Here Comes the Chopper to Chop Off Your Head (1984 Pt. 2 Ch. 11 - End)

It really shouldn't be surprising to me as much as it is, but not since Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged has a book affected me as much as 1984.  It has shone a light, been the comforting "You're not alone" message in a bottle that has washed up on my shore, has shown me pitfalls to avoid and defenses to set within my mind and personal philosophies.  I do feel like a better person for having read it or, at least, a better prepared member of an intelligent species anyway.

There are plenty of political parties, institutions both religious and secular, even work environments where people simply want to grasp power for power's sake, and that is by far the most insidious motivation.  They will lie, cheat, steal, brainwash, and then look at you like you are the crazy one for finding fault in them.  There are far more people who ask us regularly to deny the truth of our senses.  Our society currently is taken up in a swell of moral/philosophical/ethical/religious relativity.  The facts, we are told, do no matter.  "Madame, kindly do not confuse the issue with facts" used to be a joke line and now it's practically a protest march chant.  We've been told by our superiors in Washington D.C. that we have to vote on a bill first and then we can find out what is in it...and nobody acts like that is madness.  "There is nothing good or bad except that thinking make it so," was a line from Shakespeare and our generation turned it into "There is nothing right or wrong...".  Gender is no longer considered a fact of birth.  It's what you "feel" that is more important than facts, these days.  The sea level hasn't risen to predicted levels, but we're still right on track for the environmental flambe...until we're headed for another Ice Age (as was recently decided by top scientists).

The scariest, darkest part of the entire novel was this last quarter.  Winston is captured and psychologically dismantled piece by piece until he gave in at the end and found his heart full of nothing but love for Big Brother.  "We shall squeeze you empty and then we shall fill you with ourselves..." was the quote that filled me full of fear.  I've spent a good portion of my life looking at the world and desperately trying to find consistency.  I'm attracted to consistency.  You say what you believe and what you are going to do and then you do it and you'll have my vote fairly easily.  I've felt crazier in this past six or so years than I ever have before and, like Winston, I've come to the conclusion that I'm not insane.  The media tends to do just that, scoop you out and put themselves back in.

"Water will wet us and fire will burn," is practically a mantra between my wife and I these days.  It comes from Rudyard Kipling's "The Gods of Copy Book Headings" which is a poem about what happens when we deny universal truths for too long.  When we pretend to be masters over reality we eventually get our comeuppance.  When we print trillions of dollars and give out sub prime loans eventually the piper must be paid.  "...we often find it convenient to assume that the earth goes round the sun..." O'brien declares while torturing Winston into realigning his beliefs with the Party which include their fact that 2 + 2 = 5.  We find it convenient...sometimes when we need it to 2 + 2 = 4...That mentality has always filled me with nothing but contempt for whoever has expressed it.  It is the most selfish of phrases.  I once admired a girl for being a pretty rational feminist.  She seemed to walk the talk, which is always big in my book, and then she was talking about how she'd go to the bars, dress in something tight and revealing so that guys would buy her drinks.  She boasted that she hasn't paid for a drink since her 21st birthday...and she immediately lost my respect.  Why?  Because she was not a person of principle.  What we shout from the roof tops had better be how we live in the day to day or it's little better than a full on lie.

I've had this discussion so many times before where someone expresses a supposedly deeply held principle that doesn't carry over into other areas of their life.  I'll say, "OK, so you believe and declare this, but what about over here where you violate that principle."  I get the most dumbfounded looks where they say, "Uh, that's not what I'm talking about, dude."  The most notorious example of this in my life has been with people who believe, and generally say in an airy fairy hippy manner, "All life is sacred and so precious, ya know?" This usually is said after explaining why they are against war or for veganism.  I reply, "Ok.  So are you for the death penalty" "Well, yeah, of course." "Abortion?" "I think that the supreme court has ruled quite clearly on Abortion, thank you.  I don't understand why you're bringing those things up.  I'm talking about how sacred life is."  Doublethink is not a far off fantasy of dystopian science fiction.  We've already trained ourselves to have principles and opinions that are limited to a specific issue in a specific portion of our brain and neither the twain shall meet.

It's not about having the courage of our convictions anymore...I'd be happy with just the consistency of our convictions.

Orwell cautions us to reject sensationalism, to reject those who would say that facts are subject to our whim, to embrace principal, and to know without a doubt that any Party is a fox in a henhouse...but it is so difficult.  We have forever been slipping toward 1984 and we will be forever slipping until it actually arrives.

