Trump, Postman, Orwell and Huxley

In the introduction to Neil Postman’s classic “Amusing Ourselves to Death,” the author draws several distinctions between the dystopia of George Orwell in “1984” and that of Aldous Huxley in “Brave New World.”

As Postman described it, Orwell’s vision was of an oppressive dictatorial mind control that “flipped” human values. Vis. “War is peace. Freedom is slavery.  Ignorance is strength.”

Huxley, on the other hand, described a world in which we ourselves choose to escape through drug-induced fantasies. “…most men and women will grow up to love their servitude and will never dream of revolution.”

On the status of truth, Postman wrote: “Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance.”

There’s more that Postman contrasted and it’s well worth reading, but at the end of his introduction, he concluded: “This book is about the possibility that Huxley, not Orwell, was right.”

Looking at the 2016 election and the on-going Trumpian transition to power, I conclude that both Huxley and Orwell were right…but there is much, much more going on.

Certainly Orwell’s fear of truth being concealed from us is true and has been throughout our history. But, likewise, as Huxley predicted, truth has become “drowned in a sea of irrelevance.”

Indeed truth itself seems irrelevant, not because it is concealed, but because what passes as truth is fabricated and, even after being unmasked, still manages to retain its power.

So we have “fake news.” We are dizzily forced to tease reality from “reality.” Fact from fiction. If we have the time or inclination for it….

The consequences are clear and dangerous beyond the results of the election.

Yesterday’s news of the armed “self-investigator” set upon threatening a pizza parlor is a case in point. The pizza establishment had been falsely portrayed by trolls as being at the center of child sex ring operated by none other than Hillary Clinton. The gunman bought the lie.

Such rampant lies result from financial as well as political incentives.

Witness the entertainment business. Entertainment, much of it violent and outlandish, is richly rewarding. That has been true for decades, but, amplified by new technologies, it has escalated in brutality.

Society and civility are far the worse for it.

And so we have the president of CBS, Les Moonves, confessing during Trump’s profane, violence-prompting, news cycle-grabbing campaign. "It may not be good for America, but it’s damn good for CBS.”

Solitary trolls have made small fortunes concocting “fake news” (ie. lies) to attract internet “clicks” and hence money on Facebook and other sites.

In such an amoral environment, lying overwhelms truth in the marketplace of “ideas.”

Just as “truth will set us free,” today’s rewards for lying have doomed us to enslavement.

So who was right? Huxley or Orwell?

While I wouldn’t wish our predicament upon Postman (who died in 2003), Orwell or Huxley, I yearn to put the question to them.

Orwell's sniff test of 'Native Ads' and 'Strategic Communication'

My inner Orwell, ever on the alert for new Orwellian words, has found two worthy of note.

Ironically, but alas not surprisingly, they are becoming embedded in the lexicon of communications jargon.

They are “strategic communication” and “native advertising.”

I first came across “strategic communication” when the University of Oregon opened an entire “strategic communication” program at its Portland campus. I got the strong sense that the term was trying to be an under-the-radar replacement for “public relations,” which has its own questionable meaning. The “public” appears because it is PR’s job to influence the public. (A qualification: As a journalist, I often rely on PR folks and many of them are exceedingly helpful, but we also harbor a mutual suspicion.)

PR is often about putting a verbal gloss on a corporation’s (or candidate’s or political party’s or government’s) image. The mission of PR is to get the client’s story out in a way that serves the client’s best interest. That can lead to omission, obfuscation, dubious comparisons and false association.

I can’t figure out how strategic communication is different except it has substituted a new name. Just ask your self: “Who’s strategy is this communication part of?”

The term is now creeping into my own neighborhood where the Hillsdale Main Street program has a board member assigned to “strategic communication.” As a journalist who covers Hillsdale (hillsdalenews.org), I take the board member’s designated assignment as fair warning. Indeed I’m already seeing frothy, “strategic” press releases issuing from the small, struggling program.

I don’t know where I first came across “native advertising.” The term on its face seems vacuous except that it suggests it is different from plain old advertising. “Native”? Could this be the “new new thing in advertising?”

Of course, advertising itself is riddled with deceitful devices. For a list visit any media literacy site. Try THIS ONE.

So what exactly is “native advertising”? It seems to be advertising that melds with surrounding editorial content (on-line and in print) by having the same “look and feel.” In short, it requires you, dear reader, to separate editorial wheat and advertising chaff. For me, the prime example is “WIRED” magazine, where editorial content looks like advertising; advertising looks like editorial content.

Most of the time a reader can “read” the “look” without having to read content to tell which is which. Not so with “native advertising.” Getting you to read it – ALL of it– is the point.

No doubt a “communication strategist” devised the term “native advertising.”

Before writing off both terms as not passing my Orwellian sniff test, I decided to visit Wikipedia to see what its entries had to say. It seemed as if “communication strategists” have again been at work. Worse, ACADEMIC communication strategists had been at work, sprinkling the definitions with vague jargon and an air of inscrutable respectability.

