On Orwell

I worry about Noam Chomsky dying, because when he’s gone, who will give us trenchant critiques of U.S. foreign policy?

Most days I find myself wishing David Foster Wallace was still alive, because I’m desperate to hear his take on our current world, desperate for him to help make sense of it like he did when he was alive.

I wish George Carlin and Bill Hicks were still alive, because they wrote jokes that kill, the only kind of jokes that matter, and made the absurdity of our times tolerable.

The deaths of Wallace, Carlin, and Hicks all occurred in my lifetime.  As will Noam Chomsky’s.

But I’ve got another hero who was dead before I was born:  George Orwell.  And I don’t find myself missing him—not because I never lost him, but because he's is still commenting on our day and age.

Let’s review: 

Orwell wrote 1984, my favorite novel of all time.  When I was 17, my younger brother gave it to me and said "read this" and changed my life.  It was the best, most absorbing, most riveting reading experience I've ever had.  It’s my favorite book to talk about.  It’s my favorite book to teach.  (Though that's increasingly hard to do because his predictions become more and more true.  I taught it during the Iraq war, and his prescience just about made my head explode.)

Orwell wrote Homage to Catalonia, one of my favorite nonfiction books, and maybe my favorite history book of all-time.

Orwell wrote the essay "Politics and the English Language", which is the best essay about writing I’ve ever read.  I always thought you could build an entire composition class around this essay alone, and it'd be a mighty good class indeed.

And of course there’s more:  everyone loves Animal Farm, Down and Out in Paris and London is fantastic, and his description of working in a coal mine made me claustrophobic (just like Melville’s description of standing atop a ship’s mast gave me vertigo).

I wrote mean things about his defense of English cooking, so I want to make it up to him by giving him more love.  When I first got to England, (otherwise known as The Land of Orwell My Favorite English Author), I bought a collection of his essays.  And though I thought it impossible to love him more, I fell for him again and harder than before.

Amongst the many fawning things I could say, I’ll mostly concentrate on the one I mentioned above:  it’s astonishing how relevant Orwell remains.  It's certainly true about this collection of essays; though he was writing in the 30s and 40s, he’ll come out with a killer sentence that could stand as a perfect critique of our times.

Let’s start with this:

“As far as the mass of the people go, the extraordinary swings of opinion which occur nowadays, the emotions which can be turned on and off like a tap, are the result of newspaper and radio hypnosis.”

Iraq war anyone?

Or in from the same essay:

“Whether the British ruling class are wicked or merely stupid is one of the most difficult questions of our time.” 

That’s the question we asked for the entire George W. presidency.

This one made my jaw drop.  Here’s Orwell reflecting on the standardized tests he had to take as a schoolboy:

“At St. Cyprian’s the whole process was frankly a preparation for a sort of confidence trick.  Your job was to learn exactly those things that would give an examiner the impression that you knew more than you did know, and as far as possible to avoid burdening your brain with anything else.  Subjects which lacked examination-value were almost completely neglected.” 

And,

“This business of making a gifted boy’s career depend on a competitive examination, taken when he is only twelve or thirteen, is an evil thing at best.”

Orwell was opposed to high-stakes standardized tests!  He knew that as a twelve year old in the 1920s!  If only we were as smart as the young Orwell . . . because nearly 100 years later, the stakes of high-stakes tests are only getting higher.

O.K. George, you’ve nailed our tyrannical political leaders and you’ve seen through the absurdity of standardized tests.  You were man before your time.  But these days many of us are deeply concerned about the environment.  Surely there must be some sort of eco-Orwell that was decades ahead of his time:

“If we kill all pleasure in the actual process of life, what sort of future are we preparing for ourselves? If a man cannot enjoy the return of spring, why should he be happy in a labour-saving Utopia? What will he do with the leisure that the machine will give him? I have always suspected that if our economic and political problems are ever really solved, life will become simpler instead of more complex, and that the sort of pleasure one gets from finding the first primrose will loom larger than the sort of pleasure one gets from eating an ice to the tune of a Wurlitzer. I think that by retaining one's childhood love of such things as trees, fishes, butterflies and — to return to my first instance — toads, one makes a peaceful and decent future a little more probable, and that by preaching the doctrine that nothing is to be admired except steel and concrete, one merely makes it a little surer that human beings will have no outlet for their surplus energy except in hatred and leader worship.” 

