The Language of Politics

Big Brother is reading youI am reposting my graphic because it disappeared once. I get the feeling that the government or the government's representative here on earth is watching and will not allow non-conformity.

George Orwell (1903-1950) is one of the memorable writers of the 20th century and may have contributed more vivid images into the language than Dickens did per square word written. Big Brother will never die although allusions to him in modern discussions about our blossoming surveillance society turn the issue towards frivolity. Orwell’s 1984 is often called ‘prophetic’ although it is little more than a good story about his view of a totalitarian society. Orwell was no prophet and he never pretended to be one. 1984 is just 1948 backwards. He had to name it something and he was writing it in 1948. Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World was far more insightful into the future than 1984. He wrote about a total state that controlled the population with sex and drugs, but he didn’t know about rock and roll. In his Brave New World Revisited, Huxley wrote in 1958 about the ‘prophetic’ nature of his 1932 novel Brave New World and made predictions about what will come using the future tense in a very specific manner. Huxley’s view of a developing world of distraction and eugenics was far closer to today’s ‘shut up and shop’ society than Orwell’s militaristic future.

This was on Cnn's website in a recap of the Republican debates this week. I remember my high school history teacher preaching the gospel of Regan. I found this really funny but also disturbing.

Can’t see the words for the forest.

Last night I was listening for comments about what was happening in the language of the selections, but everything said seemed to be focusing on the specifics of the names and the issues involved. What proceeded from that was a discussion and judgment of the rightness or wrongness of the issues or the trashing of the people involved based on what was brought to class already in our minds. I wanted to pop up and suggest that we change the names of the principals in the selections so that we could see more clearly what was happening with the language, but it wasn’t my role. So, I changed the names involved and wrote a little blurb in the spirit of the two platforms:

Hello fellow students in the Politics of Language. Declare your candidacy as a Student Government Representative today! The cutoff date is Monday, May 7, so hurry and make a run for office! Forms are available from me or from www2.evergreen.edu/studentgovernment or at CAB 320 Student Activities Space Number 11 at The Geoduck Union.

Asenka Miller, Student Government Representative 2006-2007 

I am going to school for art so I've been trying to think of a related issue. Does anyone have any ideas?

I found this episode of To The Point very interesting. I especially found the information from the doctor to be pertinent to the naming issue. Listen to it here.

Supreme Court Moves the Anatomical Landmark

The Supreme Court last week upheld the first restriction of any kind on abortion since Roe v. Wade legalized abortion for any reason in all fifty states during all nine months of pregnancy in January, 1973. Previous to that date each state was free to choose its own abortion laws. Just months before Roe, voters in Washington State installed by referendum the most extreme abortion law in the country. Mostly the abortion procedure was restricted to certain specific circumstances in the vast expanse of North America, but a few states like Washington, California and New York had very liberal abortion laws in 1973.

Hello, everybody. Nice to have people writing back about my blog entry regarding PP driving deep into genocide. This post is a response to them and I am putting it on the blog forum because the great computer just makes one long hard-to-read paragraph in the ‘response to response’ mode:

The bramble fields of our brains…

I wasn't trying to demonize Margaret Sanger or PP. I am more of an observer rather than a participant out there trying to change the world or rule it. Philosophical anarchists are like that. They tend to anger the true believers and activists. I like freedom and it is about the only thing that I insist on. William James said that genius is 'simply that quality of viewing the world in non-habitual ways.' That leaves room for all of us to break out of the slogans, clichés or metaphors that are like the familiar rabbit trails (‘circuits’ to the Linguistic Darwinists) that lace the bramble fields of our brains. To have a different thought than the habitual, a person has to blaze a new path thru the thicket. The activists, true-believers and ideologues discourage this, consider such thinking as thought-crime, and try to kill it before it spreads by varying techniques that include bullying. This is all observable in the real world. In my opinion, the ideologues feel threatened by non-habitual thinking because mostly they are trying to create their utopian dream and new-thought is dangerous to their plans. How can their utopia be created when people are going off on thought tangents? All they want is some agreement on their view of the world, history, all of existence and the way things should be. Is that too much to ask? Non-conformity is dangerous to them. Communism is a form a utopianism, but it created the two most prolific mass murderers in the history of the world—Stalin and Mao—yet, some true-believers still want to give Communism a proper chance to work. What does it take to discredit a philosophy? The problem with any utopia is that one needs a state to enforce it or bring it about.

You Are What You Grow

Brian Ulrich