All Animal Farm Adaptations Are Equal, But Some Are More Equal Than Others

I've been hearing about Andy Serkis's animated version of George Orwell's satirical fable Animal Farm for some time now.  Apparently it's been in development for a long time, but the time is now fulfilled, and the release is at hand.  I barely remember the two previous versions (from 1954 and 1999), except that they were pretty bad, toning down the book's anti-capitalist assumption.  I say "assumption" rather than "message," because the story takes for granted that capitalism (represented by the human farmers) is evil.  The remarkable thing about its mainstream reception is that its anti-communist fans completely missed that assumption.

So I didn't expect much from this new adaptation.  The occasional reports I saw didn't say much about its fidelity to the original.  But this weekend the Algorithm recommended a story about it from Deseret News, a Latter-Day-Saints newspaper.  It was even more clueless about Animal Farm than the book's Cold War boosters:

In the final scene of George Orwell’s 1945 satirical novella “Animal Farm,” animal workers watch through a window as their ruling pigs and the human farmers drunkenly play cards, and they can no longer tell them apart. The moment is grim and impactful.

The image exposes the cracks beneath Marxism’s utopian promise. 

... The upcoming animated adaptation of “Animal Farm,” directed by “Lord of the Rings” actor Andy Serkis, transforms Orwell’s sharp critique of communism into a lighthearted, family-friendly story — and casts capitalism as the villain.

Wait, what?  Capitalism is the villain in the original tale, but I can't remember encountering such blatant denial about that before.  It's not the only villain, of course: Napoleon and the other pigs, who happily embrace greed and ultimately become indistinguishable from their human neighbors, are also villains, but is it really so hard to grasp that there's more than one group of bad guys involved?  If Orwell thought capitalism benign, that final scene would be the happy ending this article's writer claims Serkis imposed on his version.  Nobody makes that mistake - everybody knows the outcome is bad - but it seems to be almost impossible to recognize why it's bad.  Similarly, the writer of an introduction to a print edition of Animal Farm (I think it was Malcolm Muggeridge) wrote that already in 1946, when the book was first published, "it was becoming brutally clear that wartime hopes of peacetime cooperation between the West and Russia had been dangerously naive."  Orwell coined a word for this sort of ideological self-discipline in his later novel Nineteen Eighty-Four: "doublethink."

I learned from the Deseret article that Serkis invented a new human character who seduced Napoleon into embracing sinful luxury; also that [SPOILER ALERT] when Napoleon first stands on his hind legs, "flatulence erupts, amusing the kids and reminding adults how low Serkis will go to get a laugh" according to Variety. Well, kids and not a few adults love fart jokes, so I suppose this is what Serkis meant when he said he'd tried to make the film more "family-friendly."

Deseret quoted "One commenter [who] criticized Hollywood, writing, “Hollywood is incapable of critiquing anything other than capitalism.”  Have any of these people ever read Animal Farm?  Do they know anything about Orwell and his politics?  As I said earlier, he didn't explicitly "critique" capitalism in the story, he took for granted that it was exploitative and generally immoral. I think I can safely skip watching this film.

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.

There Is One Orwell, and Hitchens Was His Prophet

Recently I read The Betrayal of Dissent: Beyond Orwell, Hitchens and the New American Century (Pluto Press, 2004) by Scott Lucas.  Lucas shows how Christopher Hitchens anointed himself as George Orwell's spokeman for the twenty-first century.  It was a good read, and reminded me of a number of things I needed to be reminded of, such as this:

Hitchens charged that Chomsky, in The New Military Humanism, was guilty of 'double standards' in criticising NATO's bombing of Yugslavia while supporting intervention in the case of East Timor.  Chomsky replied, 'There is a double standard only if the intentions are humanitarian …. My book found no evidence of benign intent [over Kosovo] …. hence no double standard but rather the familiar single standard of power interests with little concern for human consequences'  Hitchens, after the cheap jibe, 'It is no disgrace to be condescended to by Noam Chomsky nor to be instructed in matters of formal logic and argumentative procedure', wrestled with double standards before settling on a simpler call, 'We appear to be in a new era, where old reflexes serve us less well.  However, this does not relieve us of our responsibility to take the side of the victims, as Chomsky once taught me and many others to do' [66-7].