Example: Strategic communication management could be defined as the systematic planning and realization of information flow, communication, media development and image care in a long-term horizon. It conveys deliberate message(s) through the most suitable media to the designated audience(s) at the appropriate time to contribute to and achieve the desired long-term effect. Communication management is process creation. It has to bring three factors into balance: the message(s), the media channel(s) and the audience(s)

Another definition deals with governmental uses of “strategic communication”:

In the U.S., Strategic Communication is defined as: Focused United States Government efforts to understand and engage key audiences to create, strengthen, or preserve conditions favorable for the advancement of United States Government interests, policies, and objectives through the use of coordinated programs, plans, themes, messages, and products synchronized with the actions of all instruments of national power.”

Could we be talking about propaganda perhaps?

Wikipedia, fortunately, is not asleep at the wheel about its contributed content.  Wikipedia editors top questionable definitions with warnings. Of the “strategic communication” entry they write:

This article has multiple issues. Please help improve it or discuss these issues on the talk page. This article may require cleanup to meet Wikipedia's quality standards. (February 2010) This article contains wording that promotes the subject in a subjective manner without imparting real information. (April 2013)

“Native Advertising’s” definition on Wikipedia emphasizes how the device is used on the internet.

Native advertising is a web advertising method in which the advertiser attempts to gain attention by providing content in the context of the user's experience. Native ad formats match both the form and the function of the user experience in which it is placed. One form of native advertising, publisher-produced brand content, is similar in concept to a traditional advertorial, which is a paid placement attempting to look like an article. A native ad tends to be more obviously an ad than most advertorials.[1] The advertiser's intent is to make the paid advertising feel less intrusive and thus increase the likelihood users will click on it.

Again, to Wikipedia’s credit, the editors put up a warning about this definition:

This article may document a neologism in such a manner as to promote it. Please add more reliable sources to establish its current use and the impact the term has had on its field. Otherwise consider renaming or deleting the article. (May 2013)

You can’t say you haven’t been warned.

Manning and Snowden; Huxley and Orwell

The Bradley Manning decision got me thinking about the late Neil Postman's conclusion at the end of his introduction to the insightful "Amusing Ourselves to Death."

He argued that Aldous Huxley's entertainment-anesthetized "Brave New World" better describes our plight than does George Orwell's totalitarian "1984."

Until recently, I would have largely agreed. Through our addictions to television, Twitter, Facebook, on-line games, broadcast sports and the internet generally, we have been "amusing ourselves to death." We are willingly living in a fabricated media environment manipulated by corporate interests. We define ourselves through purchases.

We have turned our backs on a world we might otherwise be able to influence.

Its problems are infamously daunting: inequality, poverty, war, global warming, fanaticism, sexual slavery, overpopulation, starvation, ignorance etc.

Now, the revelations of Bradley Manning, Edward Snowden and others prove that Orwell's Big Brother is tracking each and everyone of us as we play in our technological sandboxes.

Moreover, our ersatz democracy is performing crimes against humanity — all in the name of freedom and "The American Way."

Understandably Big Bro (collectively the Obama administration, the military and the "intelligence" community) desperately wants to keep secret both its atrocities and its surveillance.

So Manning and Snowden are vilified. They are tried both in the corporate press and in fact. Manning faces spending the rest of his life in prison; Snowden is being pursued like a traitor on the run.

So there's a meld of Orwell and Huxley in all of this. Informed of our government's Orwellian atrocities, will we simply behave as Huxley predicts — by flipping the channel or clicking to another web site?

Will we be too distracted to care?

Will the government be monitoring our complacency and apathy? If we alter our compliant behavior and become engaged, will Big Brother's computer detect it and take note? (Are the computers reading these words? Has your own readership been noted?)

Will we find ourselves on a "Watch List"? What next?

For a graphic, literally and figuratively, portrayal of the Postman comparisons go HERE. The cartoon strip is by Stuart McMillen. Two panels are shown above.

Killing by another name...

Newsweek's current issue knows how to get the reader's attention with the cover headline "How Obama Learned to Kill," but somehow the article inside goes all wobbly when it comes to describing the president's ordering death sentences in the Middle East.

In the Newsweek story we learn that Anwar al-Awlaki, born in New Mexico and ringleader of terrorists in Yemen, isn't "killed" at all in an American missile attack.

He is "eliminated."

To parse the difference, "killing" is what the president and our government did; "elimination" is what happened to al-Awlaki. It's similar to the difference between using the active and passive voice.

Obama ordered the killing of Al-Awlaki. (Active)

Al-awlaki was eliminated. (Passive...we don't know who did the eliminating). By the way, professional basketball teams are "eliminated" from tournaments. So far, none has been killed.

George Orwell in his classic essay "Politics and the English Language" wrote, "... political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness." One example he uses reads like front page news. "Defenseless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called 'pacification'."

Well, actually, it is now called "elimination" and we use robotic drones to do the dirty work, but you get the point. "Pacification" is what we had in Vietnam, 15 years after Orwell's death. Today it is "elimination" and it takes place in Yemen, Pakistan, Somalia and Afghanistan. Tomorrow, no doubt,  our government will be eliminating in Iran.

There's more Orwellian mind-twisting in the Newsweek story, much of it created by our government's "intelligence" strategists. Drones are sent to "eliminate" "signature" targets — those that bear the "signature" of being terrorist gatherings. Never mind that weddings and harmless tribal meetings have the same "signature." Willy-nilly, the signatures of those attending invite death warrants.

They become "collateral damage."

As Orwell notes, "...every such phrase anesthetizes a portion of one's brain."

