A number of novels, throughout our history, have described actions taken by controlling regimes to maintain power, and to curb and control the information they spread, or withhold from, those of us they hold as a captive audience.
In George Orwell’s novel, 1984, for example, the Party and Big Brother (who is watching YOU) are continuously rewriting historical records, altering newspaper archives and manipulating language, itself, through what they call Newspeak, in order to control public thought and collective memory, at its core. The fictional government department in charge is called The Ministry of Truth. Their departmental slogan: “Who controls the past, controls the future: who controls the present, controls the past”.
Ray Bradbury’s novel, Fahrenheit 451, is set in a totalitarian society where “firemen” burn books and every scrap of history. They control the populace by systematically punishing independent thought, destroying physical texts, and suppressing critical thinking by “flooding” the zone with constant bursts of shallow mass media.
Yoko Ogawa’s 1994 novel, The Memory Police, is located in a world where objects, logical thought and memories are systematically made to disappear. The ruling “memory police” enforce total conformity by forcibly and physically erasing citizens’ recollections of everything they once had.
In Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, the state controls society by overwhelming it with state-sanctioned distractions, consumerism, chemical pacification and constant conditioning designed to erase individual thinking, once and for all.
In Franz Kafka’s The Trial, a bewildering legal system keeps an accused man totally in the dark about the nature of the charges against him, the laws being cited or even the source of the authority holding him prisoner.
I cite these examples because, day by day, the techniques and methods of the regime controlling this country are looking more and more similar to our would-be-dictator’s fictional predecessors, utilizing a set of targeted and honed communication tactics, messaging repetition, constant distraction, and government initiatives designed to reshape the ways by which Americans perceive reality, history and authority. Just last Monday night, the faux king president frantically punched out a breathtaking, middle of the night, 1,321-word rant attacking, of all people, Bill Maher, his business partner Chuck LaBella, and HBO.
Why Bill Maher? After Maher had made the mistake of having a rather cordial dinner at the white house, he, nevertheless, went on the air and mocked the president’s ever-lower approval numbers and referred to him as a lame duck. Oh, no, there’s that truthyness again. Slap it down!
And, of course, it had the additional benefit of creating yet another distraction on the very night it was reported that the Epstein files were being further held up by his regime. Why, you ask? Well, there appears to be a growing body of evidence that the orange guy had a well-documented, direct, involvement in the disgusting activities of his friend, Jeffrey Epstein. Quick! Look somewhere else!
Most telling, however, is the steady unfurling of executive orders designed to erase American history. A series of these orders have mandated the changing of place names, deep censorship of historical exhibits, reduced access to public areas, changes in school curricula, and censorship of museum exhibits, all literally in the service of “white-washing” our national story.
The oval office squatter’s skill at orchestrating the news cycle through tweets that keep Americans caught in the web of an “eternal present” as The Atlantic wrote, is unrelenting. He makes certain that attention is constantly focused on whatever outrageous acts he seeks to normalize in order to commit more. His constant barrage of lies is exhausting our ability to hang onto our own thoughts and not to simply be forced to fact-check yet another piece of blather.
The antidote? His fall from power. He is already greatly weakened by the very acts he uses to distract us, as more and more of us, like Plato’s emerging cave-dweller, see the mendacity, the self-enrichment and the corruption, and are forcefully turning away from him in order to recapture the good parts of America we are in danger of losing through erasure.
Struggle against the polluted tide and vow to keep and share your own thoughts and memories. Thus will we bring him down.
Veritas liberabit vos
The DooDah Peace Prize
In 1978, some intrepid and irreverent watchers of the venerable Rose Parade in Pasadena decided there just had to be an antidote to all those rose petals and waving gloved hands and sweetness, one that was more accessible to the rest of us.
Sooo…they invented the DooDah Parade. Named variously as the Twisted Sister of the Rose Parade, or, by Reader’s Digest, America’s Best Parade, it features people doing whatever they please, however they please, all along the sacred parade route on a day other than New Year’s.
Included among the (marchers? aimless wanderers? gaggle?) are satire groups like The Bastard Sons of Lee Marvin, the Committee for the Right to Bear Arms (marching in formation with mannequin arms) and the Church of the SubGenius. There are drill and marching teams like The Shopping Cart Drill Team, the Marching Lumberjacks, the BBQ and Hibachi Marching Grill Team and the Men of Leisure Synchronized Nap Team. Well, you get the picture.
Why do I bring this up? I was thinking about it when our big Vieux Boulogne in the white house (Vieux Boulogne, btw, is officially the world’s stinkiest cheese) declared himself a peace-maker of the highest order, deserving (but deprived) of the Nobel Peace Prize. Which, compared to those who are actually working for peace in the world, and may have accomplished it for a bit, marks our clueless president as the DooDah Parade version of those who have earned the prestigious, real Rose Parade, Nobel Peace Prize.
Speaking of parades, I think of him, at this time of year, as a big, floating, Macy’s Thanksgiving Parade balloon, leaking air, literally deflating, and ending his term as a flaccid hunk of orange plastic, swept into the gutter. Join me in sticking a pin in it?
