by David Pascal
George Orwell had the good fortune -- or misfortune, depending on your perspective -- of being an honest man in an exceptionally dishonest time. The world has always been filled with liars, of course, but whereas previous tyrants and tyrannies were quite open about the naked pursuit of power for its own sake, the twentieth century had a unique capacity for clothing this nudity with a well-placed ideological thong. One tormented and exterminated not for mere self-aggrandizement, but in the name of an Ideal: the Proletariat, the Aryan, the People, the Motherland. Democracy.
By and large this was guff, though often enough victims as well as perpetrators swallowed it whole. George Orwell was not among them. A leftist, he never condoned or hid or diminished murders and brutalities done by the left. Nor did he ever pretend that life for the poor or the colonized under the purported opposite of the left, capitalism, was anything but miserable, unfair, and vicious.
This dual perception was only unusual among intellectuals of that time. Common folk knew well enough that not only was Stalin a swine, but that their boss was a jerk too, albeit on a radically lesser scale. The romance of capitalism, communism, fascism, all that luxuriant ideological flora, was a matter of rapture only to those insulated from it. Unfortunately those were the people that wrote the books.
Of that class, Orwell was one of the very few to point out that poverty and brutality stank however one labelled the system under which it occured. The mystery of Orwell is why advocates of nearly every such system eventually ended up clasping him to their respective reptilian bosoms.
The secret of Orwell's success? Hardly anything complex. By dumping on all sides, each side located in Orwell material that served as a convenient stick to beat the other fellow. And by repeatedly describing himself as a socialist, a democrat, a patriot, all the socialists and democrats and patriots could identify with this sympathetic comrade who gave them lots of ammo to direct at unsympathetic non-comrades. Raising Orwell in moral stature raised an Orwellian in moral stature too. And allowed one to sneer at all that teeming shabby lot not equally as righteous.
So the left shot workers, and the right hired scabs to club out their brains, and Orwell pointed it out. And for several decades now both left and right have claimed Orwell as prophet and patron saint. The tradition continues in a craven new book issued by Orwell groupie Christopher Hitchens. His "Why Orwell Matters" (Basic Books, 2002) purports to be a defense of shining Orwell against his one-eyed hump-backed detractors. But they are not many, and not really very critical, and Orwell needs to be defended from them by Hitchens about as much as Jesse ("The Body") Ventura needs to be guarded from papparazzi by Shirley Temple.
What the book is really about, and what is really embarrassing about it, is not the state of Orwell vis-a-vis his few detractors, but the -- Orwellian? -- revisions foisted by Hitchens upon his hero as he trims and snips and tranvestitizes Orwell in order to more safely bask in his adopted role model's reflected glory.
What made Orwell formidable, you see, was that he said what he thought, regardless of what others thought. He did not apologize for his opinions, or trim them to make them acceptable. What he saw, he reported. What he thought, he said. Hitchens praises these qualities to the skies, then turns around and indulges in the perfect opposite. Oh, Hitchens is right there with Orwell when it comes to blasting Stalin and Stalinism, all right. Who isn't? Since Stalin's been dead for fifty years, and his system's a shambles and vanished, it's a very safe thing to defy.
But Orwell also had the very lowest opinion of homosexuality, abortion, birth control, and was not even invariably complimentary to all ethnic groups excluding Dead White Males. And that offends influential people now. Not people that have the power to put you into concentration camps or stick your head in the rat box in Room 101, perhaps, i.e. the sort of people whom Orwell did not hesitate to offend, but people whom offending could prove to be socially embarrassing and fiscally counterproductive.
Hitchens falls over himself trying to apologize for Orwell and qualify and minimize his views on these scores. It's a pathetic performance. A brave stand to Orwell was a refusal to buckle before the powers and commonplaces of the day. A brave stand to Hitchens is a refusal to buckle before the powers and commonplaces of yesterday. Hitchens, for instance, twists Orwell into a mobius strip trying to find pro-feminist sentiments in Orwell's notably unsentimental work. Well, they're not there. And while we rightly honor Orwell for taking on the cliches of his day, we do him no honor by trying to retro-fit his views so that they fit neatly and falsely into the cliches of our own. OK, fine: Hitchens wants his idol to look good. But there's a problem with taxidermy. It involves removing the guts.
