Dear Blog Reader.
I hope that this finds you doing well. I hope that your
pipes did not freeze. If they did, I hope that they did not burst. In central Indiana
Even our dogs, Henry and Hugo, were affected by the cold
weather. Obviously, they were watching too much of the Weather Channel huddled
under a blanket with the lovely Miss Beverly sitting on the couch in front of a
space heater. They kept looking up at us with their inquisitive brown eyes as
they watched weather person after weather person throw boiling cups of water
into the air. The physics impaired weather persons squealed in amazement as the
water vapor turned to ice crystals before it hit the ground. In the spirit of
scientific inquiry, the dogs could not wait to get outside for their own
experiments. Their hypothesis? It was so cold that their dog doo would turn to
tootsie rolls before it hit the ground. It certainly looked like tootsie rolls.
It felt like tootsie rolls. Unfortunately, the researchers report that the
artifacts were lacking in the tootsie roll smell and taste department.
Conclusion? Dog doo does not turn into tootsie rolls in extreme polar vortices.
It is hard to believe but 6 months from the time of this
writing, I will be participating in the Ride Across, INdiana. The RAIN is a day
long ride across Indiana
Last year I provided a giving incentive. Anyone who donated
$100 had the opportunity to pick the topic for the daily blog that I wrote at
the end of each day. The format will have to be different this year. Everything
is compressed to one day. This will dictate the compression of the
communication. Thankfully, modern communications have devolved to a point that
this can be accommodated also. If you donate $100, I will write a limerick
addressing any topic you wish, during one of the 6 or 7 rest stops. These
creations will be posted on Twitter, live, during the ride.
Don’t donate now. This is just a heads up. I’ll let you know
in late May or early June.
Last week, the topic was a comparison between the Hunger
Games and 1984. For some reason, I cannot let 1984 go. I read it a long time
ago. I suppose in college. Marketing being what marketing is, I would have had
to do the hip thing and read 1984 in 1984. The only thing that I remember about
it was the drabness of Oceana. Everyone wore coveralls, exercised when told to
exercise. Everyone was withholding all spontaneous emotion out of fear of Big
Brother; everyone that is except the Proles. They were the only ones who had
lives. Sure they were starving to death and had drab lives, but what they had
was a freedom.
I wrote last week wondering if the teachers in the group, that
we were chatting with, had taught 1984 in comparison to the Hunger Games. As I
have thought about it, I hope that they had not. Why waste a classic on the
young? I speak of the young here in generic terms. The young in the line may
have been unusually bright. They may have gotten it. It may have made a
tremendous impact on their lives and their world view. When I speak of the
young, I only speak with authority that 1984 was wasted on me a 22 year old
youth. It just made no sense to me. I understood that Orwell was writing about
communism, describing what he saw happening in the newly minted Soviet Union in the late 40’s. In 1984, the Soviet Union was crumbling. Freedom was sweeping the
globe. 1984 had little relevance. Sure, double speak was alive and well.
However, as long as there are politicians and ad men, they will be telling us
that 2+2=5. We just don’t worry about a cage of rats being strapped on our face
if we do not believe that cell phone surveillance is not an intrusion of our
rights; at least not yet.
Either I have changed or the world has changed. I do not
know which. Every time that read Oceana’s slogan “War is Peace. Freedom is
Slavery. Ignorance is Strength, I hear Bill Clinton saying, “It depends on what
the meaning of the word “is” is.” He did that under oath; swearing to tell the
truth; 2+2=5. O’Brien, cue the rats. O’Brien was Winston Smith’s torturer for
those of us who have cleared our minds of trivial facts in favor of important
things like remembering the lovely Miss Beverly’s birthday.
1984 has been in the news lately. Eric Snowden said that
1984 paled in comparison to the scope of surveillance being conducted by our
government. I don’t know how I feel about Eric Snowden; traitor or patriot. I
am suspicious of government, but I am also a big rule follower. It creates an
inner conflict that leaves me on edge. It would be better if he had not run to Russia Boston
I think that the saddest part of reading 1984 at a ripened
age is recognizing the ruthlessness of making no martyrs, of breaking
dissenters down until they love Big Brother. The inevitability of it, the
unconquerability of it rings true. There is hand wringing over electronic eaves
dropping, but the Niggling Slimy Automatons have not stopped collecting. Even
if they said they had stopped, the American Public would not trust that they
had. History would show that the public should be skeptical. They can claim
that there is no personal information being collected, but I get the feeling
that metadata is surely reduced to individual pieces of straw so that the chaff
can be sorted from the needles if you have a big enough computer.
While reading 1984 at a wizened age I was left with a
crushing sense of doom. It left me with a general dread that the worst thing is
telling others what they have to do. Hopefully, wisdom has transformed me over
the years. When I was young, I could be provoked by the insipid ideas of the
other side. I was prepared to save them from themselves. If others lived in
just such a way they would not have to suffer the consequences of their stupid
behavior, or beliefs, or politics.
As a youth, I believed that I could change the world. Shoot,
I believed that it has already changed because of me. The enthusiastic optimism
of youth believes that it can change the powers and principalities; that it can
make a difference. Yet that belief fosters the danger of more oppression; of
becoming the power and principality. Jennifer Lawrence, the actress who
portrayed the totalitarian fighting heroine in the Hunger Games was quoted last
month saying that “calling people fat should be illegal.” When idealism doesn’t
get its way, it almost always resorts to enforcing its will on the unrepentant,
which is totalitarian, and while well intentioned, it is just cuing up the
rats.
Take care,
Roger
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