Probably my favorite novel of all time is 1984, a book that I think is often misinterpreted, cherry-picked, or interpreted far too superficially---to such an extent that I paradoxically ignore or discount anyone who makes a 1984 reference.
But this just jumped out at me:
And by Monday night, Trump iterated his anti-media script, indulging the crowd’s hate for reporters by letting supporters scream for two minutes at the press penned into the venue.
This is literally … it’s … I mean Christ, why do we even have fiction anymore? What’s the point?
This guy seriously just held a “two minutes hate.” Literally two minutes … hate. And just like the book, it was directed at a largely symbolic figure of fictional oppression, engineered by the Party as a scapegoat.
This is a short diary, but it took a long time to write, punctuated by long periods of stunned silence. In Watership Down, the rabbits had a word called “tharn,” to describe the stunned immobility caused in animals by car headlights. I think that’s what I’m looking at here: a what-is-this-I-don’t-even event that just has my brain frozen up.
In the novel (1984, I mean) there are a few obscure passages in the book-within-a-book that reveals the fundamental sci-fi principle behind the fictional world of Oceania. That scientists---economists, sociologists, psychologists---figured out all the mechanics behind political revolutions, and the Party used this knowledge to engineer a government that would never be overthrown. Through a combination of technology, propaganda, and burning money on perpetual war, they created economic and social conditions that would forever prevent the preconditions for a revolution. This is what makes 1984 a work of science fiction: it’s a “what if” exploration of the human condition in a world where science gives us an unusual ability, in this case the ability to control society. Orwell’s answer to this question is depressing: such an ability would first be seized by people who want to rule the world with an iron fist, and that will be the eternal end of civilization.
We are now experiencing a different kind of experiment, where the Party is exploring the power of circus antics. We have a candidate who turns everything he touches into a fucking circus, to such an extent that we’re less than a month away from the presidential election, and the public is still too distracted by (check sex tape and past) to focus even on basic fundamentals----like the fact that we have two major candidates, one of whom has extensive experience while the other has a completely blank resume, never having held any office of any kind, and doesn’t seem to understand basic ideas about government and foreign policy. In any other year this contest wouldn’t exist. Without Trump’s megasize personality, reputation and showmanship, anyone else with his complete lack of qualifications and his dimwit answers in interviews would have been ignored months ago. But here we’re faced with a character who can turn reality into a 24/7 episode of Access Hollywood, and make a presidential election about reality-show bombast. It would make a great premise for a science fiction novel, if it weren’t so slick and unrealistic.