Quite.  But who are the victims?  Hitchens lost sight of that question, except for thinking that he himself was the victim, of Left Orthodoxy.  Those who were killed or maimed or made into refugees by American (or NATO, which amounts to the same thing) bombs, missiles, and bullets were never on his radar, as Lucas points out:

At no point did Hitchens acknowledge that, his clearly defined 'war against Saddam', the Iraqi people rather than the leader were likely to be the first casualties and those dealing with the long-term consequences [85].

What I want to focus on, though, is Hitchens's accusation that Chomsky applied a double standard, allegedly opposing "intervention" in Kosovo but advocating it in East Timor.  This is a popular claim among liberal and progressive enthusiasts for US state violence.  I first encountered it, I think, when George H. W. Bush invaded Panama in 1989, and numerous times since then.  I haven't yet heard it in connection with US support for the Saudi invasion of Yemen, but that's probably because most Americans, regardless of their location in the political rainbow, are doing their best to ignore that one.

As far as I know, Chomsky never called for the US to "intervene" in the Indonesian invasion and occupation of East Timor, which lasted from 1975 to 1999 and killed hundreds of thousands of people -- roughly a third of the population.  This was largely because the US had already intervened in that action, by approving it in advance, by arming and training Indonesian forces, by Presidential evasion of Congressional prohibition of US support, and by blocking United Nations action.  Not until the East Timorese had courageously voted for independence in a referendum, did President Bill Clinton finally instruct Indonesia to withdraw.  In 2002 journalist Allan Nairn (who along with Amy Goodman was badly beaten by Indonesian troops in East Timor in 1991) questioned Clinton about this, and Clinton bravely dodged the question.  He conceded that the US had "ignored" and been "insensitive" to the situation, which was false, since US presidents including Clinton had worked so hard to support Indonesia for a quarter of century. (There's no transcript for that clip, but a partial transcript is available here. It's worth listening to the clip, which includes not only Clinton but Richard Holbrooke and Henry Kissinger lying wildly about their records.)

Hitchens and other apologists for state violence might claim that Clinton "intervened" by finally stopping US aid to the Indonesian invasion, but this ignores the ongoing intervention that preceded it.  They also hope to confuse the issue by equivocating.  Chomsky and other critics of US foreign policy don't necessarily object to diplomatic "interventions," it's military interventions that we oppose.  President Obama could intervene in the Saudi invasion of Yemen, for example, by withholding material and other support for the Saudis, and Chomsky would surely approve of that -- provided the aid wasn't merely continued by diverting it through other channels, as normally happens in such cases.  But what liberal and progressive supporters of state violence want is military intervention, marketed as "humanitarian," with enormous costs in human life and well-being for its supposed beneficiaries.  There's no double standard.

Status Symbols

I had a dispiriting conversation yesterday with an old friend of mine, the law professor I mentioned a few posts back.  She'd posted a link on Facebook to a CNN op-ed piece, "Why 'illegal immigrant' is a slur," condemning use of the term "illegal immigrant", and seconded the writer's complaint: "And the CNN site admits it uses this inappropriate term, as does most of the media (following AP style)." If it fits the style book, it's not "inappropriate" in that context, though of course you can claim that the style book ought to be changed, as they periodically are. We got into a sort of debate in comments that I found disturbing because she was factually wrong on numerous points in her own field, as well as others that were dubious on larger grounds.

The CNN contributor, "Charles Garcia, who has served in the administrations of four presidents, of both parties, is the CEO of Garcia Trujillo, a business focused on the Hispanic market. He was named in the book 'Hispanics in the USA: Making History' as one of 14 Hispanic role models for the nation."  He's not the sharpest pencil in the box, but that's why CNN would feature him. Try this tasty mouthful of word salad:

George Orwell's classic "Nineteen Eighty-Four" shows how even a free society is susceptible to manipulation by overdosing on worn-out prefabricated phrases that convert people into lifeless dummies, who become easy prey for the political class.

