It’s been a long time since I read it, and I bought a copy and a few other books right after the 2016 election, including Orwell’s Animal Farm and Down And Out In Paris, and Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals. I read Rules right away, but had been unconsciously avoiding the Orwell until I took the plunge this week.
I’m not that far into it yet, but a few decades of life experience sure up the horror factor of Big Brother’s world:
“To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them, to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it, to believe that democracy was impossible and that the Party was the guardian of democracy, to forget, whatever was necessary to forget, then to draw it back into memory again at the moment when it was needed, and then promptly to forget it again, and above all, to apply the same process to the process itself — that was the ultimate subtlety: consciously to induce unconsciousness, and then, once again, to become unconscious of the act of hypnosis you had just performed. Even to understand the word ‘doublethink’ involved the use of doublethink.”
You’ve got to practice doublethink to be in the Trump camp, it seems, unless you’re just a liar and you no longer care about anything. Which is perfectly plausible with a lot of them. One thing that continues to mystify me is how El Turdo Gordo keeps getting people to not only stand with him, but throw themselves fully into the debasing act of both defending and praising his actions. I kind of get people who want access to corridors of power and a spotlight, but don’t they know that with this guy, the corridors of power transform into slides to the gutter, and the spotlight is really the deceptively seductive glow of an industrial strength bug-zapper?
Our highest legislative chamber, the supposedly sober one, heard a seriously presented opinion this week from one of our Most Serious People that the U.S. president can’t break the law, and if he does break the law it doesn’t count as long as he thought it was in the public interest, which one has to assume because of course the president was thinking maybe a little bit about the public interest and not just squashing political rivals or people who criticized him, and you can’t know what’s in his mind so he gets the benefit of the doubt whenever he breaks the laws that are impossible for him to break. Besides, real Americans love those law-breakers! (But only the ones that are, wink, also ‘real Americans’.)
But no despair. I’m hooking up with a group working in my congressional district, I’ve already been active with another group contacting voters and potential voters. We all gotta do it. No doublethink, no doubletalk. Just GOTV and walk the walk.