According to reports, about half the people who say they have read Orwell’s 1984 are lying. Sometimes I wish I was one of them. The story has ever after haunted my dreams. The final paragraph still makes me cry.
“He gazed up at the enormous face. Forty years it had taken him to learn what kind of smile was hidden beneath the dark moustache. O cruel, needless misunderstanding! O stubborn, self-willed exile from the loving breast! Two gin-scented tears trickled down the sides of his nose. But it was all right, everything was all right, the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother.”
All options were now absent. Even unfulfilled lust, guilt, and regret. O’Brien and doublethink had triumphed. Winston had dwindled from a naïve yet clear-eyed dilettante into yet another mindless drone. To a starry-eyed teenage reader in the final throes of the cold war, it was a gut-wrenching message.
It served to clearly illustrate for me that the concept of ‘personal’ freedom is largely a misnomer. That John Donne was correct. ‘Every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main.’ That we only get to share the liberties we are happy to grant others.
I read 1984, Catch-22, and One Flew Over the Cuckoo Nest while living in a pump house in the middle of an orchard. It was a period of enforced seclusion and reflection that changed my life. Prior to that spring I had been a committed socialist yet afterwards I became and remain entirely unsure. Carefully and indecisively unsure. I have since forsaken ideology of all stripes. I remain unconvinced. In combination these works of fiction conspired to persuade me that regardless of my own actions, ideas and ambitions – my wellbeing remains utterly contingent on the good grace and favour of others. Moreover, for as long as the mythology of the perfect society reigns supreme, we will all be subject to infrequent bouts of war, famine and pestilence. This is because, while individual humans can be quite charming, when they gather together in packs and begin to chant in unison, they are inevitably scary, and wrong.
As a result, the thing that has shocked me the most about the whole Trump fiasco has little to do with the depths of depravity and silliness associated with Trump and co, but rather the timing. I had thought that we all had a bit longer before the shit was going to hit the fan – again. Silly me.
After all; the end of the great republic period of American corporate imperialism has been approaching apace for the last few decades. But it now appears that a threshold has been breached. It looks as if the ruling class in the USA have now simply thrown aside even the pretense of democracy and so the country has now entered a ‘post-constitutional’ phase. While the billionaires have been in control for the last several election cycles, I really thought it would be a few more years yet before they would so openly play their hand. Ah well. It was nice while it lasted.
When you take the long view, it very soon becomes obvious that periods of relatively-harmony across the world are the aberration. Now it looks like the pax Americana (as with the pax Brittania and the pax Romana) might now be spluttering to an end. Our not-at-all-cherished interregnum of peace is ending. Once again, the various sovereign states around the globe are focusing more on national mythology and disharmony than the cultivation of joint liberties.
Half the American population are now gazing up lovingly at the face of big brother. While here in Oceania the knives are out, the drums are beating, and those who are to ‘blame’ have all been clearly labelled. When America sneezes Australia catches cold; so what happens when the USA turns into a totalitarian state?
Aveagoodweekend.
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Over 30 years ago l spoke at a maths conference , pointing out that chaos theory meant that a stable Utopia was mathematically impossible . Yet still some think we can return to the 50s ? We know the universe exhibits chaos.
“Our not-at-all-cherished interregnum of peace is ending.”
Surely that should have been “interbellum”?
And pax americana was an illusion.
It only applied to vassals of the US, and even those were kept in a constant state of apprehension, fearful of threats that did not exist, at all times ready for war.
In our case, as with the invasion of Vietnam, even jumping in uninvited to show how loyal and despicable we were.
Pax americana is dead?
Most of the world will heave a sigh of relief.
I was hungry for some justice – the best that I could find,
perhaps a pound of jurisprudence from a great judicial mind?
I started in a ghetto
in a forgotten broken mile
it was full of squalid little hovels
and here I shopped a while
I bought a sixpence worth of sympathy
and three pennies worth of tears
a carry-bag of misery
and a basket full of fears
then two dozen long excuses
came so very cheap
so I bought them all unthinkingly
and then went home to sleep
I was hungry for some justice -the best that I could find,
perhaps a pound of jurisprudence from a great judicial mind?
I went searching in a shopping mall
so invitingly secure
there was muzak all around me
and a welcome on the door
and everywhere was shiny
and they were all so very nice
and any justice you care to name
could be bought at any price
but upon awakening next morning
I found to my surprise
I’d bought a trolley full of promises
and a long receipt of lies
I was hungry for some justice – the best that I could find,
perhaps a pound of jurisprudence from a great judicial mind?