Maybe Garcia didn't mean to imply that Orwell's tightly-controlled and oppressive Oceania is a "free society," but that's what he wrote.  And of course anyone who gets to write for CNN, let alone serve as a White House Fellow under Ronald Reagan, is a member of the political class, a predator on the public.  That he's also a businessman adds another level of manipulation to the mix.  But on the other hand, it's precisely because of his qualifications that he's concerned with manipulating the discourse on immigration.  He knows how important framing and packaging are -- far more important than substance.

Given the level of discourse in our political media, then, I have to admit that terminology isn't a negligible tool.  The corporate media are very concerned with it, and will resist any attempts to change their stylistic preferences.  Gay activists spent years after Stonewall lobbying the New York Times to use "gay" instead of "homosexual," for example, and I'm of at least two minds about that.  It reminds me of the struggle I had in high school over my hair length.  "It's not such a big deal," my principal told me.  "Why won't you cut it?"  "If it's not such a big deal," I retorted, "why are you ready to throw me out of school if I don't?"  (In the end I did cut my hair, because it wasn't a life-and-death issue, but I always grew it as long as I could before cutting it after that, just to keep pushing the limits.  And it was the principal who ended up looking bad in most students' eyes, not me.)

I don't know why the AP elected "illegal immigrant" as a term of choice in their stylebook.  They claim it's "accurate and neutral," though "illegal" is a loaded term in any discourse, and the racist Right loves the word, though they don't care about legality in any other area.  Still, "illegal" is in many cases accurate, and I don't see that "undocumented" is an improvement: it still implies that the person is lacking something they should have.  If the Right adopted it, "undocumented" would be equally pejorative in a month at most.  What matters is not the word, but how it's used and by whom.  (I pointed out to my friend that "gay" went from a hard-won positive word to a schoolyard pejorative in less than a decade; she couldn't seem to grasp the signficance of that change, and indeed took a very strict linguistic-determinist line throughout our discussion.)

Garcia points to an increase in the use of "illegal immigrant" since the AP designated the term, which is hardly surprising: a term with institutional support will tend to be used in that institution.  And of course bigots love terms that are not negative in themselves, though they become so with practice; such terms are known as "dog whistles," because their overtones are audible only to those in the know, not to normal human ears.  But that's true of all language, and I contend that getting bogged down in squabbles over terminology can be a distraction from more substantive issues, a distraction that our opponents will welcome.

My friend insisted that "It's important to point out that we don't criminalize people or status, 'just' behavior. It mattered during the Red Scare, when some argued that being a Communist was criminal." In reality the distinction between "status" and behavior is as permeable as any other border.  People who behave in a certain way will be assumed to do so because of their nature, and acts can function as markers of "status."  In everyday speech and thought, a person who steals is a thief, a person who lies is a liar, depending on your view of the person in question: you may distinguish between her conduct and her being if you want to excuse her, or not if if you don't.  And this vagueness extends to elite legal discourse: in Bowers v. Hardwick, the notorious 1986 case in which the Supreme Court upheld Georgia's sodomy law, Justice White equated "consensual sodomy with 'homosexuality' per se, criminal activity, and all 'homosexual conduct'" (Marta T. Zingo, Sex/Gender Outsiders (Praeger, 1998).

In the case of membership in the Communist Party, there isn't even a status of "being a Communist" to distinguish: one "is" a Communist because one joined the Party and participates in its programs and activities.  My friend declared "Communism was criminalized, and that was struck down as unconstitutional precisely because status could not be criminalized."  And here, interestingly, my friend was completely wrong, though as a law professor she is in a position to know better.  The Communist Control Act against membership in the Party was never "struck down," and so is still on the books, mostly unenforced.  (This means it can be used again someday as expedient.)  I found two relevant court cases online: in Communist Party v. Catherwood (1961), the Supreme Court held that the Communist Control Act didn't bar the party from participating in New York's unemployment insurance system.  "In 1973 a federal district court in Arizona decided that the act was unconstitutional and Arizona could not keep the party off the ballot in the 1972 general election (Blawis v. Bolin)."  I took a look at the opinion in Blawis v. Bolin, and it was argued and decided on the basis of the First and Fourteenth Amendments; "status" seems not to have been involved.