"If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a face - forever."

For the past few months this has been a haunting image.  It's one of the most famous lines from the novel so I knew that it was coming, but it has never seemed more appropriate or more potent.  Find a cause, give them someone to hate, whip them into an emotional frenzy, reject logic and they will press that boot into flesh every single time.  The mob...no one on either side is immune.  Our own parties are replete with this rhetoric.  Republicans hate the poor and want to starve your grandmother while carpet bombing the third world.  Democrats just want to bankrupt the country financially and morally...gay pride parades every day while they tear down the churches.  They each make you demonize the other side and call one another out on the demonization.  Why?  Because it's an election year and you need to feel afraid or you won't vote and they won't win.

I know I've been rambling and all over the place...try talking to me about it and it will be 20 times more so.  I have but one more point to cover and then I will place some of the most meaningful quotes from this chapter as a closing on this amazing, provocative, and most enduring of novels.

After Julia and Winston are released from torture and re-education they see each other again.  It should be hopeful.  Love should conquer all...but this isn't that kind of story.  There is an intensity to the moment as they admit to each other that they had betrayed one another.  Their love was broken by what they said and did under interrogation.  For a moment Winston is determined to begin again.  He walks with her side by side to the tube station, through the crowd.  And then he stops.  He lets her go.  She disappears and they never see each other again.  It is so fraught with things unspoken, deep wells of feeling dampened by the horrors of the society that they live in.  I so want to see that moment done well on screen.  In my head it is so intense, and it reaches so many because, as I've said about every novel so far, it is real life.  We are all broken people in search of healing and society will lean on, put pressure on every hairline crack to make us bend to its will.  It will destroy love with hate every time that it can.  "The ends justify the means" it is often said and I defy that with every breath.  "The means condemn the ends".  It is such a basic thing that we forget because we want to, because it is easier to live without principle...and the Party and Big Brother are just waiting for us to compromise.  The only way 1984 can come to pass is in a world where the good compromise, where those able to stand just beg it all to happen to someone else when the pain comes.

"...the aim of this (the torture/re-education) was simply to humiliate him and destroy his power of arguing and reasoning."

"...in the eyes of the Party there was no distinction between the thought and the deed."

"You believe that reality is something objective, external, existing in its own right.  You also believe that the nature of reality is self-evident...Reality exists in the human mind, and nowhere else...only in the mind of the Party, which is collective and immortal.  Whatever the Party holds to be truth is truth.  It is impossible to see reality except by looking through the eyes of the Party."

"The Party is not interested in the overt act: the thought is all we care about.  We do not merely destroy our enemies; we change them."

"The command of the old despotisms was 'Thou shalt not.'  The command of the totalitarians was 'Thou shalt.'  Our command is 'Thou art.'"

"The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake.  We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power."

"We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it.  Power is not a means; it is an end.  One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish a dictatorship." (This quote should make activists run scared...but it never will.  We'd like to believe all humanity is good at its core...it is selfserving to its core and always has been.)

"How does one man assert his power over another...By making him suffer.  Obedience is not enough.  Unless he is suffering, how can you be sure that he is obeying your will and not his own?  Power is in inflicting pain and humiliation.  Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing."

"The old civilizations claimed that they were founded on love and justice.  Ours is founded upon hatred.  In our world there will be no emotions except fear, rage, triumph, and self-abasement...all competing pleasures will be destroyed."

"It will be a world of terror as much as a world of triumph.  The more the Party is powerful, the less it will be tolerant; the weaker the opposition the tighter the despotism...Always we shall have the heretic here at our mercy, screaming with pain, broken up, contemptible - and in the end utterly penitent, saved from himself, crawling to our feet of his own accord." (This is what scares me about the current thinking that to disagree is to hate, to dissent is to be a bigot.  They don't just agree to disagree, many in this world destroy the lives of those who dare to disagree.)

Love in the Time of Darkness (1984 Pt 1 Ch 8- Pt 2 Ch 5)

(In which Winston finds love...or at least sex...or at worst sex and someone who makes him feel differently than he normally does)

This next section of the novel begins with more detail in regard to the society's "values", as they may be loosely termed.

