The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

“But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.” George Orwell

“It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.”
― George Orwell, 1984

Words do matter. We so-called writers, addicted purveyors of the language, kind of know that, even if we have our doubts in these polarized times. So when the government bans words like ‘substance abuse disorder’ (it implies drug addiction is a disease) or ‘science-based’ (better to use something like ‘science in consideration of community wishes’) or ‘fetus’ (maybe use something like ‘little people who can’t speak for themselves and can’t vote but who don’t want to be killed by liberals who don’t read the Bible), they’re hoping to skew the meaning in their direction.
Nothing new here. You don’t believe in Global Warming, hey, ban the use of the words. Call it the Will of God or Faux Science. Course, if you ditch the words, then you can ask the question, why fund research into non-existent phenomenon? If you refer to fetuses as unborn humans, then you can write them into laws like one where a minus two month old kid can apply for a hunting permit. Validates the idea of life beginning at conception and goes for the twofer of applying the Second Amendment nine months earlier than before. The NRA is happy, the Right to Lifers are tickled, what’s not to like? ‘Right to Lifer’, there’s another nifty use of words.

My favorite this year, of course, was ‘Alternative Facts.’ Kind of sums up the entire Administration’s approach to, well, pretty near everything. Lies? Naw, just Alternative Facts. The News? No, dummy, not alternative facts, they’re Faux News, what we now call Lies. I know, it’s slippery at first, but after a year, we’re all getting used to it. In the Orwellian dystopia, Big Brother had to set up entire agencies to revise the history their Alternative Facts kept creating. In this new paradigm, not so much. Quote Trump from a year ago contradicting the current opinion, no problem!! The news media is biased. Faux!! They are, by definition, Liars. No need to bother about revisionism, it’s built right in. You just have to redefine Truth. Or ban its usage in the Newspeak altogether. Big Brother is smiling these days. And George Carlin is laughing his ass off.

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The President recently tweeted that the American public is finally wising up, high praise for us dweebs out here in the hinterlands. He’s talking about a survey that shows how few people believe the news media is truthful. You know, media like the New York Times, NBC, the Washington Post, CNN. Wow! I remember reading Orwell’s 1984 as a kid in high school and being chilled by Big Brother’s revisionist history. The Ministry of Truth needed entire departments to rewrite past events to make current events fit into what preceded them. “It’s a beautiful thing, the Destruction of words. …. Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought?” Easy, just change history.

These days we don’t change history to match our beliefs, we just say facts are lies. Ignorance is Strength. War is Peace. Freedom is Slavery. Faux news, fake history. Trump and the alt-right have managed to convince the public the truth is whatever they want to believe. Fox News, fair and balanced. Facts? We don’t need no stinking facts!! The President is a liar but plenty of folks think the press is fabricating stories to defame him. He would like to pull the broadcast license of NBC. He’d really like to shut down most of the news media and replace it with the Ministry of Tweet. Big Brother is in office right now.

If Big Brother had a real agenda, we’d be in a sinister world of trouble, but thankfully the Donald is only interested in self-aggrandisement and increasing his brand’s net worth. If he had any ideas or ideals, we’d be in deep doo-doo. He’s no neo-con and he’s not much interested in policies. One day he’s against this, next day he’s all in. Only a craven empty suit could flip flop one hundred and eighty degrees then announce that he always believed the flop. Newspeak for Dummies. Rather than change yesterday’s headlines, just convince the proles the headlines were lies, a helluva lot easier. Ignorance, once bliss, is now strength. Truth, once the thing that would set you free, is now a shackle.

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