It also occurs to me that in court, the argument doesn't involve the best, most rational arguments about the merits of a case, but the legislation and precedents that counsel thinks most likely to persuade the individual judge, based on his or her known biases; and decisions are often based on technicalities peripheral to real human interests.  Therefore, even if the Supreme Court had overturned the Communist Control Act on grounds of "status," it wasn't necessarily the most important issue involved.  I get the impression that my friend was trying to throw dust in the eyes of a layman; it might have worked if I were even twenty years younger.

My friend wanted to blame the Right for the blurring and distortion of the status/act difference, but I pointed out that the advocates for same-sex marriage do it all the time, by claiming homosexuality as a biologically determined, inborn status.  The Supreme Court of Canada based its ruling in favor of same-sex marriage partly on that claim, so it's not limited to thoughtless laypeople.  The best that can be said about the claim is that so far it's unsettled: we have no idea what shapes sexual orientation, and the research to date is fatally flawed.  To base a claim for equality on inconclusive science is to run the risk that the science may yet be concluded in a way that invalidates your claim -- and what will you do then?

But more important, the status claim is irrelevant.  When the Supreme Court overturned state laws against "interracial marriage" in 1967, it did not declare that Mildred Jeter and Richard Loving should be allowed to marry because they had a biologically determined 'racial orientation' that impelled them to marry only persons of the opposite race.  Insofar as "status" was relevant, it was the race of the bride and the groom, as in the case of same-sex marriage it would be their biological sex, not their "gender" or their sexual orientation.

Going back to immigration, then, to say that someone entered the US illegally is not to criminalize that person, though of course people do tend to essentialize people who've broken the law, if they find it convenient to do so.  Few Republican loyalists thought of Richard Nixon as a criminal, even though he indubitably was one, would have been removed from office for his crimes if he hadn't resigned preemptively, and should have faced criminal charges as well.  That's another problem.  Nixon was a criminal, but so was Martin Luther King, Jr., along with many other people who engaged in civil disobedience during the Civil Rights struggle.  (That's not insignificant: it was difficult for many respectable black people to face arrest and imprisonment, not only because it put them into the hands of abusive police, but because Nice People Didn't Break the Law and Go to Jail, only Trash.)  Jesus of Nazareth was a criminal, executed for insurrection by the Romans.  Many early Christians were criminals under Roman law, for refusing to offer due honor to the gods, including Caesar.  The leaders of the American Revolution would certainly have been hanged if their rebellion had failed.  Sometimes breaking the law is a positive good, when the law is in the wrong.  This is disturbing to contemplate for people whose attitude to the law is still that of a child.  An adult takes the law seriously, but doesn't see it as sacred.

I pointed out that the problem with "illegal immigrant" is less the "illegal" part than "immigrant."  Americans have always been ambivalent at best about the waves of immigrants that entered the country after them or their parents.  The more I watch the debate, the more obvious it is to me that, as I've suspected before, the most vehement opponents of "illegal immigration" consider all immigrants illegal.  Substituting "undocumented" for "illegal" won't change their attitude; they'll recognize it -- correctly, for what that's worth -- as a euphemism, a distraction from the issues; not that they are interested in the issues either.  Oddly, my friend conceded the point but then backtracked, because "language does matter."

