Those Were the Days!

The rally concluded, and people began strolling to the buses we had chartered to take them back to their cars.  Suddenly dozens of squad cars appeared, as if from nowhere.  They had been carefully concealed behind buildings surrounding the rally.  We counted hundreds of police from five different agencies.  Many of the squad cars displayed shotguns and contained six police officers in full riot gear, something most people there had seen only in television.  The Redwood City police department and the San Mateo County sheriff's office had prepared an elaborate ambush, and they were obviously disappointed that they had not found a chance to "teach you some patriotism," as one cop yelled at the protesters from a car window.

Only local newspapers reported that the march and rally had taken place, and they underestimated the size of the crowd, reporting that most citizens of Redwood City were hostile to such activities.  Bruce Brugmann, the Redwood City Tribune reporter who had been covering the napalm campaign, became so disgusted by the blatant censorship and and rewriting of his stories that he left to found the radical weekly newspaper the Bay Guardian.  Even a mere twenty miles away, the press and radio in San Francisco imposed a total news blackout.  This did keep many people in ignorance.  But it also educated tens of thousands about the role of the media.  Almost everyone in the area knew that an important event had taken place and could not help but wonder why it was not reported and how many events from other areas were not being reported to us.

The above text is taken from the historian H. Bruce Franklin's account of a rally against napalm production in the Bay Area in 1966, in his book Vietnam and Other American Fantasies (Massachusetts, 2000), pages 87-8.  The book as a whole is very informative.  I decided to read it today after seeing a critique of the first episode of the new Ken Burns-Lynn Novick documentary on the Vietnam War for PBS.  The critique mentioned that

in the 1990s historian H. Bruce Franklin found that most college students recognized the famous image of a prisoner being executed by a man firing a pistol inches away from the victim’s temple. But most of the students believed the shooter was a communist officer, rather that General Nguyen Ngoc Loan, chief of the South Vietnamese national police, an American ally.

This didn't surprise me; it fit with so much else I knew, such as the long and largely successful propaganda campaign to cast the United States as the victim in Vietnam, rather than the victimizer.  Franklin also quotes an amazing speech on the Vietnam war by Barack Obama's role model Ronald Reagan in which, as Franklin points out, "not a single sentence ... is accurate or truthful" (29).  I've seen a similar falsification about the post-9/11 war on terror; it's as if the structure of the scenario is embedded in people's minds, and they need only to insert the names and dates to fit the situation.

But the reason I wanted to quote this particular passage has to do with other misrepresentations of history that I see among many liberals and progressives, including those who are old enough to know better.  The militarization of the police that is presently under way, for example, and the treatment of peaceful dissidents as enemies of the nation who must be crushed, is not as new as many people seem to want to think.  The 3500 or so white, clean-cut, middle-class folks who gathered to object to the production of napalm for use against Vietnamese civilians weren't attacked and beaten by the police that time, though it's clear that the police were hoping for an excuse to do just that.  Later on the police were less restrained.

The other point is the suppression of news of such a rally outside the local newspapers.  Many liberals fondly believe that the mainstream media took an adversary stance toward the government in those days.  That's simply false, though as always even their customary collusion was never abject enough to suit the mighty.  Whatever the flaws of the Internet (and they are many), it makes it much easier to spread information about such actions now.

This greatly offends the sensibilities of the high priests and priestesses of the cult of Expertise.  I've begun grappling with the dreadful apprehension that I may actually have to read Hillary Rodham Clinton's new book.  At first I was skeptical of the brief excerpts I saw online, which were so badly written and downright stupid that they were hard to credit: surely they weren't representative of the whole?  But the more I saw, the more I had to believe that they were.  (See Sam Kriss' account of his own ordeal reading the book here.)  And this bit, widely circulated, is symptomatic:

This is what happens in George Orwell's classic novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, when a torturer holds up four fingers and delivers electric shocks until his prisoner see five fingers as ordered. The goal is to make you question logic and reason and to sow mistrust toward exactly the people we need to rely on: our leaders, the press, experts who seek to guide public policy based on evidence, ourselves.

