Reading "1984" in 2024: A Rambling Rumination

It's long been a commmnplace to attach the Orwellian label to everything  from mass surveillance to censorship to the endless war machine. Centered in a post-capitalist post apocalyptic future, George Orwell's dystopian novel has something for everybody. 

I just finished rereading the book for the fourth or fifith time since I first picked it up as a teenager in the 60s. Back then, I viewed it as the perfect description of the regimented public education system. I saw in the novel a mirror image of my high school, an ugly, dimly lit concrete example of Brutalist architecture. Not for nothing did those of us who fancied ourselves rebels dub it The Brain Factory.

At the time, I didn't pay much attention to ihe name of my school - Indian Hills High, nestled in a white middle class enclave where virtually every street bore the name of an indigenous nation. There was (still is) an Osage Road, a Cherokee Court, a Lenape LLane and Ramapo Avenue. It makes me cringe every time I think about it.

Fast toward 50 years to old age, and now the novel is a whole lot scarier, morphing from what Might Be to what ot Actually Is. 

I'm a lot more class conscious than I was in my youth. I had not really  noticed in in my prior reading how closely Orwell's fictional class system hewed to our own. In just that one respect, "1984" was entirely, eerily prescient. 

The top One Percent was rendered by Orwell as the "Inner Party." Granted, his version of the ruling oligarchy lived much more materially modest lives than our own Billionaire Class. Even Orwell could not have envisioned Jeff Bezos and his ilk.

His "Outer Party," however, bears an uncanny resemblance to what the late Barbara Ehrenreich called the Professional-Managerial Class: the upper 10 or 15 percent of the population serving the top One Percent 

The novel's antihero, Winston Smith, is very much an integral part of the PCM. Toiling away in the Ministry of Truth, He's the very model of our own modern day corporate media, whose dual function is to destroy the inconvenient past and to mold an alternate reality for the mass consumption of even the lowest rung in the hierarchy known as the "proles." In so doing, these Outer Party members must carefully suppress their own dissenting viewpoints, if any, if they want to survive. Winston Smith, as a careerist member of the PCM media division, was very careful in the beginning to toe the Party line himself, hoping that the Proles would be the ones rise up and revolt. I  can envision dozens of Winston Smiths sitting in their New York Times cubbyholes,, stealthily editing  articles that are, say, not entirely friendly to the establishment. Down the Memory Hole go all narratives referring to Occupied Gaza and Israel's 75 year old history of ethnic cleansing of the native population. The Israeli army obliterating that hospital? Never ven happened. There is now "confidence" from anonymous sources in the Inner Party that Hamas destroyed it with a stray missile.

 Dissenters to Party orthodoxy in Orwell's novel are relegated to the Ministry of Love for deprogramming. In real life, they are similarly disappeared, either by censorship or being  fired from a media job. The thought police ensure that free-thinkers are simply never invited to the panel discussions of Inner Party elites which pose as reporting and journalism.

Orwell's novel describes regular Two-Minute Hate sessions as well as more elaborate Hate Weeks for the masses of proles. For our part, we have Cancel Culture and endless political campaign seasons. And don't forget Shark Week.

 We have tightly orchestrated and controlled elections to put even a faint gloss of democracy on our own de facto oligarchy We in the USA still have a uniparty system divided into two factions, Republicans and Democrats. These factions disagree only around the edges, and mainly in matters of popular culture. For example, if Taylor Swift endorses Joe Biden, Republicans say it spells the end of democracy.

 Proles are urged to blame one bickering party faction or the other, and then to pull the lever accordingly every two and four years to vote against something or someone  - before everything stays the same. The main function of  the Uniparty both in Orwell's fiction and in our own reality, is to divide and conquer the proles, imposing on them an austerity so rigid that it forces them to fight each other for the crumbs.

. The ruler of Orwell's Party is an entity called Big Brother. Nobody has ever actually seen this personage in the flesh, probably because he doesn't actually exist iin the flesh.  He is mainly an Idea. a personification of the permanent ruling Structure. In our "reality-based" version, we're treated to a revolving cast of paternalistic leaders - ReaganBushClintonBushObamaTrumpBiden to name just the most recent actors - who all meld into one blob if you stop to think about it. And the Inner Party is perfectly fine with it. They want you to think of presidents  as personifications of the ideal of the United States of America. Why else would Joe Biden kick off his re-election campaign by evoking George Washington? Continuity of propaganda narrative is all they have to offer.

Just speaking for myself, every time my mind tries to conjure up an image of Joe Biden, I I keep getting the face of Bush the Younger. Maybe it's their similar beady little eyes. Maybe it's the similar contrived folksy demeanors trying to cover up their brutal neoconservative thirst for permanent global hegemony. Maybe it's their low I.Q. fanaticism.

Trump was labeled senile when he confused Nikki Haley and Nancy Pelosi. But aren't they too similar for comfort, each acid-tongued  lady adopting a phony feminist persona with which to scold the Patriarchy in service to the Patriarchy? .

So they want us to think that Election12024 is a consequential death match for democracy or dictatorship, or whatever turns you on. But all it really is,  is an intra-oligarchic brawl between Trump and Biden as persons and party  leaders. It is really about the Inner Party making one of its periodic efforts to win the consent of the governed to give themselves a facade of legitimacy. They don't even much care that those of us in the prole category are increasingly onto their con, particularly those proles born after the brutal final stage of Neoliberal Capitalism. Young people never bought into the quaint and very cruel promise of the American Dream - a concept which had kept their elders more or less asleep these past 40 or 50 years. Now even more elders are beginning to wake up.

It's refreshing that every time Joe Biden gives a campaign speech trying to gin up hate for his opponent, people are showing up to call him out for the genocide in Gaza. His feeble efforts at Orwellian "doublethink" - as, for example,  he claims to champion the reproductive rights of American women at the same time he destroys the reproductive rights of Palestinian women by killing them. This gross display of gross contradictory messaging is not being lost on those dismissed as proles by the Inner Party and their Outer Party sycophants. They are finding it increasingly hard, as Orwell wrote, to be  "competent, industrious and even intelligent within narrow limits" but at the same time to be "credulous and ignorant fanatic(s) whose prevailing moods are fear, hatred, adulation and orgiastic triumph."

"All that is needed is that a state of war should exist.... It is precisely in the Inner Party that war hysteria and hatred of the enemy are strongest... No Inner Party member wavers for an instant in his mystical belief that the war is real."

It reminds me of how often Biden and Antony Blinken and Nancy Pelosi and their mutual Partiers get so emotional whenever they boast about their "unwavering" and "unshakeable" support for a genocide they pretend is a war between two equal combatants. 

It's a wonder their heads don't explode with all that double-thinking effort. Maybe it's because their brains have already collapsed in upon themselves without anybody even noticing.

 Whenever I try to imagine what they could possibly be thinking all I can come up with is is a vast, yawning morass devoid ,of all life and all intellect.