Reflections: You're Laughing Now

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Here is an excerpt from an essay on George Orwell that I read this morning on the New York Times Sunday Book Review page:


… [W]henever perplexed Americans fret over Osama bin Laden or suicide killings, and delude themselves that material progress will cure these ills, I think of what Orwell wrote in 1940 about another charismatic monster. “Hitler, because in his own joyless mind he feels it with exceptional strength, knows that human beings don’t only want comfort, safety, short working-hours, hygiene, birth control and, in general, common sense; they also, at least intermittently, want struggle and self-sacrifice. . . . However they may be as economic theories, Fascism and Nazism are psychologically far sounder than any hedonistic conception of life.”

While I agree with the essayist about Osama bin Laden in this connection, I glean something more about current events from this quote to which the author does not allude. What could sum up more succinctly the impetus behind the snowballing rejection of Barack Obama’s liberal agenda of providing the security of universal health care, along with “comfort, safety, short working-hours, hygiene, birth control “ for all citizens than does this typically prescient insight of Orwell’s?

This quote shows exactly how, and why, the activist “Tea-baggers” have arisen to agitate against their own best interests by championing the likes of intellectual and ideological non-entities such as Sarah Palin, Rick Perry and Scott Brown.

And it shows, more chillingly, whom they most resemble within the larger context of history.

I know, I know... You’re laughing now…

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Your comments welcomed: irodak47@gmail.com
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Quote(s) du Jour

Kerouac on writing as riffing:

...You'll never know what you wanted to say about something till you're scribbling furiously into it, reaching the center, then scribbling out again. This is BLOWING, accidentally and actually finding your center.

~ Some of the Dharma

Orwell on Western Civilization:

It was what he had chosen when he declared war on money. Serve the money-god or go under; there is no other rule.

...He had a vision of London, of the western world; he saw a thousand million slaves toiling and grovelling about the throne of money. The earth is ploughed, ships sail, miners sweat in dripping tunnels underground, clerks hurry for the eight-fifteen with the fear of the boss eating at their vitals. And even in bed with their wives they tremble and obey. Obey whom? The money-priesthood, the pink-faced masters of the world. The Upper Crust. A welter of sleek young rabbits in thousand guinea motor cars, of golfing stockbrockers and cosmopolitan financiers, of Chancery lawyers and fashionable Nancy boys, of bankers, newspaper peers, novelists of all four sexes, American pugilists, lady aviators, film stars, bishops, titled poets and Chicago gorillas.

~ Keep the Aspidistra Flying

Reflections: Divide and Conquer - Two Game Plans

Over at my home-away-from-home, Ragged Thots, in the comments section under the title: Government at work (6/18/08 edition), a strange bird named Golub mused thusly:

Lastly, I am always baffled by the fact that Red States should be Blue States and Blue should be Red - in terms of taxation and in the support for more government spending.

NY absolutely should be AGAINST taxes and FOR localized government and rural states should be FOR more taxes and FOR more government spending.

Edited to fit this post, my response to that was, in part, as follows:

[W}here the logic of that fails is that rural folk tend to vote on cultural issues, rather than on economic ones. Therefore, the GOP is able to keep them Red based on issues loosely defined and lumped together as "gays, guns, and God."

[Below are some excerpts from George] Orwell's “The Road to Wigan Pier"… that describe these political forces as they pertained to middle- vs. working-class Brits in the years prior to WWII. The issue that was analogous to Red vs. Blue (rural vs. urban) in contemporary America, was Socialism vs. Fascism (working-class vs. middle-class) in pre-war Great Britain. In both cases, the negative pressure [giving rise to these opposing impulses] is applied by capitalism. But the antagonism between the two social groupings keeps them seeing each other as the enemy, rather than seeing the real enemy, who successfully divides and conquers.

So, Orwell:

Obviously the Socialist movement has got to capture the exploited middle class before it is too late; above all it must capture the office workers, who are so numerous and, if they knew how to combine, so powerful. …The people who have got to act together are all those who cringe to the boss and all those who shudder when they think of the rent. This means the small-holder has got to ally himself with the factory-hand, the typist with the coal-miner, the schoolmaster with the garage mechanic. There is some hope of getting them to do so if they can be made to understand where their interest lies. But this will not happen if their social prejudices, which in some of them are at least as strong as any economic consideration, are needlessly irritated.

