Saturday, June 8, 2019

Paging George Orwell

From the Editor:

I wrote and dated this piece several days ago.  I did not know it at the time, but June 8, 2019 is the 70th anniversary of the publication of George Orwell’s “Nineteen Eighty-Four.”  For all his eerie prescience, Orwell did not count on Big Brother having fake orange “hair,” severe uh, brain damage, and the grossly misplaced certainty that he is an “extremely stable genius.”
Op-Ed Venture, Managing Editor

 
“Ignorance Is Strength”
June 8, 2019
“Truth isn’t truth.”
Rudy Giuliani, August 2018
The title is a quote from George Orwell’s seminal book, Nineteen-Eighty-Four, which saw its sales increase 3,100 percent shortly after the inauguration of a president even Orwell would have found implausible.  Orwell’s statement was meant to represent the psycho-fascist dystopia of a world in the thrall of “Big Brother” and the all-consuming State that told people what to think and tailored reality to meet the needs of the few at the expense of the many, and now the American Carnage president has made “ignorance is strength” a reality.  Donald Chrump is the embodiment of the phrase.  Like it or not, Chrump has displayed nothing but unparalleled ignorance at every lumbering, unsteady step and yet managed to acquire tremendous strength by winning the presidency while losing the vote count by a wide margin.  You just can’t get any more Orwellian than that.  I hope.
 
Der Furor blithely insists that he did not say something that is easily fact-checked by playing the audio tape of him saying the thing he says he did not say.  Hand size, crowd size, “hair” size, brain size, height size, weight size, whatever size, size clearly matters to this very small man.  Nothing too big or too small for this putz to lie about.
“What you're seeing and what you're reading is not what's happening.”  First of all, I find it, let’s say interesting, that he made a distinction between seeing and reading.  Makes one wonder how he reads.  Second, what the fuck?!?!
 “The party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears.
It was their final, most essential command.”
                         George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four
Republican’ts are using Nineteen Eighty-Four as an instruction manual rather than a warning.  They have been mining Orwell’s final work for talking points without an iota of shame or irony.
“His heart sank as he thought of the enormous power arrayed against him, the ease with which any Party intellectual would overthrow him in debate, the subtle arguments which he would not be able to understand, much less answer. And yet he was in the right! They were wrong and he was right.”
                         George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four
 

*****
R.I.P. Mac “Dr. John” Rebennack
Revolution

Right Place, Wrong Time
 

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