Leftover from previous chapters:  I still find the differences between the two castes to be fascinating.  The Party is kept under strict rules at all times.  The Proles are given few, if any, rules as long as they maintain their patriotism.  The Party is given exclusive rights to the possession and consumption of alcohol which is manufactured by Big Brother.  The Proles are given exclusive rights to possession and consumption of pornography which is manufactured by big brother.  I suppose that both are made to keep each caste compliant.  That alcohol "cheers" the members of the Party so they don't feel as closed in and oppressed, I suppose.  The pornography, I guess, keeps the Proles titillated and encourages breeding which creates more workers.

Chapter eight begins with the information that the Party is pretty much required to be engaging in communal activities when not working, eating or sleeping.  "Enforced" community participation is ultimately another way to figure out who is loyal and who is not.

"...to do anything that suggested a taste for solitude, even to go for a walk by yourself, was always slightly dangerous.  There was a word for it in Newspeak: ownlife, it was called, meaning individualism and eccentricity."

Ownlife would generally bring out the Thought Police after you...as would walking home by a different route.

Another way the Proles were pacified was by the institution of "The Lottery", which is rather identical to our own lottery systems.  In the world of Big Brother the prizes were imaginary, but kept the potentially unruly Proles happy by thinking of how one day they'd be living the good life.  Sounds very familiar.  Not that I'm saying the Lotteries in our world are imaginary, but I do wonder if they serve a very similar purpose among the lower class.  When I was at my poorest, for all intents and purposes homeless, a lot of people I knew spend about as much money on scratch tickets and Powerball as they did on food.  One guy who worked at the same pizza place that I washed dishes for would take home a whole pizza every night so that he wouldn't have to buy food and thereby "increase" his chances of winning.  Yeah.

Winston goes among the Proles, not expressly forbidden because, you know, there are no laws to break only imprisonment or execution to fear, in order to possibly find an old timer who might remember the days before the glorious revolution.  Every man avoids his direct questioning.  Winston then moves on and finds himself in front of the very shop where he purchased the journal.  He goes in cautiously, looks around, and finds a glass paperweight with a piece of coral in it.  It fascinates him because of its absolute uselessness.  He then discovers a second floor with a bed and a picture of a seashore.

Upon departing the store he notices a girl with a red sash about her waist pass him.  He'd seen her before, shouting the loudest at the 2 minute Hate.  Worried he would be found out, that she might have been following him as a spy, he considers strangling her or bashing her head in with a rock.

Fortunately he did neither of these things (Well, I say "fortunately" not knowing how it will end).  Days later she trips right in front of him.  When he reaches down to help her up she slips him a note that says "I love you".  The notion rocks his entire world.  It takes days for them to be able to meet to discuss this because romantic love is supremely frowned upon by Big Brother.  Weeks later they are finally able to meet in a wooded area where they have sex.

As it turns out she is a "rebel from the waist down" named Julia.  She was born after the revolution and so has known nothing else.  She pushes the party line in public and works hard in the community centers and then uses sex as her rebellion.  Winston was certainly not her first.  In many ways, provided that she isn't a spy for Big Brother, she's exactly the sort of the person that is a threat to Big Brother.  She will pay lip service to all but secretly hold no convictions.  The generation after her will be the one to revolt.

Winston analyses his feelings for Julia and can't bring himself to regard it as Pure Love or Pure Lust.

"No emotion was pure, because everything was mixed up with fear and hatred.  Their embrace had been a battle, the climax a victory.  It was a blow struck against the Party.  It was a political act."

I'm not sure that this has any more redeeming value than Winston's wife who only has sex with him because it is her "duty to the Party".  To the modern perception they should be lauded for doing "Something...anything that makes them feel like they are moving forward".  Personally...I'm not so sure.  In the end this little act of "rebellion" doesn't actually strike a blow against anyone in any way...except perhaps in their minds.

Orwell does a great job of showing just how love or even infatuation can change someone's perception of life.  Everything seems brighter, happier; the food tastes better (or in this case less bad), the flowers (were there any) smell sweeter.  Everything is more bearable with those precious hormones pumping through our systems.

Orwell also does a good job of describing what the side effects of a sexually repressed society are.

"What was more was that sexual privation induced hysteria, which was desirable because it could be transformed into war fever and leader worship."  Huh.  Hadn't thought of it that way.

Julia explains, "All this marching up and down and cheering and waving flags is simply sex gone sour.  If you're happy inside yourself, why should you get excited about Big Brother and the Three-Year Plans and the Two Minute Hate and all the rest of their bloody rot."

Sex does inevitably lead to children, generally speaking.

