John Reed has published an anti-capitalist parody of George Orwell's classic, Animal Farm. Entitled Snowball's Chance, the book was inspired by the events of 9/11:

Mr. Reed said he was watching the aftermath of the terrorist attacks on television in his East Village apartment on Sept. 11 when the idea came to him to rewrite the Orwell classic. "I thought, `Why would they do this to us?' " he remembered. "The twin towers attack showed us that something is wrong with our system, too."

He decided, he said, that the world had a new form of evil to deal with, and it was not communism. It was the evil, he said, within American corporate capitalism itself, and American arrogance in protecting its interests in the Middle East oil fields. To Mr. Reed, "Animal Farm" was the ultimate expression of pro-capitalist ideology. "It has inoculated generations of schoolchildren against the evils of communism," Mr. Reed said.

Mr. Reed says he is definitely one of those in the anti-Orwell camp. "I really wanted to explode that book," he said of "Animal Farm." "I wanted to completely undermine it."

The Orwell estate is not happy about this:

William Hamilton, the British literary executor of the Orwell estate, objected to the parody in an e-mail message to the James T. Sherry, the publisher of Roof Books, saying, "The contemporary setting can only trivialize the tragedy of Orwell's mid-20th-century vision of totalitarianism."

"The clear references to 9/11 in the apocalyptic ending can only bring Orwell's name into disrepute in the U.S.," Mr. Hamilton wrote.

One hopes that when schools assign this book--and they will--they will at least have students read it alongside Orwell's original. It would be nice if they would assign some Friedrich Hayek, too, but that's probably too much to ask.