1984 All Over Again

Hello again.  It's me.  I did a good job of containing myself during the contived debt ceiling crisis, but I can't contain myself any longer.

I recently reread the George Orwell book 1984, a futuristic novel about an all powerful Big Brother government of Oceania, with an Inner Party that controls every aspect of its citizen's lives.  While reading it, I was often reminded that Orwell's writings from the 1950's are still relevant today.  I saw many parallels with current American politics.  However, during the past few weeks as liberal democrats and Obama have made ridiculous statements during the debt ceiling negotiations and the credit downgrade that followed, I began to associate those statements to terms Orwell used in his novel.

It became quite clear that our mainstream media is equivalent to the Orwellian Ministry of Truth.  Just as this ministry sought to control all news and history for the benefit of the Big Brother and Inner Party, the mainstream media seeks to ensure the our crippled president Obama is insulated from obvious truths.  His "version" of the truth is always reported in a positive light and never challenged with obvious facts.  Opponents are ridiculed as inflexible and uncompromising.

But the 1984 parallels go beyond the media.  Orwell used the terms doublethink and newspeak to explain how the Inner Party sought to control thought and language in the fictional state of Oceania.  Doublethink is the state of mind where 2 mutually exclusive facts are both believed.  Big Brother (Obama) and the Ministry of Truth (mainstream media) expect their subjects to use doublethink.  How else can they believe the evil pro-business republicans wouldn't participate in  finding a solution to the debt ceiling contrived crisis, when in fact they were the only group who passed not one, but two bills to raise the debt ceiling and sent them on to the Senate only to be tabled by the democrats.  The first of these bills was called Cap, Cut and Balance and was a serious plan that would have cut real spending levels (not just the rate of spending increases) and forced congress to take up a balanced budget amendment this year.  To believe the republicans did not participate, one must engage in doublethink.

We also see examples of newspeak.  In the novel, Orwell introduces newspeak as the official government sanctioned language of Oceania.  The newspeak vocabulary eliminates all words that detrimental to the Inner Party.  In the newspeak language, "tax increases" would be eliminated in favor of "revenue enhancements".  In Oceania, Orwell's Inner Party also promote class warfare by equating "capitalists" as the devil overthrown by Big Brother so that all citizens could prosper.  Wow.  All you need do is exchange "millionaires and billionaires" for "capitalist" and the parallel is frightening.

So when you hear Obama and the democrats tell us there is no spending problem, just a need to get millionaires and billionaires to pay their fair share, (double)think of 1984 and Big Brother.