In 1948, a visionary writer named George Orwell imagined a world of the future and it didn't look good. Despite it seeming so far away, he reversed the last two digits and titled the book "1984" and it rose to the position of a major shrine of pessimistic book-lovers, along with Huxley's "Brave New World" and Vonnegut's "Player Piano."t
We are now thirty years past Orwell's date, so I thought it might be a good time to take a look at our country and see how accurate the author's predictions have been so far. Of course, we have to bear in mind that the immense leaps in technology we have seen surpassed anything Orwell came up with, but just following the trends is instructive.
Wikipedia provides the plot: "The novel is set in Airstrip One (formerly known as Great Britain), a province of the superstate Oceania in a world of perpetual war, omnipresent government surveillance, and public mind control under a privileged Inner Party elite that persecutes all individualism and independent thinking as "thoughtcrimes".[2] The tyranny is epitomised by Big Brother, the quasi-divine Party leader who enjoys an intense cult of personality, but who may not even exist. Big Brother and the Party justify their oppressive rule in the name of a supposed greater good."
Let's see. "A world of perpetual war." I'm 84 and I'm working really hard to remember a time when we weren't killing somebody. For some reason, the United States was always in peril - from Korea, Viet Nam, Hunduras, Panama, Cuba, Chile, Iran and a bunch of others. With some of them, like Chile and Iran, we just felt the people had made a mistake in electing leaders, so we got rid of them and put in our own - like everyone's friend, the Shah of Iran. What else? "Omnipresent government surveillance." Sound familiar? Public mind control? "Thoughtcrimes?" And everyone justifying their oppressive rule in the name of a supposed public good. Keep us safe, Daddy.
In 1984, Orwell presented a torture room, Room 101. He was 'way off. We have hundreds of them, we're told, all over the world. We have the word of no less a hero than former vice-president Richard Cheney that what we did in some of those rooms, like waterboarding, wasn't torture because we were doing it, although when the Japanese were doing it during WWII, was. You have to keep paying attention.
The only thing we seem to have to discovered in the last 30 years is the identity of Big Brother. He goes by many names - Wal-Mart, McDonalds, Boeing, Big Pharma, Bank of America, J.P.Morgan Chase - I could go on and on, but we can just call him Wall Street. Big Brother is always front-page news and has been officially declared to be a person, but a special person who can't go to jail or be held responsible for anything he does. Corporations don't go to jail. Sen. Elizabeth Warren tried to find any regulator who had even brought a bank to trial and she couldn't. Hmmmmmmm.
I suggest Mr. Orwell had it right on, but he didn't go far enough. As more Americans get more entitled and "affluenza" becomes a criminal defense while millions of more Americans fall further behind and see their hopes of catching up being permanently locked out on the wrong side of the gated community called America, things may happen. Read the book.