So I called upon my chauffeur
and informed him I would dine
then I bought a brace of issues
and some fine expensive wine
And the Club was full of bonhomie
an absolute delight
we partied all that afternoon
and well into the night
and imagine my astonishment
when I awoke upon a cloud?
an Australian in paradise?
it makes me feel so proud.
2004
Steve: you are more than probably right. The pax Romana only really lasted for the period of the five good emperors – which was about a century. The concept of a pax Britannia was invented to celebrate the empire. Pax Americana was (to the best of my knowedge) used in Kerouac somewhere. Then Hunter took it up in his squealing for Nixon series. For me these phrases are just labels for commonplace social narratives and mythologies.
Anyways: I am always well prepared to be wrong if it makes someone else feel happier. But not about my word choice – I meant to infer that I believe we are likely now in a transitional period between ideological (and so political) orders – which I correctly labelled an ‘interregnum’. The problem is actually sloppy editing as I did originally include a paragraph which made all this clear. Then, when removed it left this stranded little echo of another something I might have said.
I recently pointed out in a column that I do not aspire to coherence. As long as it reads well and I can then sleep without nightmares I am happy.
(It also gives me a chance to post some of my poetry and doggerel in the threads.)
11/1/2007 – falling out of love with Thomas Payne
consider
the sweet honey
dripping like venom
from your lips
and you wonder I feel hurt?
Yes I feel petty
belittled
and ashamed
I hate falling out of love
Am I really so flighty?
So damn paltry?
But it hardly matters
I know how I feel.
Oh America
horny tumult of ideas
sexy mass
you bitch
you have turned
you have changed
you have betrayed me
like a scatter of dry leaves
my dreams
have been picked up
and blown away.
bitch!
the truth indivisible:
the treason of the patriots:
no man can own another
and no generation can own the next
I should forgive
kiss and make up
watch my TV, forget the row
but I am hurt
and petty
you said liberty is never granted
only earned
and you were right
Jim, thanks for the clarification.
win jeavons says:
“Yet still some think we can return to the 50s .”
I lived in the 1950’s it was not what those who want to “return” to it think it was unless you were a white wealthy male.
There is also the phenomenon that hath no name, ‘the architecture of influence’ (Jane Mayer) and ‘a long game’ (Nancy McLean); both referring to Atlas-Koch, and indirectly Tanton Networks.
Targeting ageing white, less educated, often middle class and more Christian demographics being leveraged to vote against the future and for the 1950s; before the ‘great replacement’ over the next generation.
Achieved by campaigns including dog whistling of ‘the other’ to induce ‘pensioner populism’, ‘collective narcissism’ and radicalisation amongst middle aged and older; destroying the middle class (Prof. Ian Haney-Lopez & Dame Warsi).
See Putin, Koch’s Tea Party, Orbán, Brexit, Trump, gay marriage plebiscite, The Voice and Trump II; now every effort to platform Dutton and the LNP, Farage and Reform, Afd etc. while Trump et al submit to Putin …..
I don’t see anything in the current state of the world that makes me sigh in relief. Quite the opposite, in fact.
I don’t believe there was ever an ‘interregnum of peace’ in reality. In the alternative, there were just many and various ‘snow jobs’ by those wielding power – the public drumming-up of obeisance and fear to suit the purpose of domination and extraction. A sort of manufacture of moral (or immoral) conformity. It’s hardly the people’s fault, as it is a matter of breadth of perspective. And that is in the main controlled by those wielding power, and the mainstream media barons.
For example, following the 20th century wars, there may have been in the cities of western Europe, talk of reparations and a rapid re-building. But was there any common discussion of the sort of ‘slavery’ of the low-paid eastern Europeans et al, and their other resources used for the re-building, and that their countries (and families) lay in ruin for decades after the west’s wars, languishing, exhausted, without reparations or acknowledgement?
This m.o. has never gone away, it became more insidious and enmeshed with crime under Pax America, albeit, internally they have been wracked with revelations and popular uprisings, soon put down by the hired sheriffs and a regime of brutality.
Sound familiar to us in Oz? Indeed, it may as well be a story of Britain, mythologized in The Adventures of Robin Hood schmoozing us and the anglophone world in the 50s & 60s, but also via much adored versions from the 1930s through to the 1990s. And of course it is far from representative of the real motives and actions of the Crusades and Britain of that time. But for want of the availability of actual evidence and accounts of the time, the screen-story remains rinsed through and deeply embedded in the unread man’s psyche.
