Forty-five Years Later?

 

On Waukazoo Street in Northport, Michigan

First, some bookshop news and blog notes:

 

Reminder: Dog Ears Books is open four days a week this winter, Wednesday through Saturday, from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m.

 

Reminder: you can order audio books through Libro.fm and choose Dog Ears Books as your bookstore on the Libro.fm site, and we will earn a little something from each audiobook you buy that way. It will help us get through the winter. Thank you!

 

Blog note 1: This blog, Books in Northport, has been around since September of 2007. It has always been free and will be free as long as it survives. I make my living as a bookseller, not as a blogger. Neither will I be moving to a Substack account, although many professional writers and independent journalists are there now, and I encourage you to follow a few, upgrading to a paid subscription if you can afford it, especially those whose work is crucial to giving us real news, e.g., Dan Rather, Heather Cox Richardson, and others. The importance of these sources will increase sooner than you might imagine.

 

Blog note 2: Call my blog a “labor of love” or call me a graphomaniac – however you want to characterize it and/or me, I’ve stuck to this project for over 17 years. Some of you have been with me from the beginning, while others are brand-new readers, but I appreciate every single one of you, however long you have been reading. My morale this year, however, could use a little extra support (I’ll be trying to provide support for the morale of my readers, too), so I encourage you to (1) sign on as a follower, (2) comment on posts, and (3) send links to your family and friends for posts you find particularly meaningful. There is no financial advantage to me in this, only personal satisfaction.

 

That’s it for bookshop hours, audiobooks, and blog! Now, for some book thoughts --.

 

Still relevant!

George Orwell’s dystopian novel 1984, an “instant classic,” first appeared in 1949 and hung over us like the sword of Damocles for 35 years. When the fateful year of his title passed, we in “the real world” heaved a sigh of relief. It didn’t happen! We’re still free! Did we then become complacent? Oh, gripes about government continued, with “Big Brother” now used as an epithet. It took until 2019 for worry about corporations keeping tabs on us to start catching up with worry about government. In 2023 concern over corporate surveillance surpassed the worry about government. 

Where are we now? Is Big Brother watching us? Follow-up question: are Big Government and Big Corporations separate? 

 

In Orwell’s novel, was the fictional Big Brother an individual modeled on Stalin or a figurehead personifying the ruling party of the totalitarian state? Follow-up question: Does it matter? 

 

In the novel, there is no life of significance without Party membership, and for Party members there is no such thing as private life, as they are frequently reminded by ubiquitous posters and ever-on telescreen messages: “Big Brother is watching you.” Is it ironic or just pitiful that Americans in the 21^st century have not waited for the government to install telescreens in homes but rush to put their own personal lives online in videos for all the world to see, even grooming their toddlers as video stars? Follow-up question: How will that play out in the future of those children? 

 

Admittedly, this blog of mine has not been restricted to book reviews and bookshop news, and over the years I’ve shared quite a bit of my personal life, from photographs of my dogs to an account of my husband’s death and my cross-country trip home to Michigan without him. It's been kind of a memoir in installments. (This blog is not AI-generated. I am a real person, as well as a live bookseller.) I do, however, maintain a degree of privacy and intend to keep it that way.

 

January 30, 2025, Up North

However, back to the book --.

 

Winston, the protagonist in 1984, lives in constant uncertainty and fear. He doesn’t have to worry that he is breaking the law because there is no law! There are only bad thoughts. But if he is suspected of having them (as we pretty much know from the beginning he will be), there will be no possible defense. He is guilty when accused, accused because guilty, and all that remains is for him to confess and name names, specifically the name of his lover, since he is not supposed to have a private life. But no, that’s not all he has to do. He can’t just give a name. He must be broken. 

 

We Americans in 2025, forty-five years after the date Orwell's book predicted world totalitarianism, can keep our lives relatively private if we choose to stay offline and buy local with cash. All of us can do our best to seek truth and hold onto it in a whirlwind of public lying and stories that change from one hour to the next. Certainly we can ration our viewing of “reality” videos and so-called “news,” even completely unplugging for days at a time. 

 

All that done, even so, it’s hard to live in a country whose leaders have turned their backs on law. 

 

When, as now, in the last week and a half, the rules change day by day … and people appointed or elected to run government are not restrained by laws or held accountable for breaking them … and individuals formerly in positions of authority are persecuted because they believed in and followed laws and testified against law-breakers … then, with or without constant surveillance, with or without thought police continually monitoring our posture and facial expressions, we have been taken hostage by the world of 1984.

 

And yet--. And yet--. 

 

This morning on a back road I came upon a pickup truck that had run off the road and was half-buried in deep snow, and a little way up the road a man was walking. “Is that your truck? Do you need a ride?” He did. 

