El Jefe Is Watching
It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.
—George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four.
I graduated high school in 1983, and read the book that same year. I have to admit, aside from it’s great storyline and superb literary merit, the book was hard to take seriously, considering the predicted year was just around the corner and the irrefutable evidence that Flock of Seagulls was still on the pop charts.
(I figured if a government was really serious about manufacturing such a dystopian reality, it would take at least a decade to live down the absurdity of allowing a country where the above could ever happen at all…can you imagine the Score brothers in the Kremlin? Okay, bad example…)
Seriously, Nineteen Eighty-Four is a great novel, and some of the most lingeringly chilling ideas came from this great literary mind (Orwell wrote the book in Scotland in 1948—the last two digits were reversed, so it was less of a prophecy than a statement of fear anyway).
The point is, I have never been much for conspiracy theories, or the idea that the U.S. Government is (or could ever be) totalitarian in it’s construct. I may be naïve—I have been accused of worse—but my opinion of the government leans more toward a huge lumbering beast that is more at risk of collapsing under it’s own clumsy mass than one capable of putting it’s citizens under the thumb of an autocratic regime.
That said, and understanding first and foremost that I never claimed to the be the most politically scientific bulb in the shed, two things happened to me this week that sent an Orwellian shiver down my spine (to be completely honest, it was more of a Kafkaesque, Circean, and without a doubt, downright Luddite shiver).
**Apologies to anyone with eponumousophobia—the all too real, but far lesser known, fear of eponyms.**
1. I watched Good Night, and Good Luck, the incredible docudrama by George Clooney (who has yet to staple the world with Clooneyesque but whose historical antagonist spawned one of the most well-known eponyms of the twentieth century—and, for the record, scared the holy bejezzus out of me).
and
2. I read the following Time article (from last year) that, among other things, detailed the “tightening” of the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control policy regarding U.S. citizens importing or consuming Cuban cigars:
http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1054968,00.html?cnn=yes
On the movie:
The experience was honestly chilling. Being born two decades after the “Junior Senator from Wisconsin” began (and was subsequently desisted from continuing) his harrowing but unsubstantiated mudslinging, I did not understand the reality in which his blacklisting, combined with a climate of fear catalyzed by the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), became sinister enough to cause the suicides of a great many Americans wrongly accused of traitorous behavior. I have to admit the film invited me to think about the power of the government—power not necessarily of absolute nature, but the deceptively strong arm of communication of thought through the media, ala Nineteen Eighty-Four.
Could society again be marauded into believing anything simply by beaming one man’s version of the truth into our frightened cubbies each evening?
Hmmm.
On cigar smoking:
The article on the Cuban tobacco embargo (as a subset of the larger) seemed more light-hearted to me on the surface, particularly in the context of a picture of then House Majority Leader Tom Delay—who considered the Cuban regime a “thugocracy” and was a huge proponent of said embargo—partaking of the effervescence of a mild Hoyo de Monterrey (made in “Habana”).
The truth is, however, the idea of, in 2004, the Department of Treasury still taking this 41 year-old proclamation so seriously—an act that claimed nearly a half-century ago to have the ability to destroy Castro’s dictatorship by denying Americans any sort of travel or enjoyment of an entire country’s exports, but has since failed miserably—then also extending it’s authority to foreign soils??? Against smoking a cigar made from Cuban tobacco??
Color me flabbergasted. And, more appropriately, in the words of Seinfeldian Jackie Chiles, attorney of record against Big Tobacco:
“Lewd, lascivious, salacious, outrageous!”
Please. Even in 2004, in the day and age of al-Qa’dia and Islamic Jihad against the United States—indeed three years after two jet airliners took out the Twin Towers as a horrified public looked on helplessly—the Treasury Department still believing so fervently that American tourists not smoking Cuban cigars would somehow make a difference??
Martha, throw some cold water on my face. Maybe I will wake up in Oceania, where at least the government knew how to do a respectable job of societal control. I can’t imagine the Thought Police or the Ministry of Truth caring one way or the other if I smoked a Swisher Sweets or a, ahem, Diplimatico.
Of course, they’d all be illegal, but that just goes to show you that any totalitarian government worth its salt would never allow for something as petty as brand discrimination when it came to putting the thumb on leisure activity.
The backseat is quiet.
