Orwell had it half-wrong. The Ministry of Truth wouldn’t be the future of 1984, but instead 2012 and beyond. Yet our Animal Farm culture would be rather recognizable to him.
An ill-defined era, likely flickering to embers sometime between the terminus of the Reagan administration in 1988 and the mass commercialization (and resultant dumbing down) of the Internet in the mid-1990s, featured a majority of American people actually being fluent in national and world issues instead of marginally coherent servants to their 10-second attention spans. The rampant profusion of misspelling, sloppy usage, bad grammar and haphazard linguistic gibberish–seen constantly in online fora and comments, and more commonly than ever in journalism–is but a symptom of the illness, rather than the disease itself.
The productivity ethos isn’t, “A man should do his job so well that the living, the dead, and the unborn could do it no better.” Instead it is planned obsolescence.
The civic ethos isn’t, “Ask not what your country can do for you…”, but rather, “Here we are now, entertain us”, or feed us, or medicate us, give us free stuff, or pay for the fruits of my irresponsible behaviors.
Yes, sociopolitically, we know more but understand less, thanks to information overload, an appalling absence of education in civic responsibility, and deepening cultural emphasis on self-centered and secular worldviews that lack accountability to a higher authority than manifestly imperfect humans.
Don’t believe me? Believe instead the results of the aforementioned trends. To wit, ask any random 100 U.S. college students to identify both members of the following photo pair. Next, tabulate the fraction who could identify only the woman on the right. [If you’re reading this and can’t name her, you’re part of the problem!]
As Bill Engvall is wont to say, “There’s your sign.” Who of the two is vastly more crucial to world affairs? It’s not the one most readily identifiable to the prevailing culture of self-as-demigod, “What’s in it for me?” and, “If it feels good, do it”!
How else can I explain the slow-drip hoodwinking of such vast numbers of the populace–many otherwise intelligent and well-meaning, by purveyors of leftist Utopian dogma? Only the inertia of the Greatest Generation’s civic literacy, to the extent it has survived passage through ever-more-shallow successions of their offspring, precludes complete domination of spin over truth, euphemism over forthrightness, ambiguity over clarity. In that vein, I offer the following exemplary nuggets of modern American doublespeak, representing what Thomas Sowell described as,”using lofty words to obscure tawdry realities”. Blame not the carrier of the message for its pathetic reality…
What they say
What it really means…
Journalism
1. Heavily feature every real or made-up misdeed of the right or Christian;
2. Ignore the real misdeeds of the left or secular, except when convenient for producing isolated, token counter-examples of “fairness”.
Quantitative easing
Devaluing our already declining fiat currency, the dollar, by printing hundreds of billions more of them. The logical extension? Making more and more of less and less until we have an infinite amount of nothing.
Collaboration
1. Inclusion for the sake of appearing inclusive, regardless of merit, qualifications or credentials;
2. Reducing the product to the level of team consensus, instead of enriching it to that of the most expert member.
Conservative Women
Either don’t exist, or simply must be ill-educated, barefoot and pregnant mouthpieces for their male slave-masters.
Conservative Racial Minority Man
Conservative Racial Minority Woman
(Appearing on forehead of liberal in electronic lettering…)
!DIV/0 ERROR
UNABLE TO PROCESS FUNCTION
(…followed by protracted period of open-mouthed, glassy-eyed, nonverbal silence.)
Social justice
Classifying entire groups of people as helpless victims of grievous oppression in order to garner sympathy and preferential treatment for them, thereby perpetuating social injustice.
Affirmative action
1. Overreaction to collective, self-manufactured guilt over the bad deeds of dead people by overcompensating for the injustices those corpses committed when alive, against other people who also are dead;
2. Inequality in the name of equality, using discrimination today to “solve” discrimination of yesteryear (a.k.a., “Two wrongs do make a right.”).
Reparations
Overreaction to collective, self-manufactured guilt over the bad deeds of dead people by giving payola to the descendants of those corpses who suffered injustices when alive, at the hands of the aforementioned dead.
Tolerance
1. Not literal tolerance–but instead outright approval and celebration–of any among many moral depravities and fringe lifestyles that make an idol out of personal sexual pleasure;
2. Alternatively but similarly, tolerance of every point of view except those arising from a socially conservative and Christian worldview.
Diversity
Bowing at the altar of anything and everything not related to or emanating from English-speaking Christian males of European ancestry, particularly rural ones.
Equality
Some are more equal than others.
And so goes our post-1984 American Animal Farm.