The Moon Is Down

I’m still stuck in bed, but I felt like reading today.Something non-academic. So I checked my shelves for some fiction I could digestin an afternoon, and I stumbled on a copy of The Moon Is Down, by John Steinbeck. I had no idea what it wasabout, but I love the author, and the work was only eight chapters long.  So I dug in. And what I read astonished me byfitting seamlessly with this week’s discussions about conquering andcolonizing. 

In this story, an invading army takes a small coastal townby force. (i.e., conquers it). Though otherwise inconsequential, the place hasa large coalmine, so the enemy needs it. While Steinbeck never names the invader, clues suggest he has in mindthe Nazis and Hitler (“the Leader”), but the characterization could apply toany army forcing its way in. At any rate, when the invasion takes place, the people are toostunned to put up much resistance. 

The enemy's colonel sets up headquarters in thehome of a democratically elected mayor, a simple and just man. The colonel, well experienced in the ways ofwar, cloaks all his actions under a veil of order and civility, but underneaththat veil, he knows any supplanted people long for freedom and loathe their oppressors.

The more the enemy tries to break the spirit of thetownspeople through arrests and violence, the more united the people become intheir resistance. Eventually the enemy arrests the mayor and his friend thetown doctor in a last-ditch effort to make the people obey. Knowing he is headedto the firing squad, the mayor reminds the doctor of a high school play inwhich he appeared some four decades earlier. The mayor played the part ofSocrates in the Apology. And the speech, which he recites, proves timeless onceagain.