"The family could not be abolished, and, indeed, people were encouraged to be fond of their children in almost the old-fashioned way.  The children, on the other hand, were systematically turned against their parents and taught to spy on them and report their deviations.  The family had become in effect an extension of the Thought Police.  It was a device by means of which everyone could be surrounded night and day by informers who knew him intimately."

Yeesh.  Totalitarian systems always, always, distort traditional systems to their own purposes.

The two move their love affair, quite dangerously, into the room above the junk shop where Winston bought the journal.  Whereas before they would take extra precautions and never meet in the same place twice, they meet at the room above frequently.

"Both of them knew it was lunacy.  It was as thought they were intentionally stepping nearer to their graves."

My favorite part of the entire book so far has been those moments in the room.  He's not very descriptive of what goes on there.  The before and after he is, but not the during of course.

I've spent the last 15 years feeling something very similar.  Not the passion of "new love" but the bits that stay as you move through the years.  No matter what I am doing, if it's with my love the whole thing is at least 10 times better.  I've given up going to movies that only I want to see.  All experiences without her are shades dimmer.  For a long time I was even planning a trip to all the cities that I ever lived in so that I could "redeem" them with her.  A silly notion, but I want to show her every place I ever went or ever explored.  Sadly I mostly lived on military bases so I can't ever truly fulfill that, but the point remains.  When the couple notice bugs and rats in the room it doesn't matter as much as it would otherwise.  There's this feeling I get with my wife that sounds crazy to explain.  When we are together, side by side, it's like that little area is all that exists in the world.  Kundera in The Unbearable Lightness of Being called it "A Nation of Two".  That's close.  The space traveling sphere from The Fountain is closer.   It feels as if nothing else exists or matters or even could ever matter.  I swear I think that's why God has created children as a consequence of sex.  They move us beyond our comfortable little zone by necessity and draw us out into a broader world.

It's like that paperweight with the coral inside it.

Pax,

W

The Harrowing ("1984" Part 1 Ch. 1-7 )

(harrowing:  adj,  acutely distressing)

Before I get started on what very well may be my most epic post (in size...I don't guarantee epic quality of content) I want to point out that with this post I am sure to go over one thousand pageviews.  The fact that anyone looks at my blog at all makes me happy.  When there are enough people looking at it that it has been viewed one thousand times...while I may not sure how to process that stimulation I do, however, know how to appropriately respond.

Thank You.

Now that we've had a puppy validate you with positivity and cuteness, it's time for the bleakness.

The world that George Orwell creates is not frightening because of its substance or structure.  If he set it on some alien planet populated by Zygons then it would be an amusing entertainment.  It is so frightening because it is so close to not only the world we live in but the world we are becoming.  Every technological step along the way, every change in how we consume information propels us closer to 1984.  There's a sort of vertigo that I feel, that fear as we get closer and closer to the edge and we can see Oceania below.

The story itself is not the point of the book.  It is quite rightly seen as a warning rather than entertainment.  Normally I try to give a sense of the overall storyline in my blog.  With this novel, there are so many more ideas than actual story.  I haven't marked up a book like this since Atlas Shrugged.  I openly wondered to my wife if this book would change me in a similar way as Ayn Rand's prescient masterpiece.  She shrugged and said, "Probably not".  Now that we are both reading 1984 together it's clear that it will change us both.

The basic story is that of a man, Winston Smith, who goes about his day and life as a member of the Party.  In this world there are two castes.  There are the Proles, the working class stiffs, who are pretty much anyone middle class and lower.  Proles make up 85% of the population and are essentially "slave" labor for the Party.  The Party is the government, the intelligentsia, and the media.  They are the college graduates, the blessed, the smart ones who are controlled and indoctrinated by the ubiquitous and mustachioed Big Brother.  It's fairly strange to think, but the Party is more indoctrinated and has more confining laws placed on them than the Proles.

Winston has strange feelings that there is something missing in life.  He has noticed for ages that Big Brother and the Party manipulate facts and even create them out of whole cloth.  The past, which he can barely remember, has been erased and changed in so many ways that he can't be sure what is true.  Truth, in itself, could just be another lie.

Without realizing why, Winston purchases a diary at a shop and takes it home.  He discovered a blind spot in his apartment where the all seeing Teleplate cannot observe him and takes up writing in it.  He's gripped with an exhilarating fear as he goes to write in it.

"The thing he was about to do was open a diary.  This was not illegal (nothing was illegal, since there were no longer any laws), but if detected it was reasonably certain that it would be punished by death, or at least by twenty-five years in a forced-labor camp."

