Big Brother is back with a vengeance. It’s “1984” all over again. George Orwell’s seminal dystopian novel, you know, the one they made you read in school, the one you dismissed as a dark sci-fi fable that could NEVER REALLY HAPPEN, is now all the rage again. We’re talking No. 1 on Amazon’s bestseller list.
The cautionary tale of a totalitarian state where everyone is always watched, no one is free and war is a perpetual capitalist machine is somehow striking a chord once again. Many sources are tracing the book’s renewed popularity and relevance to remarks that Kellyanne Conway, an adviser to Donald J. Trump, said on “Meet the Press,” referring to debunked claims about the attendance for the presidential inauguration being “alternative facts.” To many, the phrase was an eerie echo of Orwell’s “Ministry of Truth.”
The novel, published in 1949, conjured up a bleak vision of an authoritarian society where propaganda has replaced reality and doublespeak has ousted truth. Orwell’s work has long been regarded as one of the most influential novels of its era. But for many folks, it also seemed like a far-fetched and paranoid fantasy to imagine a time when words like “doubleplusgood” would come into usage and government surveillance would be the norm and not the exception. Sound familiar?
For the record, the last time “1984” got a big bump in sales was right after Edward Snowden exposed the scope of the National Security Agency’s surveillance program in 2013. The death of objectivity and analysis is just another step on the road to tyranny in the Orwellian classic. As one character chillingly puts it, “It is the beautiful thing, the destruction of words.”
Those of us who bleed onto the page (or screen) to make a living, a tribe of people once known as ink-stained wretches, beg to differ.