…Economically, I am in the same boat with the miner, the navvy and the farm-hand; remind me of that I will fight at their side. But culturally I am different from the miner, the navvy and the farm-hand; lay the emphasis on that and you may arm me against them. [i.e., “turn me into a Fascist”]

…The weakness of the middle class hitherto has lain in the fact that they have never learned to combine; but if you frighten them into combining against you, you may find that you have raised up a devil.

[To stave off Fascism] all that is needed is to hammer two facts home into the public consciousness. One, that the interests of all exploited people are the same; the other, that Socialism is compatible with common decency.

The historical situations change superficially; but the mechanisms and machinations of politics and human nature remain virtually identical.

Reflections: The Fascist Impulse

From The Road to Wigan Pier, George Orwell’s thoughts on how a badly presented socialism can lead to fascism:

Fascism as it appears in the intellectual is a sort of mirror-image -- not actually of Socialism but of a plausible travesty of Socialism. It boils down to a determinism to do the opposite of whatever the mythical Socialist does. If you present Socialism in a bad and misleading light – if you let people imagine that it does not mean much more than pouring European civilization down the sink at the command of Marxist prigs – you risk driving the intellectual into Fascism. You frighten him into a sort of angry defensive attitude in which he simply refuses to listen to the Socialist case.

… In order to combat Fascism it is necessary to understand it… To anyone with a feeling for tradition and for discipline it comes with its appeal ready-made. Probably it is very easy, when you have had a bellyful of the more tactless kind of Socialist propaganda, to see Fascism as the last line defense of all that is good in European civilization. Even the Fascist bully at his symbolic worst, with rubber truncheon in one hand and castor oil bottle in the other, does not necessarily feel himself a bully; more probably he feels like Roland in the pass at Roncevaux, defending Christendom against the barbarian. …Fascism has been able to pose as the upholder of the European tradition, and to appeal to Christian belief, to patriotism and to the military virtues.

Orwell concludes that “Socialism is the only real enemy that Fascism has to face.” I, of course, agree with this assessment. Even under the best of conditions, capitalism creates an underclass of angry losers for whom criminal activity seems a better way out than any other readily available means. When things get bad enough, as they did in the 1960s, this anger is fairly easily organized into smoldering, widespread rebellion against the Establishment. What Orwell was predicting for Europe, prior to WWII, can be seen as a cyclical, recurring phenomenon. As the world economy worsens, we may be on the brink of the violent phase of another such cycle. But rather than in Europe this time, here.

Readings: Taking No Prisoners

from Orwell's The Road to Wigan Pier:

One of the analogies between Communism and Roman Catholicism is that only the “educated” are completely orthodox. The immediately striking thing about the English Roman Catholics…is their intense self-consciousness. Apparently they never think, certainly they never write, about anything but the fact that they are Roman Catholics; this single fact and the self-praise resulting from it form the entire stock-in-trade of the Catholic literary man. …

A working-class Catholic…does not spend his time in brooding on the fact that he is a Roman Catholic, and he is not particularly conscious of being different from his non-Catholic neighbors. …In the Roman Catholic homes of Lancashire you see the crucifix on the wall and the Daily Worker on the table. It is only the “educated” man, especially the literary man, who knows how to be a bigot. And, mutatis mutandis, it is the same with Communism. The creed is never found in its pure form in a genuine proletarian.

It may be said, however, that even if the theoretical book-trained Socialist is not a working man himself, at least he is actuated by a love of the working class. He is endeavoring to shed his bourgeois status and fight on the side of the proletariat – that, obviously, must be his motive.

But is it? Sometimes I look at a [middle-class] Socialist – the intellectual, tract-writing type of Socialist, with his pullover, his fuzzy hair, and his Marxian quotation – and wonder what the devil his motive really is. …The underlying motive of many Socialists, I believe, is simply a hypertrophied sense of order. The present state of affairs offends them not because it causes misery, still less because it makes freedom impossible, but because it is untidy…

Nobody spared!

Readings: Orwell on Chronic Welfare

In The Road to Wigan Pier, his study of the plight of the working class in pre-WWII England, George Orwell makes the following observations on displaced workers living on "the dole":

When I first saw unemployed men at close quarters, the thing that horrified and amazed me was to find that many of them were ashamed of being unemployed. I was very ignorant, but no so ignorant as to imagine that when the loss of foreign markets pushes two million men out of work, those two million are any more to blame than the people who draw blanks in the Calcutta Sweep. But at that time nobody cared to admit that unemployment was inevitable, because this meant admitting that it would probably continue. The middle classes were still talking about "lazy idle loafers on the dole" and saying that "these men could all find work if they wanted to," and naturally these opinions percolated down to the working class themselves. I remember the shock of astonishment it gave me, when I first mingled with tramps and beggars, to find that a fair proportion, perhaps a quarter, of these beings whom I had been taught to regard as cynical parasites, were decent young miners and cotton-workers gazing at their destiny with the same sort of dumb amazement as an animal in a trap. They simply could not understand what was happening to them. They had been brought up to work, and behold! it seemed as if they were never going to have the chance of working again. In their circumstances it was inevitable, at first, that they should be haunted by a feeling of personal degradation. That was the attitude towards unemployment in those days: it was a disaster which happened to you as an individual and for which you were to blame.

