1984

Let’s see. I was a twelfth-year classroom teacher back in 1984 when on one afternoon in April, with freshman students in my junior high English class, I read out loud to them in my best dramatic voice, while they followed in their own, just-passed-out paperbacks:

It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen. Winston Smith, his chin nuzzled into his breast in an effort to escape the vile wind, slipped quickly through the glass doors of Victory Mansions, though not quickly enough to prevent a swirl of gritty dust from entering along with him.

The hallway smelt of boiled cabbage and old rag mats. At one end of it a colored poster, too large for indoor display, had been tacked to the wall. It depicted simply an enormous face, more than a meter wide: the face of a man of about forty-five, with a heavy black mustache and ruggedly handsome features.... It was one of those pictures which are so contrived that the eyes follow you about when you move. BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU, the caption beneath it ran.

Though it was a little after 2 in the afternoon, I had, after months of planning, successfully melded a classic novel’s time signature into the real space and time of a group of American teenagers. Perhaps it was my coolest day as a teacher. I mean, here we were, experiencing the opening lines of George Orwell’s classic 1984 -- in 1984. It was so cool. The next couple of weeks reading and discussing the text were pretty cool, too.

I call your attention to this because of a couple of tangential connections I’ve come across lately.

First, a national hamburger franchise has come up with a series of commercials selling a sandwich that claims buying it is such a smart thing to do that you owe yourself doing something completely stupid. So a guy hauls his sandwich up on a ladder in a lightning storm with a golf club to recalibrate the satellite dish. Or another guy, sitting inside an old tire just above a rocky precipice, takes a bite and tells us how smart he is before a buddy rolls him into the chasm.

Maybe these ads bother me so much because they remind me of the way of politics these days: Say whatever you want loud and long enough, and it will become Truth. Say a provision in a health care proposal calls for death panels to kill off grandma. It isn’t true, but never you mind. Say it loud and often enough and polls and Congressional votes swing. Do something really dumb and we’ll all agree it’s really smart. Irritates me.

Second, following Glenn Beck’s Restoring Honor rally in Washington, I found a contemporary reference to 1984 in the news just this morning. Chauncey DeVega, a blogger over at AlterNet, sees Beck as twisting interpretations of history to make different points than were ever intended. He writes, “I’ve come to the conclusion that what he is doing is just nakedly Orwellian: destroy the truth in order to advance his idealogical agenda.” A group of pretty much all white folk holding a civil rights rally calling for a return to a more traditional America. WAR IS PEACE. FREEDOM IS SLAVERY. IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH.

I think we all can agree that 1984 was a horror story. Tragic romance. Erosion of privacy. No absolute truth. Selling out a lover at the threat of having your face eaten by rats. The gnawing question if we have become more like Winston and Julia than any of us feel comfortable to admit. Such was pretty good discussion-stuff for a high school literature class. As it is today.

Odd, I always felt the older civilization got, the smarter we’d become. We would learn from our ancestors’ errors and not only change, but make amends. The contradictions of doublespeak could certainly not flourish under today’s enlightened sunshine laws.

And yet, liberals are considered mentally ill by some conservatives while empathetic care for the sick is considered socialistic, fascist, even demonic. I mean, they want to kill grandpa! The whole thing depresses me.

Oh, one more thing. Apple Computer assured us that our year 1984 would not be like the story 1984. Why? Well, because the Macintosh computer would set us free. To be released the day after Super Bowl XVIII (the Raiders beat the Redskins, BTW) the Mac would let our computer work closer with our brains to create new and exciting stuff. Boy, have they ever. And now iTunes accounts keep track of every piece of music we buy on line from Apple. Geez. So much for avoiding Big Brother.

Still, I wish I could have used that first iconic Mac commercial in class. Now that would have been sweet.

Today’s elder idea: Ah, that great first Mac commercial. Classic stuff. How iconoclastic.

On January 24, Apple Computer will introduce Macintosh. And you'll see why 1984 won't be like 1984.

This blog is written, designed, and uploaded from a Mac. Surprise.