“There are some ideas so wrong that only a very intelligent person could believe in them.”
– – Eric Arthur Blair, better remembered as George Orwell
Looking back from this small summit on the road to ruin, I recall a time in middle school when “1984” was so distant in the future that it was unreal.
Impossible, in fact. Sitting at the desk in English class at Barnum Junior High School, I looked at the trade paperback volume and alternately watched the dust motes dance in the still air that smelled of old wax and disinfectant.
I calculated what it meant in dog years.
By the time the world of Winston Smith- he even had a screen name like the one AOL assigned me years ago: 6079 Smith W- arrived full blown, I would be a grown man in my early thirties. Not dissimilar to Winston himself, I thought, as I plowed through a thoroughly discouraging look at the future.
It was supposed to be a cautionary tale, and what happened to poor 6079 Smith W was really troubling. I don’t like rats, and I am naturally inclined to be suspicious of bossy people who tell me what to do. Thank God we were not subject to learning history from that revisionist jerk Howard Zinn.
I imagine his trash is going to be part of the “Common Core,” the new syllabus the Department of Education is going to jam down the throats of local school boards. Orwell knew that was coming, too:
“Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.”
There were other Orwell books I liked. “Burmese Days” gave me an appreciation for what it was like to be an Imperial apparatchik in south Asia. But “Animal Farm” was much better, and was blown away by the assignment that first revealed to me the subtlety of the writer’s craft. It was something simple- symbolism, I think, or the power of metaphor, but the assignment rolled into my 7th Grade consciousness like a grenade.
Orwell changed not only what I thought, but how I thought about it.
I was listening to the radio in the Panzer yesterday when a Wall Street Journal columnist came on to talk about the deliberate furlough of Air Traffic Controllers at major hub airports that would result in inevitable and irritating travel delays.
Finger pointing for blame was going on, naturally, since everything is about that these days, and the 2014 election cycle, but the guy had a point. The Department of Transportation also is going to go ahead and spend a half billion bucks on something called “sustainable cities,” a really important initiative that could probably wait six months, wouldn’t you think?
But they need to make the taxpayers….pay. So, off we go.
I am opposed to government that does not function, since that is a complete waste of time and money, as opposed to the half measures we are used to. But on the other hand, I do not like to fly any more. I hate the airports and the TSA and the small-minded oppression we are expected to accept without protest.
I can feel our world getting smaller by the day. This morning I was juggling Orwell quotes to try to match the government Doublespeak. One really need go further than the titles- all of them- attached to the omnibus legislative vehicles that no one reads before voting on them. I think probably the most spectacular example is “The Affordable Care Act.”
It is Orwell personified. Black is white and white is black, after all.
But it brought back some syntax analysis I remember from that same 7th Grade year with Mrs. Bigelow. My favorite hard-boiled writer, Raymond Chandler did the analysis this way. His gumshoe Philip Marlowe walks into a pub and sits down at a stool. “The sign behind the bar red: “Only genuine Pre-war Whiskey Served here.” I started to count the lies. I stopped at five.”
Orwell wasn’t that whimsical about what he predicted was coming. When he is busted by the state, the Inner Party interrogator gets 6079 Smith W to accept the principles of doublethink. (“2 + 2 = 5. Sometimes they are five. Sometimes they are three. Sometimes they are all of them at once”).
The latest perversion of the language is the phrase “Common Sense,” which famously called for the independence of the North American Colonies of Britain. They must be calling Thomas Paine Whirling Tom now.
When I hear those words issue from the lips of a politician, I know there is a whopper coming, like when the President stops speaking university English and lapses into the folk-dialect he doesn’t do very well.
The only time you can tell the Inner Party guys are not lying is when their lips are not moving. And then I panic and realize they are fumbling around in my back pocket looking for my wallet.
Copyright 2013 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com