One could easily extend the anesthetizing metaphor to our military, political, industrial, communications culture today. Indeed, the language we choose to use, to read and listen to anesthetize us all.

Orwell went on to write about such a society in his classic "1984." It's worth reading and rereading.

'Diversity of Tactics' anyone?

As our Quaker meeting reassesses its support of the Portland Occupy movement, Occupy's pondering the term “diversity of tactics” has found its way into our discussions.

George Orwell would have had a field day with this one. (See his classic essay, "Politics and the English Language" in which he asserts, "In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible.")

The term means to suggest that Occupy should employ a full range of actions, from violent to non-violent. But some have seen through the phrase and labeled it a euphemism for “anything goes.” For instance, the definition of violence has been left vague. Tactical nuclear weapons anyone?

Others say the term is a cover for young anarchists simply acting out their anger. Still others hint darkly that the proposed policy is the work of agent provocateurs trying to destroy the movement.

Whoever or whatever is behind it, I see "diversity of tactics" as Orwellian “double speak.”

Start with “diversity,” a term that carries positive connotations in our multi-cultural, increasingly diverse society. To not recognize (some would say "celebrate") diversity is a form of ignorance at best and prejudice at worst.

So those using the phrase “diversity of tactics” are off to an appealing start.

How about “tactics”? The suggestion here is that “tactics” are a proven way to a goal, presumably a common, shared one. Tactics implies that tacticians — experts knowledgeable in tactics — are in control.

There’s a “trust us” aspect to the phrase.

Again, this is all sounds good, but is it?

Will using “a diversity of tactics” in fact help Occupy achieve its goals?

Of course Occupy has never been explicit in stating its goals, just as it has never offered an identifiable public leadership. Still, the movement’s single most prominent goal would seem to be ending inequity — in education, justice, opportunity etc.

Will a “diversity of tactics,” including violence, move our society toward less inequality?

No way. In a media-defined world portrayed by carefully selected compelling images, conflict is the predominant public narrative. Visual violence attracts attention to itself, not the issues that have sparked it.

Moreover, if violence actually did serve Occupy’s stated ends, the movement would then rely on violence in the future. It’s the old story of violence breeding violence.

And make no mistake, those advocating a “diversity of tactics” are condoning violence, unwittingly misdirecting public attention and opinion, and undercutting their own cause.

It is time for the Occupy movement state unequivocally its opposition to all forms of violence and disassociate the movement from those who practice i.

The diversity that the movement needs is a diversity of non-violent tactics. Fortunately, thanks to successful liberation and rights movements, there is no shortage of them.

"Just like ringing a bell"

Recently I’ve had this feeling that there’s a jazz pianist locked inside of me trying to get out. Of course the feeling occurs when I’m listening to the likes of Oscar Peterson, Billy Taylor, Bill Evans, John Lewis, Ray Bryant or Gene Harris. Increasingly my listening happens through my iPod as I’m jogging along trying to stay limber and fit.

My locked-up-jazz-pianist feeling is one of later life’s nagging little regrets. It isn’t all-consuming and besides I suppose that I could even take a “fun run” at dispelling it by...what? Taking lessons as I approach my eighth decade?

Not impossible but unlikely.

This morning I was vaguely communing with my inner jazz pianist while listening intently to changes in a spare and perfect Count Basie riff. The iPod was in its randomizing “shuffle” mode. Suddenly, after the pause following Basie’s little opus, Johnny Winter’s pounding version of “Johnny B. Goode” popped up on the play list.

Way down Louisiana close to New Orleans
Way back up in the woods among the evergreens
There stood a log cabin made of earth and wood
Where lived a country boy named Johnny B. Goode
He never learned to read or write so well
But he could play a guitar just like ringing a bell....

His mother told him someday he would be a man
And he would be the leader of a big old band.
Many people coming from miles around
To hear him play his music when the sun go down
Maybe someday your name would be in lights
Saying Johnny B. Goode tonight!

Oddly the line that jumped out at me was “He never learned to read or write so well.”

Imagine. There’s a trade-off, I thought. What if I had “never learned to read or write so well” but could play the piano “just like ringing a bell.”

What if I had to choose? What difference would it make? Would the wisdom of the choice be determined by whether my name “would be in lights”? Or was there something more here? Emerson and Thoreau perhaps. Or Hemingway or Baldwin or Orwell.

To me, the story of Johnny B. Goode is a story of success and failure. It doesn’t consider Johnny’s regrets in later life because “he never learned to read or write so well.” Who would he be if he had written and read well?

Then again, perhaps “playing a guitar just like ringing a bell” was enough. We don’t regret what we don’t know. (Question for another time: If ignorance is bliss, what is knowledge?)

For me, simply playing and having my name in lights would not have been enough — knowing what I do know from reading, and, yes, the challenges of writing.

Still, thanks to the Johnny B. Goodes (and the Johnny Winters and the Chuck Berrys) and the Basies and Petersons, I have music in my head.

Come to think of it, why not do it all? Find music in the words — and words in the music.

Tested for Ten

I recently came across the following question on a test.

Name 10 of the most influential people of the 20th Century and, in three sentences or less for each person, explain who the person is and the impact he or she had.

As it turned out, I wasn’t taking the test, but I tried to imagine what I would write if I were.

The key word, of course, is “influential.” To whom? Are the sheer numbers of those influenced important? Influenced how? For good or bad?