This Moebius strip of a sentence (well, two sentences) seems not to be atypical of What Happened.  Every quotation I've seen that features a literary allusion shows that she (or her ghostwriters) don't really understand the material they're invoking.  The "torturer" in that scene is a functionary of the "leaders," and his victim is one who has distrusted "the people we need to rely on: our leaders, the press, etc."  The torturer seeks to bring the dissident back into the fold, to trust those whom he should trust in a time of war and peril.  Orwell certainly hoped that his readers would mistrust "our leaders, the press, experts who seek to guide public policy based on evidence, ourselves."  (Ourselves?  Does Clinton mean the rabble there, or Herself and the other wise elites "we need to rely on"?)  For that matter, doesn't Clinton want us to mistrust our Supreme Leader Donald Trump, the press that made people dislike and distrust her, and ourselves if we find that we disbelieve Hillary Clinton?

Oh, it's true that Americans have come to distrust our government and other institutions over the past half-century.  H. Bruce Franklin reports the results of a poll that tracks the growth of this distrust since 1958: "In 1958 ... over three fourths (76.3 percent) of the American people believed that the government was run for the benefit of all, while only 17.6 percent believed that it was run by a few big interests" (43).  By 1994 the numbers had flipped: "76 percent expressed this profound distrust of the government, while a mere 19 perccnt still clung to the belief that they lived in a representative democracy" (46).  This is bad news -- how long can a country survive when its citizens have so little trust in their government? -- but for people like Hillary Clinton, the remedy is more trust in our national institutions; it is unthinkable that those institutions should be more trustworthy.  Instead we citizens must believe in our leaders' probity, which is not much more plausible than that five fingers are four.

An Enemy of the Sheeple

Someone I know posted this meme to Facebook the other day.  The best part of it, of course, is the irony of someone bitching about social media on social media, denouncing those who won't look up from their screens while keeping her eye glued to the screen to search for memes to show how woke she is.  You can never go wrong attacking Kids Today for real or fancied Internet abuse; it goes viral even after it's been debunked -- and who makes it go viral?  People with smartphones, of course.  Old people with smartphones.

A close second is that the supposed Orwell quotation is not actually by Orwell.  According to Snopes, it's cobbled together from some passages in Nineteen Eighty-Four for a 2017 stage version of the novel.  The reference to people looking up from their screens is a giveaway, since Orwell's telescreens were on the wall, like today's flat-screen TVs.  Whoever adapted it changed it to make it into a reference to smartphones.

I pointed this out to the friend who'd posted it.  Though she didn't get pissy over the correction, she replied that she hadn't checked the accuracy of the quote, she just posted it because she "liked the sentiment."

While the attribution is not unimportant, it's more important to me that the sentiment is bogus. The Internet, cell phones, and social media have often been used to organize resistance to unjust systems: from the Sanctuary movement to the Arab Spring to Occupy to the movement that helped bring down President Park in South Korea this year. True, many people just watch cat videos and such, but if they didn't have smart phones they'd be watching soap operas or reading Harlequin Romances and dime novels, or playing Candy Crush, or going to bear-baiting and public floggings.  Many people probably watch cat videos, etc. and organize to smash the state; they're not mutually exclusive.

I don't mean to exaggerate the extent to which people use electronics for activism, let alone to celebrate social media as "new forms of language production" that will turn us all into awesome post-human cyborgs.  I have no idea how much screentime is spent on political activism compared to celebrity watching, or what the proportion ideally ought to be.  My point is just that people are responsible for the uses to which they put their phones and their social media.  Many people aren't happy about that thought, of course: they have their priorities, following college and pro football trumps informing themselves.  But most Americans have never had much interest in informing themselves.

And don't forget that governments don't regard smartphones and social media as the opiate of the people: that's why we have mass surveillance of these media, shutting down Internet access when the natives get restless, etc. Our rulers and owners would be happier, it's true, if people were as passive and manipulable as this meme pretends; and that's one reason for smug top-down propaganda like this -- which is obligingly spread by people who fondly believe they're better than the brainwashed Sheeple.  The friend who shared it is apparently a Democratic loyalist; I doubt she was bothered by Barack Obama's attempt to harness the Internet to keep activism against his policies in check, or by the vacuousness of much of the liberal #Resistance to Trump's election.  (We've known each other for a couple of decades, but didn't become friends on Facebook until the past few weeks. What she has posted in that time has been consistent in its politics, so it's probably better for both our blood pressure that we weren't friends during the 2016 election campaign.)  I'm going to make a meme of my own using a photo of a bunch of young people staring at their phones: there will be a thought-bubble coming from each one's head, as they think: "Gee, I'm glad I'm not shallow and stupid like all these dumb people who never look up from their screens!"