Orwell the environmental radical!  Dead on and so well written.  It presupposes The Last Child in the Woods and a whole host of other environmental books.  I just want to crawl inside that quote and rub it all over my body.

George, Big O (sometimes I call him Big O), you’re on a roll.  What can you say about the poor?  About wealth disparity?  We’ve got quite a problem with it here in modern-day America.  Inflation-adjusted wages for the working class are no better than the 1970s, people are chronically underemployed, the rich just keep getting richer.  And somehow the poor get demonized as unreasonable, lazy moochers of the system.  Please, illuminate it for us:

“All that the working man demands is what these others would consider the indispensable minimum without which human life cannot be lived at all. Enough to eat, freedom from the haunting terror of unemployment, the knowledge that your children will get a fair chance, a bath once a day, clean linen reasonably often, a roof that doesn't leak, and short enough working hours to leave you with a little energy when the day is done. . . . They knew that they were in the right, because they were fighting for something which the world owed them and was able to give them.”

You’re right.  You’re so right.  It’s so obvious.  That’s your gift, to point out a painfully obvious fact that we’ve somehow forgotten.

But I’ve been focusing on your content, George, and we can’t forget the brilliance of your craft.  Your writing seems straightforward and simple, but most people don’t realize how hard it is to write with such clarity, what an art it is.  Let’s think of a good example.  What was that line you had in one of your wartime essays?  When you had a chance to shoot a man who was pulling his pants up on the battlefield?

“I had come here to shoot at ‘Fascists’; but a man who is holding up his trousers isn’t a ‘Fascist’, he is visibly a fellow creature, similar to yourself, and you don’t feel like shooting him.”

An elegant take on the absurdity of war in one clear, plain-spoken, exquisite sentence.

And to close, let me reiterate how much you’ve meant to me personally.  After David Foster Wallace died, I felt like I’d lost a friend.  It made me realize that our favorite authors are much more than people we just read; they’re companions, fellow-travelers, people we hang out with, folks we know well and who know us back.  So surely you’ve got a quote that crystallizes something I’m struggling with right now.

Let’s see, what’s been on my mind?  I know:  money.  The wealth divide between my friends and me grows every year.  I’ve been a public school teacher too long, I volunteered for too many years, and now I'm seeing the consequences.  It might not have mattered right out of undergrad, but now my friends who are doctors, lawyers, in finance, in sales, etc., all seem to exist in a different financial stratosphere.  And it gets worse every year.

I don’t think I care too much about not having a house, a car, nice clothes, or nice things.  What bothers me is the general assumption that someone with a lot of money is somehow better.  Not better in any specific way, just better as a person.  I do it too.  In a money-driven, late-stage capitalist society such as ours, money tends to become the measure of everything, including human value.  You can’t help but think the rich man has something impressive about him that has turned into a lot of money, and the poor man has something lacking in him that has turned into a lack of money.

I know, I know, that’s not really true.  I know, I should be proud of choosing a career of public service.  I know there might be value in the classes I’ve taught and the students I may have affected.  I intellectually know it’s true.  But viscerally, after four decades of life in a money-obsessed culture, I can’t help the feeling that I’m a bit of a (I hate to say) loser when I still have to live with roommates to pay the rent.

Know what I mean George?  Ever had a similar thought?

“The goodness of money was as unmistakable as the goodness of health or beauty, and a glittering car, a title or a horde of servants was mixed up in the people’s minds with the idea of actual moral virtue.”

Thanks.  It makes me feel better to know that you know.