George Orwell died at age 47, awfully young to know so much about subterfuge– the overuse of over and over and over again messages, similar to the incessant and hellish tv commercials by Obama or Mitt that interfere with music, with game shows, with family shows, with mystery shows… We MUST see over and over the faces, and we MUST be sentenced to hear the same voices over and over, including “the annoying woman” voice snarking around” that we have already seen FAR too much of… and yet there they are plastered everywhere including right there in the midst of one’s favorite cops show.
Here is Orwell and part of his first chapter of 1984 which was published after WWII, in 1949. The protagonist Winston (a heroic name as per Winston Churchill) Smith (a common moniker making Winston just like any other poor sorry sob)… is living in a land taken over by “the party”…. that supports amongst other things, eternal and unending war.
As the scene opens, Winston comes to his dreary dreariness, followed about by posters everywhere of the Big Brother who is smarmy and whom one cannot get away from. Most telling in these few paragraphs is the oddity of the ‘telescreen’ … a television-like hole in the wall through which is broadcast preposterous propaganda…. and though the ‘telescreen’ droning it’s bs (in every evirons) can be turned down in volume, one cannot EVER turn it off. The talking, blathering telescreen continues to burn bandwidth and drone on with its lies and prevarications.
Winston is starved– for food, warmth, and truth, none of which are offered in his land that is constantly spinning the news into what Big Brother wants people to believe, rather than the true state of affairs. The point is to keep people either asleep or arguing with one another about what it all REALLY means… but never seeing the issue which is the will to power in the idea of Big Brother himself. So instead of attacking the actual issue, the populace is cowed, angry and cowed, sad and cowed, desparate and cowed… and the poor become more and more pathetic and the progenitors of Big Brother become more and more handsomely game-show host-like.
In this sense, 1984 could easily be re-named 2012.
Chapter One: 1984 by George Orwell
“It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.
Winston Smith, his chin nuzzled into his breast in an effort to escape the
vile wind, slipped quickly through the glass doors of Victory Mansions,
though not quickly enough to prevent a swirl of gritty dust from entering
along with him.
“The hallway smelt of boiled cabbage and old rag mats. At one end of it a
coloured poster, too large for indoor display, had been tacked to the wall.
It depicted simply an enormous face, more than a metre wide: the face of a
man of about forty-five, with a heavy black moustache and ruggedly handsome
features. Winston made for the stairs. It was no use trying the lift. Even
at the best of times it was seldom working, and at present the electric
current was cut off during daylight hours. It was part of the economy drive
in preparation for Hate Week. The flat was seven flights up, and Winston,
who was thirty-nine and had a varicose ulcer above his right ankle, went
slowly, resting several times on the way.
On each landing, opposite the lift-shaft, the poster with the enormous face gazed from the wall. It was one of those pictures which are so contrived that the eyes follow you about when you move. BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU, the caption beneath it ran.
“Inside the flat a fruity voice was reading out a list of figures which had
something to do with the production of pig-iron. The voice came from an
oblong metal plaque like a dulled mirror which formed part of the surface
of the right-hand wall. Winston turned a switch and the voice sank
somewhat, though the words were still distinguishable. The instrument
(the telescreen, it was called) could be dimmed, but there was no way of
shutting it off completely.
He moved over to the window: a smallish, frail
figure, the meagreness of his body merely emphasized by the blue overalls
which were the uniform of the party. His hair was very fair, his face
naturally sanguine, his skin roughened by coarse soap and blunt razor
blades and the cold of the winter that had just ended.”
(to be continued)