In an election year featuring some of the most disturbing (and disturbed) candidates in memory, George Orwell's 1984 deserves a full reading by every voter — especially by liberal and progressive voters who might contemplate sitting out this one.
During a couple of long road trips in the past year and a half, I've listened twice to an unabridged audiobook of George Orwell's 1984. Since my first listening, the extremism of the Republican Party and the Republican-dominated Tea Party has reached new heights (or depths), and the risk looms larger than ever that a Republican Tea Party-run United States will, like a nation-sized Wile E. Coyote, find itself suspended past the cliff's edge, legs spinning in a blur before the inevitable plummet to the canyon floor.
1984 deserves a full reading (or listening) by every voter before the 2010 election, and certainly by every liberal or progressive voter who contemplates sitting out this one. Reading Orwell's penetrating description and dissection of the authoritarian mindset and of the totalitarian implementation of that mindset in light of the success this year of the Republican Tea Party should activate in any reality-based reader both a driving determination to keep control of government functions out of Republican hands and a renewed appreciation of Orwell's prescience.
Via a lecture by O'Brien (a high-level apparatchik in the Party) during the imprisonment of Winston Smith (Orwell's protagonist), Orwell highlighted a key characteristic of the authoritarian/totalitarian mentality of unrelenting control (Penguin Centennial edition of 1984, pp. 256-57):
". . . Only the disciplined mind can see reality, Winston. You believe that reality is something objective, external, existing in its own right. You also believe that the nature of reality is self-evident. When you delude yourself into thinking that you see something, you assume that everyone else sees the same thing as you. But I tell you, Winston, that reality is not external. Reality exists in the human mind, and nowhere else. Not in the individual mind, which can make mistakes, and in any case soon perishes; only in the mind of the Party, which is collective and immortal. Whatever the Party holds to be the truth is truth. It is impossible to see reality except by looking through the eyes of the Party. That is the fact that you have got to relearn. . . ."
An evocation of that mindset in the Bush Administration shows up in journalist Ron Suskind's "Faith, Certainty and the Presidency of George W. Bush," published in The New York Times Magazine in October 2004. Reporting on a meeting in 2002 with one of Bush's senior advisers, who expressed "displeasure" with an earlier article Suskind had written about Karen Hughes (Bush's former communications director), Suskind wrote:
The aide said that guys like me were "in what we call the reality-based community," which he defined as people who "believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality." I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. "That's not the way the world really works anymore," he continued. "We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do."
Eight years later, that mindset continues to resonate with many politicians and voters and creates additional eerie echoes of 1984. Consider this assertion by Rep. Brian Bilbray (R-Calif. 50th) earlier this year during the furor over Arizona's proposed immigration law, SB 1070 (enacted statute here): challenged by Chris Matthews on MSNBC's "Hardball" to explain how law enforcement officers could identify undocumented immigrants, Bilbray declared, "They will look at the kind of dress you wear, there is different type of attire, there is different type of — right down to the shoes, right down to the clothes . . . ."
In 1984, Parsons, a neighbor of Smith, regales Smith with an account of how Parsons's daughter, an eager participant in the Spies youth group, came to report a stranger to the authorities as an enemy agent (Penguin Centennial edition, pp. 58-59):
"By the way, old boy," [Parsons] said. "I hear that little beggar of mine let fly at you with his catapult yesterday. I gave him a good dressing down for it. In fact, I told him I'd take the catapult away if he does it again."
"I think he was a little upset at not going to the execution," said Winston.
"Ah, well — what I mean to say, shows the right spirit, doesn't it? Mischievous little beggars they are, both of them, but talk about keenness! All they think about is the Spies, and the war, of course. D'you know what that little girl of mine did last Saturday, when her troop was on a hike out Berkhampstead way? She got two other girls to go with her, slipped off from the hike, and spent the whole afternoon following a strange man. They kept on his tail for two hours, right through the woods, and then, when they got into Amersham, handed him over to the patrols."
"What did they do that for?" said Winston, somewhat taken aback. Parsons went on triumphantly:
"My kid made sure he was some kind of enemy agent — might have been dropped by parachute, for instance. But here's the point, old boy. What do you think put her on to him in the first place? She spotted he was wearing a funny kind of shoes — said she'd never seen anyone wearing shoes like that before. So the chances were he was a foreigner. Pretty smart for a nipper of seven, eh?"
"What happened to the man?" said Winston.
"Ah, that I couldn't say, of course. But I wouldn't be altogether surprised if —" Parsons made the motion of aiming a rifle, and clicked his tongue for the explosion.
And in another expedition into 1984 territory, Christine O'Donnell, the 2010 United States Senate candidate in Delaware who functions as the happy-face façade of the Republican Tea Party, touts views on sexual conduct that call to mind those of Winston Smith's wife, Katharine, who fully embraced the Party's goal of controlling and suppressing sexual desire (Penguin Centennial edition, pp. 67-69), with the death penalty imposed for committing any sexcrime (Penguin Centennial edition, pp. 316-17).
Can the United States avoid Wile E. Coyote's fate? Only if voters see through the Republican Tea Party's doubleplusgood duckspeak (Penguin Centennial edition, p. 319) and remain rooted in the reality-based community. 1984 provides an excellent reference point for that effort in 2010 and beyond.