Peart metynomically depicts the fall of the United States from strident revolutionary glory to economic depression, by reference to song. He quotes first its national anthem, The Star Spangled Banner, then anthemic Great Depression-era hit Brother, Can You Spare A dime.

The unrest and trouble remain vague to this point. This second line shifts focus from the forest, the whole, a harmonious unit to individuals, the trees. What happens when we don’t lose sight of the trees for the forest, reversing the trajectory of the familiar saying. The individuals in this song will in turn be found in two groups, the classes into which society is divided.

The end of oppression should signal the beginning of utopia. Isn’t that what we all want? But utopia is a vexed notion. St. Thomas More, the author, chose the name deliberately as a pun from the Greek. Thus, the aspiration to utopia means that we are both in a good place and in no place. In succeeding, the revolution has failed.

The validation of social position by sentiment is rooted in Romanticism. This 18th century development in European culture was simultaneously nostalgic for lost innocence and a validation of the creative artist. Goethe’s The Sorrows Of Young Werther depicts the tortured soul who ends his life in despair.

Neil Peart’s tragic hero of 2112 fits the same pattern.

In The Trees, as in Romanticism as a whole, the tortured artist is doomed. There is no room for feelings in the geometric order

Revolutionary violence is the final outcome of this dystopic vision, solidified in a totalitarian state. The French Revolution led to the “Reign of Terror”, as the revolution ate its own children.

The Death Of Marat, by J.L. David.

Robespierre’s Committee of Public Safety cut everyone down to size, including Robespierre himself.

It was Napoleon’s cannons which gave France its new and more terrible monarch. The foreshadowings of Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot are evident.

Peart adverts to the notion of equality as an accomplished fact. The pleas and claims of the lesser maples have been satisfied. The word kept tells us that this new order is enforced. Equality is not a natural state. But it seems that Peart’s romanticism, which also has its antecedents in Rousseau is also futile in this new world. Where is there room for the misfit and the dreamer?

The irony of noble law is contained in its futility. The notion of law as arbitrary is attributed to the Positivist jurist Hans Kelsen. No law can change the state of nature. According to Locke the latter is a benign opportunity for human endeavour, whereas for Thomas Hobbes, it is the war of all against all. It is impossible to separate these two strands in the emergence of the modern economy and state from its feudal antecedents. Neither aristocrats nor peasants have any place in the new order.