For me, personally, I’d list my parents, who lived entirely within the 20th Century. My dad was a urologist; my mom was a kind of amateur mystic and, well, Mom. For better or worse, I am what I am because of them. Hey, I owe my existence to them. Now that’s influence.

But I think the test designers had something else in mind. They wanted to learn about “influential people” who might test awareness beyond the test taker’s mother, father, sisters, brothers, aunts, uncles, teachers, Little League coaches and friends.

I’m also thinking that the test givers might be weary of some candidates whom all the other test takers are certain to mention. Folks like FDR and MLK.

Consider going for surprising, but none-the-less, valid candidates, like Edward Bernays, the “Father” of Public Relations, or “Big Brother,” Orwell’s fictional creation who has taken on a life of his own, or Yogi Berra, seer of the not-so-obvious obvious.

Then there’s the question, what does “of the 20th Century” mean? Could a candidate live previous to the 20th Century to influence it? Several religious figures (Jesus, the Buddha, Mohammed) come to mind. And what about Marx, Locke, Thoreau and Rousseau? They are alive and well in today’s world.

But enough question begging. At some point the test-taker must set pen to paper.

Here are ten, in no particular order and in much less than three sentences:

Walt Disney, because everyone needs a fantasy or two — or two hundred.

Jonas Salk, because everyone needs a life and his vaccine saved millions of them

The Wright Brothers, because we need to get around, fast and faster. (or do we?)

Hugh Hefner, because we need to be OK with sex.

Rosa Parks, because we ALL should be able to sit anywhere we want.

George Orwell, because we need unvarnished truth-tellers — and clarity.

Adolf Hitler, because humanity has a Dark Side and (still) needs to learn how to oppose with it through some means short of war.

Lee Harvey Oswald (or James Earl Ray), because a single bullet can, alas, change history.

Mohandas Gandhi, because virtue has nothing to do with money or possessions, and everything to to do with spirit and justice.

Louis Armstrong, because who and where would we be without music?


That’s a list, not THE list.

What’s yours?

Pastor/Journalist in Palestine

Some years back I met Wayne Smith, a pastor at Praise Covenant Church in Tacoma, Washington, through my wife. I took an instant liking to him for his sincerity, candor and clarity of spirit.

Last December he and his wife, Ruth, embarked on a four-month mission to the West Bank. Wayne has been blogging as a witness and a journalist there.

I strongly recommend visiting his blog site. His reporting is rock-solid, eye-witness journalism. Often he takes the reader right down to ground level, as he did in his short essay about boundary stones as ominous Israeli warnings, as affronts to Palestinian pride and as telling historical markers referenced in the Bible.

I don't say this lightly when I suggest that Wayne Smith's reporting reminds me of George Orwell's essays describing the wounds of injustice and tyranny in British-ruled India, Burma and Fascist Spain.

In his classic essay "Why I write," Orwell noted the primacy of political purpose to his writing. When he lacked such purpose, he admitted to writing "lifeless" prose.

Wayne's prose is palpably driven with purpose — spiritual and, inevitably, political.

Lifeless it is not.

On calling ourselves "friends"

Governments, political groups and corporations are notorious for twisting the meaning of words. “The Defense Department,” "The Justice Department," “The Central Intelligence Agency,” “Pro-Choice,” “Pro-Life,” “Death taxes,” “Outsourcing,” “Downsizing,” etc.

In “1984,” George Orwell created an entire society reshaped by twisted meanings.

And, of course, technology is constantly changing meaning. We don’t really “watch” television. Most often we gaze uncritically at it. With audience surveys, television is really "watching" us.

We don’t talk “on” the phone; we talk through it.

Thanks to Facebook, one of the most blatant twists in meaning in recent years has been to the word “friend.”

Clearly not all our Facebook “friends” are friends. Most are, at best, acquaintances or connections. Many are institutional, consumer connections.

We know this, but strangely, we have gone along with this bizarre misappropriation of the word "friend." What choice do we have? We are increasingly living in a machine-defined world.

I don’t want to come down too hard on Facebook’s use of the word “friends” because I happen to belong to a group called “The Religious Society of Friends.” We are more commonly known as “Quakers.”

I fear that, in our own way, we Quakers have also done a grave disservice to the word “friend.”

The origin of the use of “Friends” to describe Quakers comes from the New Testament. The reference is from John 15:15 where Jesus tells his disciples “Henceforth I call you not servants; for the servant knoweth not what his lord doeth: but I have called you friends….”

Note that Jesus did not say “Friends” with a capital, as it is written in “Religious Society of Friends.” He said lower-case “friends.” It’s fair to assume he meant it exactly that way. It wasn’t just a manner of speaking. He considered the disciples to be his friends, and he wanted them to see him in the same way.

“friends,” with all that means. Think about what it means to be a friend.

The problem is that whenever I speak to my fellow Quakers as a group, I address them as “Friends,” with a capital. Many Quakers do this. “Friends, let’s consider the best way to proceed etc.” Or we might refer to a fellow Quaker as a “Friend.” Sometimes we say that we should act “in the manner of Friends.”

It would often help more if we simply acted in the manner of, lower case, friends.

Somewhere along the way what Jesus meant by “friend” became an institutional relationship defined by “Friend.” The word was drained of its meaning.