 

In the afternoon the sun came out and shone for hours, and our cold northern Michigan world was so beautiful. Shadows on snow are so beautiful! Sun on snow is so beautiful! 

We can still help each other and see beauty in the world, and each one of those small moments is important. Each such moment is resistance to tyranny.

 

In the wake of the Wednesday night air tragedy that resulted in the loss of 67 lives, the Blamer-in-Chief wasted no time in pointing the finger—in an absurd direction, naturally. It is his way. He does not want Americans to come together, either in joy or in sorrow and certainly not in understanding and love and mutual aid. Instead he wants all eyes fixed on him, his followers’ eyes in endless admiration, his opponents’ eyes filled with fear. He incites hatred, constantly whipping up frenzies as Americans with different agendas consider each other from across the political and moral chasm he keeps digging, very intentionally, deeper and deeper. He’s got the whole country in a dire game of the prisoner’s dilemma, and as long as he can keep us from joining together, he will keep pulling the strings and jerking us off-balance.

 

I must believe more people will finally see his naked narcissism and incompetence when it begins to affect their lives--although when hardships fall on MAGA families, of course he will tell them it’s someone else’s fault. It’s always someone else’s fault. President Harry Truman’s famous motto was “The buck stops here.” In the DJT White House, the buck doesn’t have time to catch its breath before it's thrown in someone else’s face. And it’s hard not to react to the absurd nonstop blaming with anger, but we cannot live every waking moment in outrage. It’s important to deny the Blamer his childish satisfaction. It’s also important for us to continue to love each other and love the world, our poor, broken world.

 

What helps you remain hopeful about our ability to heal the world? What strategies do you have to contribute to healing yourself and others? For putting the pieces back together again? To mend the world? 

P.S. Watch this. She pretty much covers everything, where I only gave sketchy hints.

You Probably Think He Was On YOUR Side, Don't You?

It will never be possible to get a completely accurate and unbiased account of the Barcelona fighting, because the necessary records do not exist. Future historians will have nothing to go upon except a mass of accusations and party propaganda. I myself have little data beyond what I saw with my own eyes and what I have learned from other eye-witnesses whom I believe to be reliable . . .  

This kind of thing is frightening to me, because it often gives me the feeling that the very concept of objective truth is fading out of the world. After all, the chances are that those lies, or at any rate similar lies, will pass into history . . . The implied objective of this line of thought is a nightmare world in which the Leader, or some ruling clique, controls not only the future but the past. If the Leader says of such and such, “It never happened” — well, it never happened. If he says that two and two are five — well, two and two are five. 

- George Orwell, Homage to Catalonia, quoted in Why Orwell Matters, by Christopher Hitchens

Christopher Hitchens says of Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia that it remained “an obscure collector’s item of a book throughout Orwell’s lifetime.” Not, in other words, a bestseller or anywhere close. Why would this be so? The answer given by Hitchens, one that makes complete sense to me, is that both the official and the popular views of the war in Spain relied on what I call a “two sides” formula. You know, the way we are told and so often tell each other that it’s so important to hear both sides of any issue or story? As if there are only two versions, the two clearly distinct from each other? That’s certainly the way the war in Spain was framed — as a conflict between conservatives (Catholic Nationalists, they called themselves; others called them Fascists) and communists (although some were grassroots socialists and others Stalin’s forces). Given the frame, which side any particular person saw as good and which as bad depended on that person’s ideological commitments rather than on more complicated facts, let alone whole truth. 

One must close one’s eyes to the virtues of one’s opposition in order to construct an inhuman enemy. 

Orwell was on the ground in Spain, an active fighter on the Left but also a man who saw clearly, first-hand, the way the anti-fascist revolution was betrayed by Stalin’s ruthless subversion of forces fighting for Catalonian independence. What were his options when he realized what was really going on? Stay with a local, independent Left and be tortured, even murdered by Stalinists for not being a loyal Communist? That happened to others he knew. Go with the Stalinists, the internationally recognized Communists, and betray the revolution or switch sides and become a Fascist? Neither of those would have been Eric Arthur Blair, a.k.a. George Orwell.

He chose to escape and tell the story, but it fell on deaf ears. The world had chosen sides, each one saying, “With us or against us!” Thus, one could only be seen — by the “other side” — as Fascist or Communist.

Sound familiar? 

