Orwell’s Animal Farm is not a critique of capitalism.

Thoreau’s Walden is not a fraudulent anti-market, pro-Green hack job.

Literary works are open to interpretation.  But not all interpretations are right. Not all interpretations are smart. Some are just betrayals. It’s like economic data. You can interpret the data on, say, international free trade, with a variety of subtle differences and still be right. But you cannot look at it and say, “This argues that free trade causes economic collapse.” That just wrong. That’s just dumb.

My tech friends are liable to exclaim in exasperation, when asked particularly dim questions, “RTFM, people!” (it stands for “Read the gosh-darned manual.” I would just like people to RTFL (Read the gol-danged literature”) before they insist that they have a new and ground-breaking interpretation of it.

Back in 1871, Lewis Carroll expressed his own aggravations with the problem.

‘I don’t know what you mean by “glory”,’ Alice said.

Humpty Dumpty smiled contemptuously. ‘Of course you don’t — till I tell you. I meant “there’s a nice knock-down argument for you!”‘

‘But “glory” doesn’t mean “a nice knock-down argument”,’ Alice objected.

‘When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.’

‘The question is,’ said Alice, ‘whether you can make words mean so many different things.’

‘The question is,’ said Humpty Dumpty, ‘which is to be master — that’s all.’

It has been a week of amateur literary interpretive Humpty-Dumptyism, and I feel like the exhausted mom glaring at the child wearing who is wearing his bowl of spaghetti for a hat as she says “It’s not cute, darling, and it’s not clever. It’s just silly. Now go to your room.”

And while you’re there, RTFM, would you?