Recently I’ve shared my concern about this change with my fellow Quakers. I've urged Friends to become reacquainted as friends. “Friends” should be friends. Indeed early Quakers in the mid-Seventeenth Century intended exactly what Jesus did when they chose the name from the Scriptures.

To preserve their intention — to preserve true friendship — those early Quakers would have done well to have written the fledgling group’s name as “The religious society of friends.”

But organizations, like technology, change the meaning of words. They twist meaning. It’s up to us to retain it to safeguard meaning in our lives.

A Hillsdale Library display for Orwell

For the month of September, I’ve been given use of a display niche at the entrance to the Hillsdale Branch Library. I’ve chosen to devote it to George Orwell.

With the help of librarian Tom French, I installed the display this morning.

The little exhibit showcases several books from my personal library and a green Remington 3 portable typewriter from my collection. Orwell used a Remington 3, although his was a no-nonsense black one, no doubt flaked with cigarette ashes.

The “news peg” for the exhibit is the 60th anniversary of the publication of “1984.”

If I can introduce just one or two young readers to Orwell, I will consider the exhibit a success.

Here are short descriptions I’ve included in the case:

George Orwell and “1984”

Sixty years ago, George Orwell’s dark, political novel “1984” was published. In it, Orwell, whose real name was Eric Arthur Blair, warns of a totalitarianism rooted in manipulating language — and hence history and thought itself. The totalitarian language was called “Newspeak.” It turned meaning on its head. For instance, people were taught that “war” meant “peace.” “Hate” meant “love.” The book has given us such lasting terms as “Big Brother” and “doublethink.”

Orwell wrote the book in 1948 as he was dying of tuberculosis. Here’s how the American author Garrison Keillor describes Orwell’s experience writing “1984.”

Orwell knew he didn't have much time left to write the book, so he wrote constantly, even when his doctors forbade him to work. They took away his typewriter [Exhibitor’s note: The model was a Remington portable similar to the one shown here]. When he switched to a ballpoint pen, they put his arm in plaster.

When he finished it, he told his publisher that 1984 was too dark a novel to make much money, but it became an immediate best seller.

He died a few months after it was first published, but it has since been translated into 62 languages and has sold more than 10 million copies. With all of his work still in print in so many different languages, critics have estimated that every year 1 million people read George Orwell for the first time.

Orwell said, "The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns ... instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish squirting out ink." And he said, "If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear."

Orwell died on January 21, 1950 at the age of 46.

A fascination with Orwell

Dozens of books have been written about George Orwell. These are just a few.

Orwell, who died at age 46, threw himself into his short life, forcing himself to live at its most challenging extremes.

He wrote about all of it, whether it was serving as a colonial police officer in Burma (“Burmese Days,” “Shooting and Elephant” and “A Hanging”). living in poverty in Paris and London (“Down and Out in Paris and London”), exploring the coal miner’s plight, above and deep below ground (“The Road to Wigan Pier”), or fighting, and nearly dying, in the Spanish Civil War (“Homage to Catalonia”).

Through it all, he sought to find the essence of his experience and to convey it to others. To read Orwell is to come face to face with life’s complexities, paradoxes, dangers and enigmas.

Two generations of writers have revered his work — and his life. They see in Orwell an uncompromising spirit whose vision and writing ranged from the grit of poverty, to the defilement of language and meaning (which we have come to call “Orwellian”), to the plight and fragility of democracy.

Nearly 60 years after his death, Orwell continues to provoke. His writing raises profound, often disturbing questions about our world. As we seek answers, we remain deeply engaged with Orwell and his writing.

Are electronic books mere "Kindling"?

The “Kindle” name for Amazon’s portable electronic reading device is suddenly leading to some frightening associations.

They stem from Amazon’s recent deleting of sold copies of Orwell’s “1984” from customers’ Kindles. Seems the electronic copies were sold by a bookseller who didn’t have the rights to Orwell’s classic.

The episode reveals that “buyers” of Kindle books are really lessees of them, and Amazon can cancel the lease at any time.

In the world of real books, of course, what you buy is what you own — and can sell. (Local note: that's why our Hillsdale used book sale was such a success yesterday.)

It turns out that a Kindle’s content is, as they say, “tethered” to Amazon. It might be more accurate to say that Amazon customers themselves are tethered to the retailer because the Seattle-based on-line merchandiser has a direct line to data about customers’ buying (and reading) habits. To say nothing of their credit card numbers.

That’s scary enough. But here is a technology that is frighteningly Orwellian, hence the irony that Orwell’s “1984” was the deleted book. How Big Brother would have loved to have the power Amazon does.

If this technology supplants real books and falls into the wrong hands, books and the free expression of ideas in “print,” are doomed. They can be expunged at the push of a button in some governmental, or corporate, “Ministry of Truth.”

The name “Kindle” in this context brings to mind another classic on the subject of thought control: Ray Bradbury’s “Fahrenheit 451,” in which mass book burnings forced “renegade” scholars and historians to memorize books in order to preserve them.

Of course computers also “memorize” books — until they don’t.

The specter of war gets Orwell's attention

Over on the Orwell Diaries, George is allowing the storm clouds of war to blot out his sunny fixation on egg production, hollyhocks and ducklings.

The diary, which recorded Orwells thoughts 70 years ago, day by day, is an astonishing document — as much for what it doesn't say as for what it does.