The more things change, the more they remain the same, eh?

Readings: Compare and Contrast

Two excerpts below: the first the Buddhist-inspired, notebook musings of an American "beatnik" ; the second the thoughts of a fictional Brit businessman and WW I vet, on the brink of WW II:

As far as ordinary life in America is concerned, for 2,000 years and much more than that old Indian Mothers pounded cornmeal for mush in the hopeless drizzle of history here in North America; why should we therefore question ordinary simple life of eating, sleeping, keeping a shelter, in the name of "Modern" needs such as automobiles, washing machines, expensive clothes, up-to-date furniture and cultural experiments like TV and movies and every kind of unreal hassle to kill time and with all its attendant ambitions? What advantage is there in multiplying need? REST AND BE HAPPY

~ Jack Kerouac, Some of the Dharma

I wanted peace and quiet. Peace! We had it once, in Lower Binfield. I've told you something about our old life there, before the war. I'm not pretending it was perfect. I dare say it was a dull, sluggish, vegetable kind of life. You can say we were like turnips, if you like. But turnips don't live in terror of the boss, they don't lie awake at night thinking about the next slump and the next war. We had peace inside us.

~ George Orwell, Coming Up for Air

Readings: What Boyhood Was Then

In George Orwell's novel, Coming Up For Air, the protagonist, George Bowling, recalls the first, transformative, summer day during which he was finally allowed to accompany his older brother and a gang of local boys on their adventures in suburban England:

I'd walked ten miles and I wasn't tired. All day I'd trailed after the gang and tried to do everything they did, and they'd called me "the kid" and snubbed me as much as they could, but I'd more or less kept my end up. I had a wonderful feeling inside me, a feeling you can't know about unless you've had it -- but if you're a man you'll have had it some time. I knew that I wasn't a kid any longer, I was a boy at last. And it's a wonderful thing to be a boy, to go roaming where grown-ups can't catch you, and to chase rats and kill birds and shy stones and cheek carters and shout dirty words. It's a kind of strong, rank feeling, a feeling of knowing everything and fearing nothing, and it's all bound up with breaking rules and killing things. ...Thank God I'm a man, because no woman ever has that feeling.

I was a boy long enough ago that days like that were still a part of growing up in the American Midwest. I fear that most boys today -- every highly-structured minute of whose lives is carefully planned and micromanaged by adults -- never feel the exhilaration of that kind of primitive freedom.

Quote du Jour

Prior to becoming a successful novelist and journalist, George Orwell, still using his real name, Eric Blair, spent a couple of years working as a policeman in colonial Burma. It was, in large part, the disgust that he developed for this role that led to Orwell’s subsequent anti-imperialism and aversion to rank and privilege in British society. In the quote that follows, his biographer, Jeffrey Meyers, gives an account of the only public hanging witnessed by Orwell during his stint as a cop. Orwell was moved to later write about this experience:

“A Hanging” is Orwell’s first distinctive work. It gives an apparently objective account of a ritualistic execution—from fixed bayonets to a bag over the head of the condemned—in which the narrator officially and actively participates. …The procession to the gallows is interrupted by a stray dog that leaps about and disturbs the solemnity of the occasion. In a strikingly human detail, the prisoner, who’d pissed on the floor when he heard his appeal had been dismissed, steps aside to avoid a puddle on the path—as if he feared he might catch cold on the way to his execution. This act of conscious will confirms his human existence. At this halfway point Orwell states his theme: “till that moment I had never realized what it means to destroy a healthy, conscious man. When I saw the prisoner step aside to avoid the puddle, I saw the mystery, the unspeakable wrongness, of cutting a life short when it is in full tide.” Instead of invoking religion, he asserts a quasi-religious sense of life’s sacredness—the first expression of the instinctive humanism that characterizes all his work.

~ Jeffrey Meyers, Orwell: Wintry Conscience of a Generation