Garcia makes a revealing comment himself:

Another misconception is that the vast majority of migrant workers currently out of status sneak across our southern border in the middle of the night. Actually, almost half enter the U.S. with a valid tourist or work visa and overstay their allotted time. Many go to school, find a job, get married and start a family. And some even join the Marine Corps, like Lance Cpl. Jose Gutierrez, who was the first combat veteran to die in the Iraq War. While he was granted American citizenship posthumously, there are another 38,000 non-citizens in uniform, including undocumented immigrants, defending our country.

Suppose that the situation were otherwise, and that the vast majority of "migrant workers out of status" did "sneak across our southern border in the middle of the night."  Does Garcia agree that such sneaky invaders should be sent back pronto?  At least some of the poster kids for the DREAM Act were brought across the border by their parents in just that way.  Garcia's using "status" tactics here -- some immigrants are Sneaky Dirty Trash, but these are Clean, Upstanding Americans! -- and his resort to flag-waving and hiding behind the uniforms of Our Troops is beneath contempt.

Garcia concludes with a last appeal to St. George:

In his essay "Politics and the English Language," Orwell warned that one must be constantly on guard against a ready-made phrase that "anaesthetizes a portion of one's brain." But Orwell also wrote that "from time to time one can even, if one jeers loudly enough, send some worn-out and useless phrase ... into the dustbin, where it belongs" -- just like the U.S. Supreme Court did.

"Undocumented immigrant" or "migrant worker out of status" are also ready-made phrases intended to anaesthetize a portion of one's brain, however, and Garcia is a hard-working functionary in the Ministry of Truth, an Outer Party member using worn-out prefabricated phrases to prey on the public; he's just in a different faction.  Oddly, my friend declared to me that both "illegal alien" and "undocumented immigrant" are "slurs", though "the former has more serious implications."  She went on to declare that the Right is "ignorant," and she wasn't going to bother with them.  If "undocumented immigrant" is a slur, why are Robert Garcia and other immigrant advocates pressing for its use as the acceptable term?  "Left wing doesn't want to piss off 'documented' immigrants, who want to distinguish themselves."  That doesn't make a lot of sense -- and I have to recall that she was writing her end of the exchange on her smartphone, which kept cutting her postings short -- because if it's a slur, it would "piss off" the "documented."

Even if I concede -- which I don't -- that the rabble are too uneducated for rational discourse, and so must be manipulated by Newspeak generated by their educated superiors, where is the rational discourse going on, and for whom?  My friend (who's very upset about the dearth of "critical thinking" among Americans) is a highly educated person, presumably the kind of person who is competent to grapple with issues. Yet she had nothing to offer but slogans and overt misstatements of fact.  In this she appears to be all too typical of the educated American classes, and that -- not the ignorance of the rabble -- looks to me to be the real threat to the future of humanity: self-styled elitists who aren't as superior as they like to think.

And yet I have to admit that somewhere in me lurks a naive child who believe that people with college degrees, people with jobs that don't get their hands dirty, are not just smarter but nicer than people who haven't.  That's why I get even angrier at nice educated liberals who distort facts, blur important differences, and ignore logic than I do at blue-collar folk who do the same.  The nice educated liberals should know better, and they think they do, but they don't.  Not automatically, not by virtue of having a degree.

The Limits of Language: Andrew Hodges's "Towards 1984"

I missed Alan Turing's centenary, though I didn't have much to say about it anyway.  Turing was a brilliant man, brutally mistreated by his government for his queerness, and he deserves to be remembered for a number of accomplishments.  One of the most impressive things I've learned about him as a person was that he doesn't seem to have felt any guilt about being queer, which was unusual though not unique among British buggers of his generation.  (The circle of friends that included W. H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood, for example, seems to have been just as comfortable with their sexuality as Turing.)

But the mentions of Turing that I encountered online often mentioned Andrew Hodges's 1983 biography of Turing, Alan Turing: The Enigma (Simon and Schuster).  When I read in the gay press that Hodges was working on the biography, I began looking forward to it.  Hodges was well-qualified to write it, for he not only had the mathematics and technical background to understand Turing's professional work, he was a gay activist and writer, co-author with David Hutter of an important Gay Liberation pamphlet called With Downcast Gays, published in 1974 but available online.  This was important because even in the 1980s, most biographies of important gay or lesbian figures were marred by homophobic armchair psychoanalysis purporting to show why the Subject had turned out That Way.  Hodges was having none of that, and his groundbreaking biography not only did justice to Turing but helped set the tone for future biographies.

