Dystopia — that’s a word we learned in high school when we read 1984. It means a society turned upside down, the negative inverse of Utopia, the perfect world.

In George Orwell’s masterwork of totalitarian government, giant televisions watch you. The news is fictionalized and history is contradicted (and then rewritten daily) to prop up the government.

It’s a place where the vision of the future is “a boot stamping on a human face — forever.” Where it is not enough to acquiesce to Big Brother, one must love him wholehearted too. One must, with one’s own free will, believe that 2 + 2 = 5, or 3, or 4, or all those answers at once — if Big Brother says it’s so.

The fanatic devotion of otherwise intelligent, critical-thinking citizens — or as they are called in 1984, “comrades, brothers and sisters” — is kept on a high flame by fixing the society in a perpetual war against a vague and shifting enemy, an enemy who plants his spies and traitors everywhere, perhaps in the apartment next to your own squalid flat.

And everyone is destined to commit treason (by thinking skeptically) and then to be re-educated by the “Ministry of Love,” which is actually the torture division of the police department.

Ministry of Love – in the dystopic 1984, negative words have been eliminated, not quite successfully (hence, the common treason), and everyone will eventually betray themselves — and their lovers, parents, children — willingly, happily, to the police interrogators. There’s a famous snatch of doggerel that appears throughout the book, a chilling two-line summary of what it’s like to live in such a world. It takes the form, at first, of a reassuring nursery rhyme.

Under the spreading chestnut tree
I sold you and you sold me.

It’s a pity that this brilliant, distilled essay, posing as a novel, is wasted on high school juniors. 1984, read against a homework deadline and with an eye toward the coming exam, needs to be re-read in maturity and at leisure — say, once every ten years.

At 16 or 17, you simply don’t have enough sense of the world, can not yet weigh official “facts” against the actual evidence, to apply the book correctly — for it is not meant as a picture of the past, or the future. Neither is it a fantasia on Stalinist Russia (though that was its germinal inspiration) or Nazi Germany (everyone’s default position).

1984 is always pointed at the present. This present, an American present for our purpose — where “official facts” are spun and then re-spun to stay consistent with administration policy, and easy-to-hate villains (the terrorists , the “gays”, the illegals) are conjured up so that the eye of the nation will be forever misdirected — but furiously engaged.

Dan Froomkin, who assembles — and then explains — a compendium of daily news stories for the Washington Post in his must-read column White House Briefing, provided a devastating deconstruction of Bush Speak last Monday in a column entitled War is Peace Here’s a healthy excerpt:

Yesterday marked three years of war in Iraq — but not to President Bush. To Bush, it was “the third anniversary of the beginning of the liberation of Iraq.”

In fact, as Nedra Pickler noted for the Associated Press, Bush didn’t use the word “war” at all in his brief remarks .

To hear Bush tell it, what’s going on in Iraq — whatever it is — is fundamentally about progress, victory and peace. “We are implementing a strategy that will lead to victory in Iraq,” he said. “And a victory in Iraq will make this country more secure, and will help lay the foundation of peace for generations to come.”

Bush’s avoidance of the word “war” in the context of Iraq is the rule, not the exception. In the carefully chosen lexicon of White House speeches, that particular word is almost exclusively reserved for the “global war on terror.”

So there is no war, except for the war that never ends, and we’re winning.

It’s a little reminiscent of George Orwell’s 1984, where the three slogans of the ruling party were “War is Peace; Freedom is Slavery; Ignorance is Strength.”

Since the disclosures about Bush’s warrantless domestic surveillance program, Bush critics have been citing that other dominant slogan from Orwell’s book: “Big Brother is Watching You.”

But there are plenty of potential Orwell analogies in Bush’s use of language, and his historical revisionism, as well.

Of Straw Men

Another aspect of 1984: the daily “Two Minutes Hate” aimed at Emmanuel Goldstein, the enemy of the people. Unlike the obvious contemporaneous analogue, Osama bin Laden, the Goldstein character was actually a straw man — a made-up figure created by Big Brother just to be knocked down.

Jennifer Loven , in a bold departure for the Associated Press, wrote a whole story on Saturday about Bush’s extensive and generally unchallenged use of straw-man arguments.

“When the president starts a sentence with ’some say’ or offers up what ’some in Washington’ believe, as he is doing more often these days, a rhetorical retort almost assuredly follows.

“The device usually is code for Democrats or other White House opponents. In describing what they advocate, Bush often omits an important nuance or substitutes an extreme stance that bears little resemblance to their actual position.

“He typically then says he ’strongly disagrees’ — conveniently knocking down a straw man of his own making.

“Bush routinely is criticized for dressing up events with a too-rosy glow. But experts in political speech say the straw man device — in which the president makes himself appear entirely reasonable by contrast to supposed ‘critics’ — is just as problematic.”

Just search the White House Web site for those phrases, and you’ll find wonderful examples of Bush’s straw-man use of “ some people say,” “some say” and “some people in Washington.”

The Daily Buzz Word

As for today, Nedra Pickler writes for the Associated Press: “Progress is the buzzword at the White House as Bush headlines a campaign tied to the war’s anniversary to buck up public support of the mission.”

Then later, at the end of the column, one of Froomkin’s pet topics, the “Bush Bubble”:

Bubble Watch

The White House has released word that Bush will actually take questions, presumably unscreened, from the nonpartisan audience at the City Club of Cleveland. …

In the New York Times this morning, Elisabeth Bumiller tries to make the argument that Bush’s willingness to take occasional questions from audiences not stacked with supporters is a “big change.” And indeed, it is a change.

But today would make only the fourth time in four months that Bush has done so. Most, but not all, of the questions still turned out to be softballs. And Bumiller neglects to mention that the vast majority of Bush’s appearances are still carefully controlled. For instance, all of Bush’s talk-show style “panel discussions” still exclusively feature people who agree with him.

ALSO OF INTEREST:

Be sure to check out this hilarious spoof on Bush Speak,

1984 online
The Principles of Newspeak (1984 excerpt)
Students for an Orwellian Society

At left, Jasper John’s 3 Flags, and above,
our homage to the graphic style of artist
Barbara Kruger