I just finished reading 1984 for the first time. I couldn’t put the book down. It felt eerie and prophetic. Like all the forces in this country right now are moving towards this point, the vision that George Orwell described in such gruesome detail in this book. The slogans of the ruling Party in 1984 very well could be subliminal messages underlying all of Bush’s foreign and domestic policy: War is Peace. Freedom is Slavery. Ignorance is Strength. One could easily juxtapose the Orwellian word “thought-criminal” for Bush’s “terrorist.” Anyone could be a thought criminal. Anyone could be a terrorist. In Orwell’s world the “enemy” we’re fighting a war against changes constantly and the records are always adjusted to make it appear that we were always fighting against that enemy. (Think Saddam Hussein) And because of a practice known as doublethink, where you adjust your memories and concrete reality according to what Big Brother tells you reality is, everyone believes (or buys into the Party’s false information) that whatever Big Brother says is and has always been and always will be unless and until further information is given, regardless of the lingering memory they might have that would lead them to understand that things were different.

Orwell describes the society running according to these principles and to me it looked frighteningly like our own. This practice of doublethink--this way of knowing that something was untrue at the same time as you are rectifying your knowledge, telling yourself that it is in fact true, and that it has always been true, and of course always will be true (and updating your faulty memories accordingly) seems the kind of mind control which is just on the other side of all of this media control and surveillance used by Bush, which is also described by Orwell:

“The [totalitarian] ruling groups [of the past] were always infected to some extent by liberal ideas, and were content to leave loose ends everywhere, to regard only the overt act, and to be uninterested in what their subjects were thinking. Even the Catholic Church of the Middle Ages was tolerant by modern standards. Part of the reason for this was that in the past no government had the power to keep its citizens under constant surveillance. The invention of print, however, made it easier to manipulate public opinion, and the film and radio carried the process further. With the development of television and the technical advance which made it possible to receive and transmit simultaneously on the same instrument, private life came to an end. Every citizen, or at least every citizen important enough to be worth watching, could be kept for twenty-four hours a day under the eyes of the police and in the sound of official propaganda . . . The possibility of enforcing not only complete obedience to the will of the State, but complete uniformity of opinion on all subjects, now existed for the first time.”

Can we say Patriot Act?

It was creepy. And reading it felt important. It feels important to me to read post apocalyptic sorts of fiction. 1984 seems post-apocalyptic to me and at the same time it feels like the truth. The here and now. The horrifying truth of the world we’re living in, now. I’m frightened by it. It didn’t feel like I was reading fiction. It felt like research. Which is as it felt when I was reading Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale and Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower. Like I was doing covert research on the powers that be. The forces moving beneath our feet.

I’m really afraid that these pictures will be the end result of human history.