Orwell locks onto ominous events by pasting often obscure newspaper clippings into his diary. You can see the faded newspaper stories on the web site. He has little to say about them. He treats them almost as journalistic specimens. It's as if suddenly, out of the corner of the gardener's eye, he senses an intruder, plucks it up for inspection and then pins it to his ever-growing collection of pests.

It's not that he has been naive these many weeks. Quite the opposite. Read "Homage to Catalonia" for proof positive that Orwell had grabbed danger and combat by the throat. And fighting had grabbed him by the throat. In the ranks of the anarchists in the Spanish Civil War, he took a bullet in the neck.

Still, the reader wonders why for days on end in the spring of 1939, Orwell, one of the sharpest observers of the 20th Century, shared so little of his worldly awareness in his journal.

Now, ever so slowing, that is changing. The danger is creeping into is pastoral writing. It's curious, and even haunting, to read.

Orwell off-limits

Yesterday I wrote of duplicates and triplicates in my library that I have culled for the July 26 Hillsdale Used Book Sale.

I confess there is some redundancy in my library that I overlook and did not mention. When it comes to pruning, I leave be the literary branches of George Orwell.

I have five anthologies of Orwell’s essays. One brick of a book includes 240 essays. It’s depth and scope might lead me to justifiably get rid of the other four relatively slim anthologies. Then again, each smaller edition, in addition to being transportable, has its own introduction and insight into George Orwell, whose real name was Eric Blair.

No, Orwell, whose birthday happens to be today, is spared my pruning. His work anchors my library, his insights inspire my thinking, and his prose is as clear and direct as any I know.

Blair was born 106 years ago today and died in 1950, the year following the publication of “1984.” I have three copies of the dystopian classic. One is the American Book-of-the Month Club edition published in that first year of publication, 1949. The flyleaf reads, “The new novel by George Orwell is the major work towards which all his previous writing has pointed.”

I’m not certain I agree, but the anonymous notion invites consideration and discussion.

The other two “1984”s are editions of “1984 — Text, Sources and Criticism” edited by the great critic Irving Howe. The first appeared in 1963; second in 1982.

(A personal note: Howe edited the first edition while at Stanford as a “scholar in residence.” At the time I was an undergraduate at Stanford. I remember attending a free-form lecture/discussion by Howe, who astonished me by speaking off-the-cuff in flawless, rounded, publishable prose. On the fly, he fine-edited his words to a finished draft in the moment between mind and mouth.)

I have 37 books by or about Eric Blair. During pruning for future book sales, I’m certain my “Orwellian” volumes will remain. If anything, I expect their numbers to grow.

A curiosity on the Web is “Orwell’s Blog,” which posts 70-year-old entries from Blair’s journals. Here is his entry for his 36th birthday, which, oddly, he doesn’t mention. But the posted comments to the blog most certainly do. One writer notes that at the time, Hitler’s shadow was falling over Europe, yet in his journal, Orwell seems oblivious (which he certainly wasn’t). The June 25, 1939 entry, like so many others, is fixated on nearby flora and his hens’ egg production.

It’s all quite strange, suggesting yet another dimension and meaning to the term “Orwellian.”

Egged on by Orwell's eggs

If you’ve been tracking George Orwell’s 70-year-old journal entries, which are being cleverly presented as a blog, you will have found a succession of the same two-word daily offerings.

The two words are “One egg.”

It’s Orwell’s running tally of his hen’s production. Fascinating!

The fun part is reading the comments.

Today the two words elicited 27 responses.

I’ve been tempted to write “One Egg is Watching YOU,” but I’ll keep it in The Red Electric family.

Of course there is also “All eggs are equal, but some eggs are more equal than others. Take today’s for instance….”

Anyway, visit the site and read the comments. They’re a kick.

Sound-bite socialism and other political follies

If American politics ever could get beyond sound bites, smears and gotchas, we might actually learn something.

The good news is that Prof. Barack Obama may, just may, be on the verge of clearing the air and opening the discussion.

John McCain and his campaign are another story.

McCain’s accusing Barack Obama of “spreading the wealth” is a case in point. Of course the "wealth" of the working and middle classes (it's called "labor") have been spread to the rich since the dawn of capitalism.

Look no farther than Cindy McCain, who inherited her millions from her father’s beer distribution company, which, in turn, was made profitable by its hundreds of truck drivers, mechanics, warehouse workers and accountants.

They worked; she profited and spread that profit to John.

John McCain clearly doesn’t have a problem with spreading the wealth. His problem is with spreading it equitably and fairly.

Which brings us to the McCain campaign’s charge that Obama is a socialist.

Here is part of the Wikipedia definition of socialism:

Socialists mainly share the belief that capitalism unfairly concentrates power and wealth among a small segment of society that controls capital and creates an unequal society.

Sound familiar? The definition continues:

All socialists advocate the creation of an egalitarian society, in which wealth and power are distributed more evenly, although there is considerable disagreement among socialists over how, and to what extent this could be achieved.

For most Europeans, this, and the guarantee of certain state-provided services such as health care, are givens. Frankly, recalling Christ's admonition to the rich man, I don't see how it is possible to be a true Christian without being a socialist. Which may be why Europe developed "Christian Socialist" parties. Shocking!

