Hello and welcome to the political orphanage. I'm your host Andrew Heaton. Let's get thanky.

Chances are, when you were in high school you either read

or at least pretended to read Lord of the Flies.

In that Nobel Prize winning novel by William Golding, a group of British schoolboys are stranded on a Pacific Island.

When they realize no one is coming to the rescue,

they decide to build a village and govern themselves.

They nominate a level-headed kid named Ralph

to be their leader and decide that anyone who holds the conch-shell

will command the attentive silence of their democratic community.

And then promptly start to kill each other.

The children establish an overweight kid to be the butt of their jokes who they call Peggy,

and they increasingly become paranoid of a supposed beast who haunts the island,

to the point of letting their signal fire go out even as a ship passes with an eyesight,

because they're out beast hunting. A nascent alpha male named Jack forms his own competing tribe

which rapidly descends into barbarism.

They kill one child, capture two more and torture them, then paint their own faces and dance

naked before a rotting pig's head they've hung on a spear as an offering to the beast. Jack and his followers decide that the

conk is not the real source of power on the island, but Piggy's glasses used to light

fires. So they raid the other tribe and steal the spectacles. When Ralph and half-blind Peggy confront them,

Piggy holds the conch aloft to address his peers to exhort them, to remain sane and civilized.

And Jack hurls a boulder down at him, killing Piggy, and shattering the conk.

Ralph flees into the jungle as Jack and the savages hunt him, every intention of parading

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