Hello, all!
You'd think that with all this sequestering and changes to school and whatnot, I'd be more active as a blogger. Strangely enough, the disruption in ordinary life has been such that I've felt less productive as opposed to more. I'm hoping to reverse that trend, as it sure seems like we're going to be doing this for a while. So here are some random thoughts as we enter this new world.
I've been thinking about Orwell a lot lately, partially because I've been assembling readings for my AP students and he pops up a lot on AP lists, but mainly because I'm remembering what happened in his most famous piece of writing, 1984. (He was originally going to title it The Last Man in Europe, but he changed his mind. Why that year? Not because he was making any kind of prediction--as we know, he was really commenting on his world as it was. He simply exaggerated. So why that year? Well, though the novel was published in 1949, he did the writing of it in 1948. He merely switched the last two digits of the year. Neat, huh?) In that novel, the protagonist Winston Smith is a minor functionary at the Ministry of Truth, which is in charge of disseminating propaganda to the public of Oceania. His job is to alter newspaper records so that the past utterances of the leader, a figure known only as Big Brother, line up with the reality of the present. For example, if Big Brother predicted on Monday that there would be an increase in the chocolate ration, and then on Tuesday there was a reduction, Smith would have to change the facts of the past so that Big Brother is and was never wrong. He'd go back and change what Big Brother was recorded as saying on Monday so that Tuesday's reality lined up with Monday's prediction.
Why does this resonate?
Well, we've been living in the world of 1984 for some time now, having duplicated many of the novel's plot points and ideas. This is a new level of deception--not just lying about the way things are or what's happening in the present, but lying about what the past even was. What strikes me, though--and this is the terrifying part--is that in the world of 1984, Winston Smith knows that what he is doing is deception. He resists it (not particularly well or particularly heroically, since he's just some dude who has been ground down by the Man) and has to be tortured with drugs and strange devices and eventually a face-cage full of hungry rats before he breaks and accepts Big Brother. (Spoiler alert: "he loved Big Brother" are the final four words). It's the complete and utter domination of a person by a totalitarian government, and it is awful and tragic in a way few books can ever hope to be.
But...and this is the point...Winston Smith resists. Oh, sure--he can't fight the State torturer (whose name, incidentally, is O'Brien) nor the combined power of the State for that matter, and he loses everything. He loses his humanity, his love for Julia, everything. He loses in every way possible. But he had to be broken. And that's what terrifies me about what's happening today.
Our leader, Donald Trump, is attempting even now to rewrite history and his own remarks about the beginning of the pandemic. Aided by his own Ministry of Truth (Fox News and other affiliated outlets) he is blithely changing what he once said and believed so that he was never wrong. He always saw the Coronavirus was serious. He called it a pandemic before anyone else did. Oceania has always been at war with Eurasia. So in that, we're duplicating the storyline of Orwell's classic.
But we're going along with it! The number of people who are simply accepting these claims, these falsehoods, these lies is staggering. Orwell predicted the power of a totalitarian government could and would be able to break anyone, given enough time and enough brutality. But even Orwell, as bleak as he was, did not predict that we would go along with our own brainwashing. Winston Smith was destroyed, but he went down fighting. We are willingly screaming "do it to Julia!" before O'Brien has even begun his work.
That is what scares me. Not losing the fight to a totalitarian regime ("who controls the past controls the present") but not even fighting at all. The State doesn't need Room 101 if we're going to surrender before the fight has even been joined.
Truth matters. Reality matters.
Fight for them.
Be seeing you!
You'd think that with all this sequestering and changes to school and whatnot, I'd be more active as a blogger. Strangely enough, the disruption in ordinary life has been such that I've felt less productive as opposed to more. I'm hoping to reverse that trend, as it sure seems like we're going to be doing this for a while. So here are some random thoughts as we enter this new world.
I've been thinking about Orwell a lot lately, partially because I've been assembling readings for my AP students and he pops up a lot on AP lists, but mainly because I'm remembering what happened in his most famous piece of writing, 1984. (He was originally going to title it The Last Man in Europe, but he changed his mind. Why that year? Not because he was making any kind of prediction--as we know, he was really commenting on his world as it was. He simply exaggerated. So why that year? Well, though the novel was published in 1949, he did the writing of it in 1948. He merely switched the last two digits of the year. Neat, huh?) In that novel, the protagonist Winston Smith is a minor functionary at the Ministry of Truth, which is in charge of disseminating propaganda to the public of Oceania. His job is to alter newspaper records so that the past utterances of the leader, a figure known only as Big Brother, line up with the reality of the present. For example, if Big Brother predicted on Monday that there would be an increase in the chocolate ration, and then on Tuesday there was a reduction, Smith would have to change the facts of the past so that Big Brother is and was never wrong. He'd go back and change what Big Brother was recorded as saying on Monday so that Tuesday's reality lined up with Monday's prediction.
Why does this resonate?
Well, we've been living in the world of 1984 for some time now, having duplicated many of the novel's plot points and ideas. This is a new level of deception--not just lying about the way things are or what's happening in the present, but lying about what the past even was. What strikes me, though--and this is the terrifying part--is that in the world of 1984, Winston Smith knows that what he is doing is deception. He resists it (not particularly well or particularly heroically, since he's just some dude who has been ground down by the Man) and has to be tortured with drugs and strange devices and eventually a face-cage full of hungry rats before he breaks and accepts Big Brother. (Spoiler alert: "he loved Big Brother" are the final four words). It's the complete and utter domination of a person by a totalitarian government, and it is awful and tragic in a way few books can ever hope to be.
But...and this is the point...Winston Smith resists. Oh, sure--he can't fight the State torturer (whose name, incidentally, is O'Brien) nor the combined power of the State for that matter, and he loses everything. He loses his humanity, his love for Julia, everything. He loses in every way possible. But he had to be broken. And that's what terrifies me about what's happening today.
Our leader, Donald Trump, is attempting even now to rewrite history and his own remarks about the beginning of the pandemic. Aided by his own Ministry of Truth (Fox News and other affiliated outlets) he is blithely changing what he once said and believed so that he was never wrong. He always saw the Coronavirus was serious. He called it a pandemic before anyone else did. Oceania has always been at war with Eurasia. So in that, we're duplicating the storyline of Orwell's classic.
But we're going along with it! The number of people who are simply accepting these claims, these falsehoods, these lies is staggering. Orwell predicted the power of a totalitarian government could and would be able to break anyone, given enough time and enough brutality. But even Orwell, as bleak as he was, did not predict that we would go along with our own brainwashing. Winston Smith was destroyed, but he went down fighting. We are willingly screaming "do it to Julia!" before O'Brien has even begun his work.
That is what scares me. Not losing the fight to a totalitarian regime ("who controls the past controls the present") but not even fighting at all. The State doesn't need Room 101 if we're going to surrender before the fight has even been joined.
Truth matters. Reality matters.
Fight for them.
Be seeing you!
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