The Revelation of Saint George

Sometimes I wonder what other people get from reading Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four.  What made the biggest impression on me when I first read it at the age of twelve, fifty-some years ago, was the Two Minutes' Hate.  When I first had to go to pep sessions a year or so later in junior high school, I immediately recognized the 2MH mentality in Indiana basketball fans, though it's also visible in partisan politics.  Over time, other elements of Orwell's allegory have come to the fore in my mind; nowadays it's doublethink and the notion of a well-controlled memory, the ability to forget inconvenient facts on demand.

There was hilarity over Donald Trump's remark about "what's happening last night in Sweden."  Nothing had happened in Sweden last night, that was the curious incident.  Swedes reacted with indignation.  Trump then claimed he was referring to a story on Fox News the night before his rally, and tweeted "Give the public a break–The FAKE NEWS media is trying to say that large scale immigration in Sweden is working out just beautifully. NOT!"  More indignation and hilarity ensued, of course.  What I noticed what was, even though Fox News is evidently becoming more critical of Trump, the President let slip that he relies on "the FAKE NEWS media" for information about what is going on in the world.  Some in Trump's base obligingly now believe that "the FAKE NEWS media" are covering up terrorist attacks in Sweden.  (Just as about half of Democrats believe that the Russians hacked American voting machines to give Trump his victory last November.  I may return to this matter in a later post.)  Then look at this dishonest post from a liberal blog on the importance of a free press; Thomas Jefferson did not limit his criticism of the press to private letters, as Throckmorton claims, he acted.

“In his second term, in response to serious criticism from the New England newspapers … he instructed the state attorney generals in New England to prosecute the newspaper editors for sedition in the same way he had opposed such behavior when it was done by the federal government,” said Ellis, the historian.

The move further alienated Jefferson from the journalists, as well as the clergy.

When I think about it, I wonder how new the supposed collapse in mainstream media credibility really is.  How long have we had "mainstream media" in the US anyway?  What that term usually refers to is elite corporate media like the New York Times and the Washington Post, along with the Associated Press, United Press International, and the national broadcast networks -- just three of them when I was growing up in the 1950s and 1960s.  But how many Americans read the Times?  How many New Yorkers, even?  I can't imagine it was that many, surely not a majority.  So how were the "mainstream media" mainstream?  Only, I think, in the sense that elites see themselves as the real, mainstream people, and the vast majority of the population as the fringe, barely human at best.

The Internet didn't exist when I was growing up, but there were many other ways to disseminate information: local newspapers, local radio and TV, churches, unions, the American Legion and other veterans' organizations, fraternal organizations, and schools -- and most of these were illiberal in their politics, and careless about facts (to put it mildly).  If you poke around Snopes.com for a while, you'll find that many falsehoods you see in your Facebook feed go back to the pre-Internet period.  This one, for instance, still circulates long after Madalyn Murry O'Hair died, and the FCC still gets mail and phone calls about it.  You probably wouldn't hear much about it from the mainstream media, but such rumors play an important role in many, many people's political beliefs.

Think of Father Charles Coughlin, a Roman Catholic priest whose radio program drew 40 million listeners in the early 1930s.  He attacked President Roosevelt, who he claimed was really a Jew (a popular accusation by the Right in those days), incited violence against Jews, and was only silenced by the Church after the US was already at war with Nazi Germany.  He remained a priest, however, retiring in 1966, and continued to denounce Roosevelt into the 1970s.  Yesterday I saw an item linked on Facebook which called evangelical Christians "the American Taliban."  Aside from the evil of stereotyping all evangelicals, it included Rick Santorum -- a Roman Catholic, not an evangelical -- in its denunciation.

Which reminded me of some late-night TV shows I've seen when I'm in northern Indiana, on the NBC affiliate out of Notre Dame University: they feature grim, bearded white men fulminating about the diabolical secularization of our society, with recreational abortion, unisex bathrooms, gay marriage, and the like; the only hope is return to the True Roman Catholic Church.  Sometimes I wonder if they are aware that not so long ago, people like them would have been seen as agents of the Papacy, trying to impose Canon law on America.  Which is what they are, in fact; they're just not much of a threat right now.  But when I think of candidates for the American Taliban, I think of these guys.  (Note: these programs don't appear on public-access cable at 4 in the morning, but are broadcast at 11 p.m. or so on a major-network affiliate station.)