I am particularly fond of line from George Orwell that American conservatives strangely ignore even as they worship him. Wrote Orwell, “Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism, as I understand it.” (from “Why I write”)

“As I understand it” leaves room for healthy debate. But in America, socialism in any form is considered unworthy of discussion.

Which brings us to George W. Bush, who is nationalizing large chunks of the financial industry. Could it be that our worst president will in the dying days of his administration turn out to be a socialist? He clearly is willing to use socialist tools as part of his effort to save the wreck wrought by American capitalism.

And yet we don’t hear the McCain campaign calling the Bush Administration’s policies socialistic.

Wonder why….

Maybe it’s because McCain voted to support the socialistic bail-out. Or maybe it’s because McCain values the other non-socialistic parts of the Bush program: the tax cuts for the rich, the cronyism on behalf of Enron and Halliburton and Big Oil, the exporting of American jobs, the union busting, the efforts to privatize Social Security, and the resistance to truly reform health care.

Why can’t we delve into such matters? Why is political discourse here so slap dash and innuendo laden? Why is it that a word like “socialism” is used pejoratively and so little understood? Why can’t we explore the ways that wealth has been spread in one direction, from the assembly line to the executive suite with its stock options, seven- and eight-digit salaries and golden parachutes?

Is the problem with the corporate-owned media as I’ve suggested? Is it in our educational system? Is it in political pandering and timidity? Or is it a part of American isolationism, exceptionalism and arrogance?

When can we begin to talk openly and honestly about ideas well worth exploring?

Next Wednesday?

Orwell's "Blog"

"As the corpse went past the flies left the restaurant table in a cloud and rushed after it, but they came back a few minutes later."

So began George Orwell's essay "Marrakech." He wrote it in the spring of 1939, as Europe, and ultimately the world, slid into war.

I cite the essay because it sprang from remarkable writing by Orwell that can now be found on line as Orwell's "blog."

The Orwell Prize is posting "Orwell's Diary" entries day by day as he wrote them 70 years ago. "Visitors" to the blog find Orwell writing in mid-September about Morocco. Orwell and his wife, Eileen, stayed in the French colony for a year while he recovered from being shot in the throat during the Spanish Civil War.

He wrote "Marrakech" in the spring of 1939 so I anticipate that snippets of the essay will turn up in his journal entries before our own spring of 2009.

Like the diary entries of Thoreau, another avid journal writer, many Orwell entries are detailed botanical and biological observations. You could probably write about book titled "Orwell, the naturalist" based on his journal and many of his less well-known essays. You could certainly do that, if it hasn't been done, for Thoreau.

The publishers of the "Orwell's Diary" assure us in their comments and notes that politics become more prominent in journal as the war grows near.

As with other blogs, readers are invited to comment. Some are elated to feel the immediacy of Orwell's writing in blog form. Others are clearly frustrated that, so far at least, there is so little evidence of the kind of insightful writing, and thinking, found in "1984."

As I read these entries, I see Orwell at that restaurant table, writing in his journal, swatting away flies. They are the same flies that trail the corpse before buzzing back to the writer's table. We'll see whether he made note of them in his journal.

Noted or not, they were there and came to be the kind of telling detail that marked Orwell's masterful work.

Stepping out with Neil Postman

I’ve been “reading” Neil Postman’s “Amusing Ourselves to Death.” I put “reading” in quotes because I’m really being read to — by an audio book “edition.”

I fear, given Postman’s passion for the printed word, that he would have looked down on my being read to. In audio form, his words march inexorably on, offering no opportunity to stop, ponder, re-read, check sources, etc.

So be it. I’ve chosen an Audio Book “edition” of Postman’s indictment of television because it can accompany me on my 10,000-Step hikes. That way I can exercise body and mind at the same time.

Postman is a great workout. Lucid, provocative, glib and insightful.

The introduction to “Amusing Ourselves to Death” offers an example. Here is Postman contrasting the worlds of Orwell’s “1984” and Huxley’s “Brave New World,” and declaring Huxley’s futuristic vision frighteningly close to what we have in the Television (and, I might add, Computer) Age.

“What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban books for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we could become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy… In short Orwell feared that what we hate will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we love will ruin us … This book (“Amusing Ourselves to Death”) is about the possibility that Huxley, not Orwell, was right.”

As I hike around the neighborhood, iPod buds stuffed in my ears, I’m certain that I am closer to Huxley’s zoned out, somnambulant world. But when I think about the perversions and atrocities of the Bush Administration, its torture chambers, its manipulations of the language, its Big Brother eavesdropping intrusions into our private lives, I’m not so sure.

We may have one foot in 1984 and the other in Brave New World. And we are sinking fast.

Postman, who died in 2003, would no doubt have been pleased that I am here writing, pondering and trying to bring my own understanding to his premise.

If an Audio Book of “Amusing Ourselves to Death” delivered me this point, it’s all to the good.

An Orwellian Writer's Almanac tribute

I have buried in my stack of well-worn t-shirts, one I rarely wear. I displays a large caricature of a gaunt George Orwell. A cigarette droops from his lips, and a giant depiction of Big Brother looms behind him.

For some reason my hand went to it today, and I put it on even though it made me look slightly cartoonish. I’m wearing it now and will for the rest of the day, for reasons that follow....