Here’s an irony for you: not only did Orwell back then have those on both the Left and Right who hated him — he also has admirers on both sides today. Today’s liberals are sure he was warning against the dangers of fascism, now imminent, while today’s conservatives say he warned against socialism, their especial bugaboo. Everyone wants to think Orwell was singing their song. Hitchens takes a chapter each show that both groups are wrong and can only turn Orwell into their saint by cherry-picking their quotes, but that’s all more than I am going to try to summarize here. You’ll have to read Why Orwell Matters for yourself— and then go back and read Animal Farm and 1984 again. One thing is certain: Orwell was warning the world about future dystopian possibilities.

One of several things that frustrates me about debate, in general (consequently, also about the adversarial American justice system), is the usually unquestioned assumption that there are always and only two sides to a question and that one one of them — and only one — is true, thus the other false. From the assumption, it follows that positions taken must possess the form of affirmation/negation: I’m right, you’re wrong. To acknowledge that there is anything to be said for one’s opposition is seen as weakening one’s own case, giving “comfort to the enemy. 

Recognizing a much more complicated truth, Orwell in his day was caught in the crossfire. The same thing happens today in our country to many politicians who don’t adhere to a strict party line. Determined to vilify those with whom they disagree, Americans seem willing to give up truth. Why?

"Power is not a means; it is an end. 

"… The object of power is power." 

- George Orwell, 1984

I once had lively discussions on ethics and politics with a graduate school friend who had been the first woman in Ethiopia to graduate from university with a B.A. in philosophy. Our very different undergraduate educations, as well as wildly divergent life experiences, inevitably resulted in very different views at the opening of each discussion. But it was, each time I looked back afterward on the course of our conversation, energizing and delightful to realize what had taken place as we argued. I cannot remember a single time when one of us claimed victory and the other admitted defeat. Instead, by the time we had hashed through our subject for several hours, we always came to a more nuanced understanding of the issue at hand, an acknowledgement that black-and-white could not contain it at all, with the result that the two of us, together, now agreed on and occupied a new, third position not envisioned in our initial disagreement. Such a result would fall far outside the parameters of the rules of debate. It would not have made, for either of us, a big splash in professional academic philosophy circles, either. But we felt satisfied that we had both advanced toward truth in those discussions, as well as finding common ground. While it should not be impossible, in principle, to achieve similar results in the halls of Congress — if Congress were actually functional and all members focused on getting work done — it seems to have become nearly so in recent years. 

Future historians will have nothing to go upon except a mass of accusations and party propaganda.  

- George Orwell, Homage to Catalonia

As far as I’m concerned, that single sentence from the passage that Hitchens quotes is sufficient to establish that Orwell still matters today. His is a warning we would do well to understand and heed.

George Orwell Warned Us

In most places and most of the time, liberty is not a product of military action. Rather, it is something alive that grows or diminishes every day, in how we think and communicate, how we treat each other in our public discourse, in what we value and reward as a society, and how we do that. 

 - Thomas E. Ricks, Churchill & Orwell: The Fight for Freedom

Coming to this book on Churchill and Orwell, it didn’t hurt that I had read Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia not long ago and still had that story pretty fresh in my mind. Orwell identified as a Leftist all his life, but Catalonia opened his eyes to the true nature of the Communist Party. He quickly realized that the Communists were every bit as totalitarian in their approaches and their aims as were the Fascists and that his real enemy, therefore, wherever it reared its ugly head, was totalitarianism.

He would leave Spain resolved to oppose the abuse of power at both ends of the political spectrum. After Spain, observed the literary critic Hugh Kenner, he would be “a leftist at odds with the official left.” “It is unfortunate that so few people in England have yet caught up with the fact that Communism is now a counter-revolutionary force,” Orwell wrote in 1937.

Churchill, in a strange way, was more a presence in my life as far back as I can remember. “Winston Churchill without the cigar” is how my parents described their first baby (me). But I had never studied his life, so Churchill’s many political setbacks and disappointments (both before and after WWII), as recounted by author Ricks, gave me a new perspective on the British leader’s startling tenacity. Before England’s declaration of war against Germany, Churchill had been unpopular both personally and for his belligerent views.

The leaders of the Tory Party felt [in the 1930s] that as part of keeping Hitler mollified, Churchill must be excluded from a position of leadership.

But in 1940 Hitler began his invasion of Holland and Belgium, bringing Parliament at last to a realization that Chamberlain must go. So Chamberlain would resign, but who would replace him? Lord Halifax, the king’s first choice? Lord Halifax who had requested that the British soccer team give the Nazi salute when playing against the German team in Berlin? No, said Chamberlain, Churchill is the man you want. And so Churchill was appointed rather than elected to serve as Prime Minister.

“I hope that it is not too late. I am very much afraid that it is. We can only do our best.”