Aside from With Downcast Gays, I'd also read an article by Hodges published in the Canadian radical gay magazine The Body Politic at the end of 1979.  Its discussion of the way language affects our ability to think about homosexuality made a big impression on me -- it was the first critique of Orwell's dicta about language I'd read till then -- but it was never reprinted anywhere and wasn't available online as far as I could discover.  The flurry of attention to Turing's centenary and to the biography reminded me that I'd been meaning to write to Hodges and ask him about it.  I knew he had a website with some of his writings on it, but "Towards 1984" wasn't there, so I hoped to persuade him to add it; I could even send him the text if he didn't have it.  So I wrote to him, and he kindly gave me permission to post it here.

As its title implies, "Towards 1984" is dated now, but as Hodges wrote, the issues it (and Orwell's novel) deals with are still current.

TOWARDS 1984

by Andrew Hodges

(This article first appeared in Body Politic #59, December 1979 / January 1980.)

As the real 1984 approaches and becomes just another calendar year, one thing is certain: there will be no lack of voices claiming to draw political lessons from George Orwell's book. Indeed, the election posters for Mrs Thatcher's Conservative Party have already suggested that we should believe Labour policy to be leading Britain into an Orwellian nightmare. 1984 has sold millions of copies; it is a standard text for school examinations. But what does it hold for us?

A number of Orwell's suggestions have become reality; a number have not. That is not the point. The real value of the work is as a modern Gulliver's Travels, as serious political satire, and in particular as a thesis on the politics of language. It was Orwell's idea that language was not simply a means of communicating thought, in the way that an open road affords space for every kind of traffic. Rather, language could be more like a railway system, with a laid-down schedule which could convey only ideas of a defined shape and size, fitted into the compartments which the managers provided. Only these right ideas could ever be used.

But Orwell's target was narrow and distinct: not the language of everyday conversation, but the official languages of his own class and time, the British educated middle class of the 1930s and 1940s. Wartime censorship, Communist Party theory, military euphemism, Times leaders and newsreel journalism -- every case involved its own trahison des clercs in which state violence of revolting enormity could be justified or concealed by the manipulation of language. It was his thesis that language was not merely symptomatic of engineered thought; rather, that language determined what thoughts it was possible to have. "How could they believe it?", "How could they accept it?", Orwell asked of his contemporaries, and his answer was that once they had accepted a political language, then their thoughts could not be other than would fit inside its concepts.

It was a small step for him to suggest in 1984 that the State might consciously impose its official language upon its servants with that very objective in mind. This was a major theme of the book, summed up in its definition of "Newspeak", the officialese of the Anglo-American superstate. It was its purpose that:

...the expression of unorthodox opinions, above a very low level, was well-nigh impossible. It was of course possible to utter heresies of a very crude kind, a species of blasphemy. It would have been possible, for example, to say "Big Brother is ungood." But this statement, which to an orthodox ear merely conveyed a self-evident absurdity, could not have been sustained by reasoned argument, because the necessary words were not available....

The modern Newspeak of "extremist", "moderate", "security", has continued to keep Orwell's critique as alive as ever. But our reaction to Orwell's ideas must necessarily be more critical. In 1984, it was possible to escape from the official thought by means of ordinary language, the old English language, associated with good old ordinary decent things and feelings. Orwell seems to have thought the common language of his day to be a perfectly adequate vehicle for thought. But was it? Was it only the official, or state-imposed language that constrained what it was possible to think? Clearly we can see that it was not: in Orwell's own description of Newspeak, he wrote:

In somewhat the same way, the Party member knew what constituted right conduct, and in exceedingly vague, generalised terms he knew what kinds of departure from it were possible. His sexual life, for example, was entirely regulated by the two Newspeak words "sexcrime" (sexual immorality) and "goodsex" (chastity). Sexcrime covered all sexual misdeeds whatever. It covered fornication, adultery, homosexuality, and other perversions, and, in addition, normal intercourse practised for its own sake....