—George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four.
I graduated high school in 1983, and read the book that same year. I have to admit, aside from it’s great storyline and superb literary merit, the book was hard to take seriously, considering the predicted year was just around the corner and the irrefutable evidence that Flock of Seagulls was still on the pop charts.
(I figured if a government was really serious about manufacturing such a dystopian reality, it would take at least a decade to live down the absurdity of allowing a country where the above could ever happen at all…can you imagine the Score brothers in the Kremlin? Okay, bad example…)
Seriously, Nineteen Eighty-Four is a great novel, and some of the most lingeringly chilling ideas came from this great literary mind (Orwell wrote the book in Scotland in 1948—the last two digits were reversed, so it was less of a prophecy than a statement of fear anyway).
The point is, I have never been much for conspiracy theories, or the idea that the U.S. Government is (or could ever be) totalitarian in it’s construct. I may be naïve—I have been accused of worse—but my opinion of the government leans more toward a huge lumbering beast that is more at risk of collapsing under it’s own clumsy mass than one capable of putting it’s citizens under the thumb of an autocratic regime.
That said, and understanding first and foremost that I never claimed to the be the most politically scientific bulb in the shed, two things happened to me this week that sent an Orwellian shiver down my spine (to be completely honest, it was more of a Kafkaesque, Circean, and without a doubt, downright Luddite shiver).
**Apologies to anyone with eponumousophobia—the all too real, but far lesser known, fear of eponyms.**
1. I watched Good Night, and Good Luck, the incredible docudrama by George Clooney (who has yet to staple the world with Clooneyesque but whose historical antagonist spawned one of the most well-known eponyms of the twentieth century—and, for the record, scared the holy bejezzus out of me).
and
2. I read the following Time article (from last year) that, among other things, detailed the “tightening” of the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control policy regarding U.S. citizens importing or consuming Cuban cigars:
http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1054968,00.html?cnn=yes
On the movie:
The experience was honestly chilling. Being born two decades after the “Junior Senator from Wisconsin” began (and was subsequently desisted from continuing) his harrowing but unsubstantiated mudslinging, I did not understand the reality in which his blacklisting, combined with a climate of fear catalyzed by the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), became sinister enough to cause the suicides of a great many Americans wrongly accused of traitorous behavior. I have to admit the film invited me to think about the power of the government—power not necessarily of absolute nature, but the deceptively strong arm of communication of thought through the media, ala Nineteen Eighty-Four.
Could society again be marauded into believing anything simply by beaming one man’s version of the truth into our frightened cubbies each evening?
Hmmm.
On cigar smoking:
The article on the Cuban tobacco embargo (as a subset of the larger) seemed more light-hearted to me on the surface, particularly in the context of a picture of then House Majority Leader Tom Delay—who considered the Cuban regime a “thugocracy” and was a huge proponent of said embargo—partaking of the effervescence of a mild Hoyo de Monterrey (made in “Habana”).
The truth is, however, the idea of, in 2004, the Department of Treasury still taking this 41 year-old proclamation so seriously—an act that claimed nearly a half-century ago to have the ability to destroy Castro’s dictatorship by denying Americans any sort of travel or enjoyment of an entire country’s exports, but has since failed miserably—then also extending it’s authority to foreign soils??? Against smoking a cigar made from Cuban tobacco??
Color me flabbergasted. And, more appropriately, in the words of Seinfeldian Jackie Chiles, attorney of record against Big Tobacco:
“Lewd, lascivious, salacious, outrageous!”
Please. Even in 2004, in the day and age of al-Qa’dia and Islamic Jihad against the United States—indeed three years after two jet airliners took out the Twin Towers as a horrified public looked on helplessly—the Treasury Department still believing so fervently that American tourists not smoking Cuban cigars would somehow make a difference??
Martha, throw some cold water on my face. Maybe I will wake up in Oceania, where at least the government knew how to do a respectable job of societal control. I can’t imagine the Thought Police or the Ministry of Truth caring one way or the other if I smoked a Swisher Sweets or a, ahem, Diplimatico.
Of course, they’d all be illegal, but that just goes to show you that any totalitarian government worth its salt would never allow for something as petty as brand discrimination when it came to putting the thumb on leisure activity.
The backseat is quiet.
posted by Commish at 7:47 AM
4 comments