And that is our first taste of the great paradox of living in the world of Big Brother.  Sure, their slogans routinely pumped into them are:

"WAR IS PEACE
FREEDOM IS SLAVERY

IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH."

But that can be readily discarded as party propaganda.  This fear is how they actually live on a day to day basis.  It is the substance of their thoughts which is, after all, Big Brother's goal.  Dominance of thought.  ELIMINATION of thought, actually.  This is how they think.  It's not illegal because there are no laws, but I could be punished for it.  Insane?  Just wait.

Winston works as one who "corrects" the past.  He adjusts news articles so that Big Brother appears to be all knowing, non-contradictory, and perfect in all his words.  He sort of sees a problem with this but his indoctrination is so deep that it is easier not to think.  A good member of the party always chooses not to think.  There are things he can't not think on though.  For instance:

"Oceania was at war with Eurasia and in alliance with Eastasia.  In no public or private utterance was it ever admitted that the three powers had at any time been grouped along different lines.  Actually, as Winston well knew, it was only four years since Oceania had been at war with Eastasia and in alliance with Eurasia.  But that was merely a piece of furtive knowledge which he happened to possess because his memory was not satisfactorily under control.  Officially the change of partners had never happened"..."The enemy of the moment always represented absolute evil, and it followed that any past or future agreement with him was impossible."

Winston viewed it as HIS fault for remembering anything other than the way the Party said it. 

"If the Party could thrust its hand into the past and say of this or that event, it never happened- that, surely, was more terrifying than mere torture or death."

"Reality Control".

This serves as a primer to doublethink: "To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies...to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it."

One only needs to turn on the TV, read a newspaper, or just pay attention to what is going on in the world to see all of this in action.  

The world we live in, this digitally predominant world, makes the past so easily malleable.  If we don't have hard copy then any administration could change something of the past.  People have been rightly worried about how easy it is to edit things like Wikipedia.  People look at it and believe its contents are truth.  However, if enough people agree that something should be changed it will be.  Our past could easily be destroyed.  I remember being in a discussion with someone about how my daughter was being taught that this leftist Union Leader in America was a hero.   They shrugged, said they didn't see anything wrong with it.  I mentioned, well except for the fact that he used violence, physical and financial retribution to achieve his goals.  If that was true, they reasoned, then they wouldn't teach about him to children.  We rationalize before we even dare to look it up.  It was not something that was included in the Wikipedia article and so what use was there in still looking?  Less than 5 minutes of doing a different search yielded proof.  With just ideology and a keyboard it has been wiped from the popular consciousness.

Recently I watched a TED talk where the speaker actually said the words "The era of knowing is over.  We don't need to actually have knowledge anymore.  If we need information we can look it up and then should forget it when we don't need it anymore."  

Creeping closer.

There are so many political issues on both sides of the spectrum that frighten me.  I have met so few people who even question their own party's line.  They'll give a pass on anything because it's "their guy".  They'll ignore blatant lies, forgive "readjustments" of their candidates history, and not bat an eye when he/she lies to them again, and again, and again.  If the other side does it then they are, quite naturally, scumbags bent on destroying the country.  We aren't that far from a single party in all but name anyway.  There is no consistency and no principles.  "Orthodoxy means not thinking - not needing to think.  Orthodoxy is unconsciousness."  That, as far as Orwell's warning, is already here in many ways.

Personally I find the notion of Newspeak as particularly offensive.  It is the new language of Oceania, always being refined.  As a colleague of Winston's declares, "You think, I dare say, that our chief job is inventing new words.  But not a bit of it!  We're destroying words - scores of them, hundreds of them, every day.  We're cutting the language down to the bone."  Later her justifies, "After all, what justification is there for a word which is simply the opposite of some other words?...If you have a word like 'good,' what need is there for a word like 'bad'?  'Ungood' will do just as well..."  

With some zealousness he later explains, "Don't you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought?  In the end we shall make thoughcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it...Every year fewer and fewer words, and the range of consciousness always a little smaller."  

So, what would be the fall out?  "Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Byron - they'll exist only in Newspeak versions, not merely changed into something different, but actually changed into something contradictory of what they use to be."

There is so much here that my mind is all abuzz with multiple ideas all firing at the same time.  Let's see if I can organize them and tease them into some sort coherent mess.