But back to Orwell and Nineteen Eighty-Four.  The book is often called "prophetic," but it's really a kind of apocalypse, like the biblical book of Daniel or the Revelation.  A prophet, technically, is a person through whom a god speaks.  Prophets do sometimes make predictions, but very seldom about the distant future, and even their predictions are warnings of what will happen if they aren't heeded.  So, for instance, Jonah warned that Yahweh would destroy the city of Nineveh in thirty days if the Ninevites didn't repent.  They did so, from the King on down, and the city was not destroyed.  Jonah sulked about this, and Yahweh chided him for lack of humanity.  (That's how you know the book of Jonah is a fable, not actual prophecy: ordinarily Yahweh demands mass murder through his prophets, ordering his servants to set humanity aside in the name of purity and obedience.)

There isn't a sharp dividing line between classical prophecy and apocalyptic, but one of the characteristics of the latter is that its "predictions" are generally backdated, ascribed to someone who lived in the more or less distant past.  You can tell when the "revelation" was written by noticing the point at which the "predictions" stop being true.  Producing repentance isn't the intention, because God planned everything before the creation of the world; the destruction will come, with only a faithful remnant saved, no matter what people do.

It has often been pointed out that in Nineteen Eighty-Four Orwell wasn't predicting.  Except for the telescreens, almost everything he wrote about was already present in 1940s England during and immediately after the war: the rationing, the missiles raining random death and destruction, the surveillance, even the ability to forget what had happened minutes before for political purposes.  (The occasion was the way the Soviet Union went from being an ally of Hitler to an enemy of Hitler, pretty much overnight -- and the Enemy of Your Enemy Is Your Friend, in wartime anyway.)  There has been a lot of criticism of Orwell's relationship to the Left, much of it apparently justified, but to my mind the important thing was his attempt, however inadequate and biased, to criticize his own side.   Attacking the Other is always safe; attacking Your Own is not.  That, too, is still with us.

So seeing Nineteen Eighty-Four as a prophecy or prediction, and praising Saint George for his anticipation of things to come, is as mistaken as praising Daniel for predicting what would happen to Israel centuries in the future.  The "predictions" in Daniel were written after the fact, with 20/20 hindsight; once the book's future history catches up with its present, the predictions fail.  In the New Testament Revelation, the predictions fail immediately; the author was avowedly writing about his own present, and the End did not come.  Whatever strikes a reader now about Orwell's imagined future is most likely the things he saw in his present.  Which doesn't mean I don't value the book, or his criticisms of political culture; Orwell could be called a prophet in the original sense, one who addresses the present to pronounce judgment.  Except that Orwell, an atheist, didn't claim to speak in the name of a god.  He used other conventions.

What led me to write this post, however, was something else.  I began thinking about the ways that people use the past, and famous people from the past, to borrow authority for their beliefs and prescriptions.  This isn't necessarily invalid; history is important to human beings.  If you're going to talk about the Constitution, you're talking about past authorities.  What I'm talking about is the invention of history, as in the blogger who elided Thomas Jefferson's overt actions against the freedom of the press.  This tactic appears to me to be as popular an approach on the Left, broadly defined, as on the Right; among secularists and atheists, no less than among the religious.  Quotations from illustrious historical figures, modified to fit the present better or simply invented altogether, are more compact versions of apocalyptic thinking.  Our Founding Fathers foresaw the future in every detail, and we need only recover the true meaning of their words to conduct ourselves rightly, according to their wisdom.

I was also moved to write this post by someone's reference to Nineteen Eighty-Four as a "political allegory," which it is, but the context made me suspect that the person thought of an allegory as something like Scripture as fundamentalists think of it: all Truth and Wisdom is encoded there, and it is up to us to interpret it rightly.  If we can, we can save ourselves, and so on.  But an allegory is a conscious invention, and Nineteen Eighty-Four is no exception.  (Nor is Atlas Shrugged, or Stranger in a Strange Land, among other novels which have been used by some of their readers to guide their lives.)  Orwell had no special mystical knowledge; he wrote the book out of what he knew, or thought he knew, and out of what he saw.  He threw in plenty of sex and violence, just as you'll find in the New Testament Revelation, and made it a good read, with enough ideas to provoke some thought.