The aforesaid story of Orwell’s 1984, written subsequent to Blair’s Spanish Civil War experience, was a great dystopian expansion brought to life by artful extrapolations and exaggerations. First published in 1949, by 1970, it had sold many millions of copies, by 1989 translated into 65 languages. It has never been far from a Best Sellers list somewhere or another, and had a massive resurgence in 2017 after Trump I POTUS. So it appears that it never ventured far from people’s quest to ‘know’ and / or ‘believe’, then settle into some ‘glad I’m OK’ comfort or tolerable cynicism.
Of course the same could be said of the likes of Huxley’s Brave New World, Bulgakov’s The Mater and Margarita, Harrison / Greenberg’s Soylent Green, Elton’s Blind Faith, and even the likes of Blatty’s The Exorcist and oddities like Wilson’s The Mind Parasites. They all take from realities, and apply certain language and motifs to produce a mirage. A mirage that takes us to a future, and appears to satisfy many who don’t want to access their reality-fantasy-absurdity dial, lest they get bound up in endless research, when all they want is a buck.
Skyhooks’ ‘Horror movie, it’s the six-thirty news’ encapsulated the start of a new era, and it’s only been magnified, and used by almost everyone in politics since then. Now we have the world cast by all-powerful Techbros, who have very recently kissed the orange ring of the world according to Trump II.
Who knows what’s next? What will suffice to scare and satisfy the majority on this Earth fashioned as our Colosseum?
Having taught and studied aspects of USA history over time, I recall being thought “odd” for critical comments, analytical and researched attitudes, for “witty” (hah) little bits of anecdote. I’ve toured there in jazz music, meeting all types, wonderful and generous folk as well as narrow and fearful ones. But the USA is a product of evils, accidents, deliberate action to triumph and was made of murder, theft, slavery, violence, crookedness, suckerisms, occupations, intrusions, overbearing wilfulness and much proud indifference. Let us applaud the approach now of the POX Americana.
Oooops stuffed up with my ‘posting’. Where the name says ‘C’ it should be ‘Clakka’
leefe,
I have heard that if you stop rationally considering Homo sapiens (oomuns) as a component of terrestial biology dependent upon existent ecology, and instead embrace the idea that we are but a transient reflection of masculine divinity (ie a drop of sacred sperm from a divine wank), you might feel better about watching us collectively descending into defense mechanisms of aggressively tribalistic primitivism as an adaptation to facing the increasingly intrusive realities of the currently unfolding, self-inflicted mass-extinction event
Apparently, shoving a bunch of crayons into ones own sinus cavity can help with the adaptive process.
I just wish to make a little point that people tend to overlook. Even editors of publishing houses have made this mistake. George Orwell’s novel isn’t called 1984. It is called Nineteen Eighty-four. 1984 is misleading as it tends to make readers think that the novel is set in the year 1984. The novel is said to be a reflection of political conditions as known by Orwell in the year 1948, which interestingly was the year when the United Nations established the declaration of Universal Human Rights, but there is no real reference as to when the story takes place. If anything the novel implies that the time is always the same with an authoritarian boot crushing down on a human face forever.
Numbers play an important role in the novel, from the opening line when a clock strikes thirteen. The numbers of grams in rations which are reported as going up or down depending on how good or ungood the news is but which are in fact always the same. Lottery numbers are the obsession of the proletarian class that keeps them subservient in their hopeless state. And the 2+2=5 theme is surely based on actual Stalinist propaganda posters that declared 2+2=5 referring to five-year plans being achieved in just four years by good working citizens.
Nobody ever spells out the numbers of any given year. I t just doesn’t look right. It is now Two Thousand and Twenty-five, and some politicians expect net zero carbon emissions to be reached by Two Thousand and Fifty. What do you think of Arthur C Clarke’s Two Thousand and One, A Space Odyssey released as a movie by Stanley Kubrick in Nineteen Sixty-eight a year before the Moon Landing in July Nineteen Sixty-nine? Did the war in Ukraine begin in Two Thousand and Fourteen when the Kiev Regime started shelling Ukrainians who refused to stop speaking Russian or in Two Thousand and Twenty-Two when Russia launched its SMO to stop the Kiev regime shelling Ukrainians who refused to stop speaking Russian?
Why is the novel called Nineteen Eighty-four and not 1984? I really don’t know.