Churchill never sugar-coated the truth when he spoke to the English people, and they trusted him for that, almost instinctively it would seem. Neither Churchill nor Orwell was willing to forsake truth for a party line, and both at times suffered for their inflexibility when it came to truth-telling. For instance, largely because the U.S.S.R. had been an important wartime ally of Britain and the United States, Orwell had a hard time finding a publisher for Animal Farm -- surprising difficulty considering publishing track record up to that time.

Both men also had strong opinions and made sure they had facts to back up their viewpoints. Orwell especially proved a ready willingness to change his mind when faced with facts repudiating his earlier position. It must be admitted, however, that either would have been a difficult life companion. 

Churchill was as relentless as a terrier in his pursuit of facts but at dinner parties would launch into monologue, showing so little interest in other people’s lives and stories that he would even recite memorized poems to ensure his ability to hold the floor. He always knew more than anyone else about the topics that interested him, and he had no patience for any other topics. Then there was the drinking. All in all, difficult!

Orwell, unpretentious in dress and manner, comfortable with and sympathetic in general to common people, was overly sensitive to smells, but worse – the real deal-breaker for me – was the lack of self-awareness he showed in what Ricks calls his quick and casual prejudice against the Jews.

The fact of the matter is that Orwell was always tin eared about Jews. During World War II, Orwell would write extensively against anti-Semitism, but in the course of doing so he failed to reexamine his own writings of the previous decade. After the war, he had surprisingly little to say about the Holocaust....”

It is easier to find excuses for his anti-Zionism, since he was suspicious of all nationalisms, but was this particular nationalism more distasteful to him than others? One cannot help but wonder.

Churchill’s genius lay in seeing the Nazi threat for the world danger it was; his virtue was believing in the courage and perseverance of the English people, despite the many strikes against them at the outset of the war. Heaven only knows where Western civilization – and one uses the word with some trepidation in this context – might have gone without Churchill holding out against Hitler and against all the appeasers in the British aristocracy and government.

Orwell’s intellectual gift was his ability to see through party propaganda and cant to the dangers of totalitarianism on both ends of the political spectrum, and his artistic gift, in a spare style very different from Churchill’s oratorical writing, enabled him to bring that clear-sightedness to life in dramatic popular fiction.

What would Orwell make of our world today? Ricks notes that the question is often asked. Notably, individuals living under repressive regimes the world over recognize in 1984 the way their governments twist truth and relentlessly curtail freedom. Also, ironically, apologists from both the right and left eager to claim him as their own.

In 1984, protagonist Winston Smith lives under constant state surveillance. Fear of Big Brother and Communist repression of individuals dominated political discussions in the United States throughout the second half of the twentieth century, explaining why so many agreed with the slogan, “Better dead than Red.” Big government, regardless of party, was the enemy to be feared. Ricks points out that today’s surveillance in our own country is done more often by business than by government. It is not “the State” but “the Corporation” that follows Americans through every step of their day, noting what products they buy and use, which entertainments they most enjoy, and how they interact with family and friends.

Orwell saw that people might become slaves of the state, but he did not foresee that they might also become something else that would horrify him—products of corporations, data resources to be endlessly mined and peddled elsewhere. He would no doubt have been a powerful critic of such things.

And so, once again, two political extremes face Americans. This time the dilemma popularly posed (i.e., in misleadingly simplistic terms) is not between Fascism and Communism but between unrestrained “predatory capitalism” (the leftist view) and what has been called a “nanny state” (the rightist view). But as was the case with the twentieth-century dilemma posed between Fascism and Communism, I would argue that today’s debate too begins with a false premise. There are avenues and choices beyond simply a “nanny state” and unrestrained “predatory capitalism”), and we should, in the name of freedom, reject both extremes.

Unhappily for the present moment in our country, the State and the Corporation have joined forces, with the State holding onto its authority over citizens at the same time that it grants the Corporation, now legally recognized as a “person,” huge unfair advantage over us. Our own Congress! Over and over, they purport to be “saving” us from a "nanny state" by stripping us of legal, environmental, and other health protections rightly the role and responsibility of government. (We may be moving toward a “police state,” but at the moment we are definitely galloping away from anything that could remotely be called a “nanny state”!) At the federal level (and in many states), executive, legislative, and judicial branches appear to have agreed to sacrifice the interests of American citizen to rich and powerful corporate interests. The latest such legislative move protects financial institutions against citizens’ class-action suits. Anyone who is surprised, however, hasn't been paying attention. Farmers have had to pay attention, because their oxen are being gored, outrageously, on a regular basis. 

This is a fine mess we’ve gotten ourselves into! Where is an Orwell to show clearly of the dangers we face? Where is a Churchill to lead us back toward freedom?