What this suggests to me is that, as I've long thought, much of what people (including me) think of as religious is not specific to religion.  The use of quotations -- often invented or taken out of context -- from long-dead authorities, usually called "proof-texting" in a religious context, looks to be as popular among the non-religious and anti-religious as it is among the devoutly religious.  Stories, allegories, fables too; officially we secularists know that our stories are fictional, but that knowledge often falls by the wayside.  Or the use of monumental, hushed spaces intended to humble and awe mere humans before the greatness of the geniuses who brought us the wisdom of Heaven.  To say nothing of Us/Them and scapegoating the Other. These are all human tendencies and (sometimes) failings.  They come naturally to most of us, and it takes work to learn to depersonalize and abstract ideas for thought -- though that, too, is part of religion, its philosophical and theological arm.  People who draw on books like Nineteen Eighty-Four for thought are not different in kind from people who draw on the Bible, the Quran, the Sutras; nor do they differ in the ways they use these authorities, only in the specific authorities they use and interpret.

Who Controls the Present Controls the Past

I hear that George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four is a best-seller again.  That's always a good thing, and if people are reading it with an agenda, that's nothing new. (If they're reading it. Buying a book, as I well know, is not the same as reading it.)  Nor is a surge in its sales new, as the NPR story I just linked indicates.  It happened, for example, right after the election of Ronald Reagan, and "Another time sales of the novel spiked was in 2013, after revelations by whistle-blower Edward Snowden about the extent of U.S. surveillance operations. In Nineteen Eighty-Four, the state keeps constant watch on its citizens to spot potential 'thought-crimes' or rebellion."

I was pleasantly surprised by this remark:

Richard Keeble, chairman of The Orwell Society and editor of the book of scholarship, Orwell Today, said Orwell would also have critiqued other aspects of Obama’s presidency. “In terms of double-think”–a term defined in the novel as the ability to hold two pieces of contradictory information at one time–“let’s think back to a so-called Nobel peace prize winner who waged war for most years of his presidency,” Keeble said.

This time the new popularity of the book is inspired by the presidency of Donald Trump, of course.  And that involves a good deal of doublethink and memory control on the part of many of Trump's Democratic critics, who must be sure to forget anything negative about Obama or Hillary Clinton.  Luckily, they have plenty of practice, forgetting or ignoring inconvenient facts.  Mention any of the less inspiring aspects of Barack Obama's record, no matter how well-documented, and they'll denounce you for making up stuff in the pay of the Republicans.  I'm quite impressed by their ability to block out Obama's support for the Saudi invasion of Yemen, for example, even when I or some other thought-criminal brings it to their attention.  I've sometimes mistaken this, along with their transitory pretense of concern for Syrian children, for a poor memory; but no, it's a strong, controlled memory that won't admit inconvenient facts in the first place.  Like Trump's base, they live in a hermetically sealed alternate reality, just a different one.

So I threw together a little post on Facebook:

"Wait a minute - Oceania hasn't always been at war with Eurasia! We were at war with Eastasia just yesterday!"

"Stop dwelling on the dead past! We need to focus on the future! You just want Eurasia to win!"

I was trying to decide whether to change the last sentence to "You're just trying to normalize Eurasia!" when my post got a couple of likes from liberal Facebook friends, both of whom misunderstood it.  One regularly posts awful political doggerel; I've never actually met him, and I'm thinking of unfriending him.  His comment was a link to his latest product, denouncing the "Trumpies."  So he missed the point.  The other I've known for more than thirty years, since he was a student at IU; he worked for the Clinton campaign last year, and assiduously passed along its talking points in response to criticism of Clinton on Facebook.  His comment: "And the Victory Tobacco ration will be raised from five units to two units! Another triumph on our behalf by Big Brother!"  Pretty clearly he missed the point too, but then he's an Inner Party member with a well-controlled memory.  (He was one of those who missed the point of a satirical Onion article about voting from last year, seemingly taking it at face value -- and he's not that stupid, at least ordinarily.)

If you want a picture of the future, though ...

"Edgy."  Isn't that the cutest thing?  Just a few months ago my liberal Democrat friends were assuring me that she had no interest in politics, she'd only been dragged into the campaign by her mom.  Chelsea Clinton was born in 1980; you do the math.