Greeting the day with Orwell's image on my chest, I did my pre-Cheerios-and-coffee e-mail check largely to read the daily “Writer’s Almanac” from Garrison Keillor. Yes, you can have the written script of the NPR “Writer’s Almanac” e-mailed to you. I recommend it, though, as you will see, it needs to be read skeptically.

After offering the customary poem, the almanac launched into it’s main item:

“It's the birthday of the man who wrote Animal Farm (1945) and 1984 (1949), George Orwell, born Eric Blair ….”

How serendipitous.

I’m noting in my PDA that June 25th is Orwell/Blair’s birthday. The note will include a reminder to wear the Orwell t-shirt to mark the occasion.

Keillor’s short sketch couldn’t possibly have done justice to Orwell’s sprawling, heroic life, although the item included a unfamiliar (to me at least) anecdote or two.

Sadly, Keillor also did Orwell an Orwellian injustice when he distorted a quote from Orwell’s famous essay, “Why I write.”

Here’s the quote as presented:

"Every line of serious work that I have written [since the Spanish Civil War] has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism."

And that’s where Keillor ended it, with a period. At the very least he should have inserted ellipses because here is the rest of the sentence:

“…against totalitarianism, and for democratic socialism, as I understand it.” (the emphasis is Orwell’s)

Yes, Orwell was a democratic socialist, and yes, my fellow patriotic Americans, democracy and socialism can be compatible. The question is, in light of our current predicament: Are democracy and capitalism compatible, if capitalism is indeed what our economy is? Or does capitalism simply buy off democracy?

If you read Orwell’s works and learn more about his life, you’ll understand why he was a democratic socialist.

Keillor would do well to do so.

Meanwhile, Happy Birthday, George.

The Death of War

Reading a New York Times business page (business?) story in today's paper about how the media are turning their backs on our wars, I was reminded of “1984,” George Orwell’s classic cautionary novel.

In the book, Oceania had been at war for so long that its people (the proles) simply accepted the propagandistic slogan “War is Peace.”

War had subsumed its opposite and become a meaningless, soul-numbing given. It was not even a question of acceptance. It simply was.

You can imagine the proles’ acceptance as beginning with what is happening to our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. By degrees, Oceania’s wars became no longer newsworthy and the redrafting of history began. (How rarely do we see the Iraq war discussed in terms of Iraq’s vast oil reserves and the Bush administration’s oil lust.)

Here is Orwell on how wars are manipulated and forgotten:

Oceania was at war with Eastasia. Oceania had always been at war with Eastasia. A large part of the political literature of five years was now completely obsolete. Reports and records of all kinds, newspapers, books, pamphlets, films, sound-tracks, photographs - all had to be rectified at lightning speed. Although no directive was ever issued, it was known that the chiefs of the Department intended that within one week no reference to the war with Eurasia, or the alliance with Eastasia, should remain in existence anywhere.

Memorial Day is an antidote to an Orwellian world. We set it aside to remember war and its huge costs. To honor the dead. To make their sacrifice visible to those who would forget or ignore.

This day. A single day. Once a year.

And, in contrast to so many other days in recent months, this day often inspires remarkable journalism — much of it about the sacrifice, and yes, the waste, of war. The op-ed pages of today’s Oregonian have three such pieces of writing.

The lead editorial, “One of many, one of one,” and two columns, “Surviving in the not-so-new Iraq” (found elsewhere on the web) and “Sifting memories from a lifetime ago.”

If you have time for only one, read the last as well as that first New York Times' story.

Memorial Day also should honor not only those who fought, suffered and died in wars, but those who fought war itself. In Christ's words: “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be known as the children of God.” They fought war by telling of its horrors. By protesting. By going to jail. And, yes, by dying.

I began by saying that Orwell's fiction described wars as simply far-away forgotten, endless parts of existence.

For many, wars are not far-away, but they are endless parts of existence. They can not be forgotten. They a seared on the soul. Those who fight wars know that even after the victory, truce, evacuation or retreat, wars never end. For hundreds of thousands of veterans and their families, wars rage on in their lives and in their hearts.

I pray that some Memorial Day we will mark the death of war. That amidst the sad remembrances, we will have cause for celebrating the end of the killing — that we all, here and around the world, shall reaffirm the pledge of Chief Joseph to “Fight no more forever.”

Forging a stage to plunge into battle

George Orwell, Politics and the English Language:

Never use a metaphor, simile or other figure of speech that you are used to seeing in print.

Strunk and White, The Elements of Style, from Section V, An approach to style:

Rule 18: Use figures of speech sparingly. … When you use metaphor, do not mix it up. That is, don’t start by calling something a swordfish and end by calling it an hourglass.

From the Front page of Sunday’s New York Times:

Senator Barack Obama won a commanding victory over Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton in the South Carolina Democratic primary on Saturday, forging a coalition of support among black and white voters in a contest that sets the stage for a state-by-state fight for the party’s presidential nomination.

In a bitter campaign here infused with discussions of race, Mr. Obama’s convincing victory puts him on equal footing with Mrs. Clinton —with two wins each in early-voting states — and gives him fresh momentum as the contest plunges into a nationwide battle over the next 10 days.

Metaphor, figure or speech and cliche tally:

“commanding victory”
“forging a coalition”
“sets the stage”
“fight”
“equal footing”
“fresh momentum”
“plunges into battle”