Millions of readers must have swallowed unquestioningly Orwell's definition of homosexuality as a "perversion", together with the connotations of "immorality" and "normal" -- just as they would have gone along with the use of "he" in that paragraph to imply (as a "rule of grammar") a person of either sex. Why not? These were the available concepts, the "proper words" that English had to offer. Whether Orwell intended this classification consciously or not is beside the point; in either case this was simply the ordinary written English of 1949, in which sexual expression had to be packaged and valued by a tiny range of nasty words.

To be more precise, a writer who was sufficiently sensitive to value-judgment might, by a sufficiently laborious discussion, avoid the unconscious communication of received ideas. Thus in 1948, the authors of Kinsey's Sexual Behavior in the Human Male had been able to use the word "homosexual" in a very precise sense, carefully detached from the connotations of "abnormal." It was no easy task, as they themselves explained, and one which met with profound resistance from the "scientific" world as well as from popular opinion. But for those without access to the language of academic authority, words imposed the bounds of possible thought, in which "queer is good" was almost as self-evident an absurdity as "Big Brother is ungood."

Another observation to be made on reading 1984 is that all those features of the State which Orwell presented in imagination as the most deeply appalling were none other than those which in 1949, were being experienced in reality by homosexual people in Anglo-America. Not only the commonplaces of censorship, blacklisting, guilt by association; not only imprisonment on police say-so; but compulsory drug treatments, castrations, electric shocks, even brain surgery; the implication and betrayal of friends or lovers; the required confessions of thoughtcrime in the dock. Worst of all, according to Orwell's book, defiance was robbed of all meaning when history would never know or care, when the past would not even be known to exist.

But Orwell would never have perceived the connection. And we too are so well trained to think of homosexual oppression as not counting, not mattering, not being "real" politics or history, that it seems fanciful to make the comparison, a slur on "real" political martyrs. But this training is itself performed by the available language, which has defined homosexual oppression as a "non-political" form of dissidence, as a "social" or "psychological" or "medical" problem. Perhaps most poignant of all is the fact that Orwell chose as a symbol of escape from the official system the drama of a spontaneous heterosexual affair. For the millions of readers, the ultimate dreadfulness of 1984 has been brought home as the system where love to be a crime, where lovers could not even be seen to touch, even to know each other for fear of the State; where the smallest sign of affection was a political gesture. And how many of them have considered that all of this was so for homosexual lovers in the real world of 1949, of 1959, of 1969, of 1979? Indeed, our position is in a sense worse than that of Orwell's rebels, who at least had the cultural resources of "ordinary language" in which to express their spontaneity. But for us, the ordinary language of sexuality is something that must be fought for: childhood training and cultural values discarded and a second language learned in order that spontaneous feeling can be realized.

And yet, for that reason, one cannot but be cheered by reading 1984. The figure of Winston Smith was brought to say and believe that "Big Brother is good," just as so many of us have succumbed to "Queer is bad," yet so many of us have not given in. Not only have we continued to utter the "crude heresies" that the old available words allowed, but we have, since 1949, since 1969, found new words, new images, new language to express ourselves. So often we are immersed in conflicts over what seem mere words: our words (the straightforward use of "gay") are hated; the available "ordinary" words ("promiscuous", for example) constrict a million different experiences into one foolish epithet; the official words of psychology and of law degrade and imprison thought as well as people.

Yet we are gaining: with an ever-expanding vocabulary of word and picture, poetry and history, music, film and art. Orwell, against his own will, reminds us that the expansion of language is no ignoble cause, nor some unreal shadow of "real" politics, nor our own strange peripheral problem. 1984 has touched so many people because it touches the heart of things that matter. That is its lasting integrity and heroism -- and that is ours, too.