since Freddy had taught the farm animals to read, they were quick to subscribe to his paper, but when people in town began subscribing, too, an enraged Mrs. Underdunk and her nephew waged a war against Freddy and his paper. In fact, they printed fake news (that Freddy was a ferocious animal running wild and attacking people)!

In another parallel to today, Mr. Garble was trying to use The Centerboro Guardian to divide the community into pro-animal and anti-animal factions, assuming his base of support would triumph. (Replace animal with immigration and you have an approximation of politics today.) So, Freddy wrote in The Bean Home News that “nobody wanted a man for sheriff that was unkind to animals…”

Maybe another part of Freddy’s appeal to me was that despite being a pig, he was all too human. He could be vain and tormented by self-doubt. He had grandiose fantasies and both overslept and overate. Sometimes he suffered from writer’s block. But he was also loyal, kindhearted and principled. I absorbed the message: he wasn’t exceptional, just the kind of journalist who stands up to the distortions of deceitful and corrupt demagogues.

SO PLEASE, OH PLEASE, WE BEG, WE PRAY, GO THROW YOUR TV SET AWAY. IN ITS PLACE, YOU CAN INSTALL A LOVELY BOOKSHELF ON THE WALL. THEN FILL THE SHELVES WITH LOTS OF BOOKS, IGNORING ALL THE DIRTY LOOKS. — ROALD DAHL, CHARLIE AND THE CHOCOLATE FACTORY