Firstly, language is so extremely important.  Their goal of controlling the people through language is not as far fetched as it seems.  When I first learned about rhetoric my mind was completely blown.  Rhetoric is how people use language in order to effectively state their position on something.  Well, that's the Light Side of rhetoric.  The Dark Side of rhetoric is choosing carefully the words you use in order to manipulate the listener/reader.  It's one thing to have a news report with the headline "Fifteen soldiers killed in a firefight with the Taliban" and completely another to say "Fifteen soldiers slaughtered in a firefight with the Taliban".  Which one grips you more emotionally?  The second one clearly sells more papers and, intended or not, makes you feel more negatively about the Taliban, or on the other hand may predispose you negatively toward the war.

Every day, language is used to manipulate.  Your emotions are being toyed with in order to achieve a desired result.  Now, in the world of advertising we can just go "Oh, look, they're using sex to sell blue jeans again" and discard it if we want.  Language is more tricky.  Reading and hearing automatically sets up residence in our minds and few are trained, let alone have the desire, to put it in a holding tank to consider it and either hold it or jettison.

I learned this and paid attention on my own over the years and then one day took a high level philosophy course as an elective.  (Yes...I took philosophy for fun.)  I get bored fairly easily, and so one of my ways to fend off boredom is to play with language and ideas.  I squish them, stretch them, spin them on their head just to see what happens.  I like to hold two contradictory thoughts in my head at one time and then watch as they play Texas Hold'em...to the death.  It was during one of these 'bouts that I realized that the teacher was manipulating the whole class.  He had taught about rhetoric only from the perspective of "the enemy" as perpetrator.  There wasn't a single bit about how our own "party" our own "allies" manipulate us.  I watched as he manipulated the class from one side of the issue to the other side of the issue and every one of them followed like obedient little ducklings and agreed wholeheartedly without even considering that just five minutes ago they were agreeing wholeheartedly with the complete opposite.  I started chuckling and the teacher turned and gave me a wink, knowing that I'd caught it.  He asked me, for the benefit of the class, to tell what I was chuckling at.  I explained and watched as each person in that 30 seat classroom couldn't figure it out.  They defended each side, as they had heard from the teacher, and some people even managing to argue the validity both contradictory views at the same time.  

So, what does this have to do with 1984?  We're not so far from it.  The enemy is the one trying to manipulate you, they will tell you, while deliberately and blatantly manipulating you just as well.  It's the Democrats.  It's the Republicans.  It's the Libertarians.  It's Greenpeace.  It's Big Oil.  It's the church.  It's Atheism.  Language and loyalty are the blinders every institution uses.  Not every institution is bad.  Not every use of rhetoric is bad, but we need to be aware of it or we may as well be sidling up to Big Brother.  If your emotions are engage by those you trust in order to sway your opinion then remember the "Two Minute Hate" from this book.  I am immediately suspicious of anything that engages my emotions in an argument of ideas because that tends to mean logic won't win them their argument.

Pax,

Will Arbaugh

WIKA "1984"

What I know about 1984:

Pretty much everything I know about 1984 I know from osmosis.  It is literally everywhere in entertainment.  Whether it's Hodgins on Bones saying he's worried about Big Brother listening in the on the conversation or watching Minority Report and worry about the Thought Police, we cannot help but know this novel without having actually read it.   It directly informs THX1138, George Lucas' student film which is world the reading, and even my favorite novel of all time which I've never actually finished reading, Lanark by Alisdair Grey.  All of Phillip K. Dick's paranoid sci-fi fantasies find their root there.

One of the most acclaimed commercials of all time was a spot for the first Macintosh from Apple.  It's tagline declared that the Macintosh was the reason "1984 won't be like 1984", an endearing moment of marketing hubris that clearly wasn't the case.  Even our most recent scandal, the NSA spying on American citizens, is reported on by using buzzwords from George Orwell's work.  It has so fully permeated the culture that I believe that anyone could tell you the basic storyline without ever having actually read it.

George Orwell was, of course, the man who wrote Animal Farm which I also haven't yet read.  I can feel the judgmental glares now, stop.  I was homeschooled half my life.  I was reading Treasure Island, Kidnapped, Robinson Crusoe, and Pilgrim's Progress instead and they've done well enough.  I regret nothing.

I often get George Orwell and H. G. Wells mixed up in my head.  I'm not sure why.

I'm really looking forward to this one.  A dark novel about a totalitarian society is probably just what I need after Wuthering Heights.  At least it might be a bit of a decent comedown before I get to the next novel,  Little Women.

Pax,

W