Orwell, it must be said, had timing. He managed to check out just before the Joseph McCarthy era, when anti-Communism threatened to entail doing something as opposed to saying something. What might Orwell have said then? Or now, about Israel and Palestine, or Iraq, or Bosnia? I wonder.
But then, do I, really? Do any of us? No. One can well imagine George Orwell's book on Gaza or Lebanon, and his consequent obliteration from literary grace. He lucked out, dying when he did. Had Solzhenitsyn had similar good fortune and crashed in the plane exiling him from Russia, Al would no doubt be on the same Olympian heights as George is today.
But Solzhenitsyn lived to see a West that didn't impress him much and a post-Communist East that wasn't very amusing either. He said so, committing the cardinal sin: he had ceased to flatter; which is to say, he ceased to be of use.
Orwell, thanks to heavy overlays of make-up on potential blemishes by unctuous acolytes like Christopher Hitchens, still has the ability to be useful, to make readers of all political persuasions feel valiant in re-tracing Orwell's shadow-boxing. Despite the fact that the shadows are largely departed? No. Because of it.
So: does Orwell matter? Objectively, apart from his cheesy misuse by fans, that is. Well -- not a whole lot, no. Intellectual honesty is so rare these days that any example should be honored, of course, and Orwell is sufficiently ambiguous as to accomodate hero-worshippers of all poitical stripes, a one-size-fits-all condom that assures passion while defusing the fertility of actually looking at one's own views critically.
Is this a bad thing? Maybe not. Children need heroes. But lasting utility as a handy icon is not the same thing as literary achievement, and Orwell's formal literary contributions do not amount to much.
No one considers Orwell much of a novelist, Orwell included. As a prose stylist he took a solid stand for clarity as against obscurity, particularly in political speech. Good stand, but nothing unique about it, unless one is Marxist or Marxoid, and those dotty heirs of dottier predecessors are safely sequestered now, wanking away in the Rare Birds cages at yuppie-supported universities.
Orwell's hideous vision of the world as top-down maniacal coercion throughout a globe consisting of nothing but gigantic balancing mirror-image totalitarianisms seems dead meat at the moment. Soviet socialism is gone, and though its current shifting goulash of mafiosi and laizze-fairies defies easy description, it is both better than the past, and too shitty to really long endure. All the formerly satanic Asian hordes seem to want is more Nikes, not universal Maoism. Nor, Homeland Security efforts notwithstanding, has Big Brother arrived in America. If he had, America would be spamming digitized photos of him and Big Sister performing anatomically curious contortions with each other, and having you click and charge $9.99 on your Visa to download more.
Orwell was not a prophet of the future, but a portrait painter of the past. And a miniaturist at that. Others traced the big canvas. 1984 lasted from 1917 through 1991 in the former Soviet Union, spreading its bacillus to China, and North Korea, Cuba, and the whole long list of wretched slaughterhouses erected in the name of Marx.
It is remarkable that someone not in that reality could have caught its flavor so well, but the true Dantes of that despicable Inferno are names like Solzhenitsyn, Navrozov, Grossman, Platonov. Orwell's nightmares were their realities; but the landscapes they personally mapped were craters impossible to contemplate and then follow up with another rerun of Ally McGraw.
Orwell is different. Orwell is safe. Because 1984 was here and gone and, hey, nobody's being picked off the street here and locked up and interrogated, are they? That we know about, that is. Except for Arabs. And not many. Probably.
The real prophet of our age in not George Orwell but Aldous Huxley. Orwell merely transcribed the genocides permeating the then-fearful European air, but Huxley had the wit, the antennae, to envision the brave new technologized world where drugs and sex, stupor and 'feelies', become the rule. The masters dispatch tanned upbeat supervisors with white smiles and Day Planners and the proles below them are quiescent, because, after all, they have their Bud Light and their Land Rover and a Playboy and the Superbowl on a thirty-six-inch screeen. What's not to like?
Orwell's totalitarians had to fail, because they based themselves squarely not merely on lies but on pain. Pain hurts! The new soft totalitarians base themselves on lies too, but the lies are witty and elegant and win ad agency awards, and the economic wheels turning underneath only obliterate towns or tear off children's limbs in unphotogenic distant icky places like the Third World, which are never on Prime Time much anyway.
In the First World, things are not like that. Here things are fun. And when things are fun, when food and drink is plentiful, and the shelves are stocked, when entertainment is available at the click of a button, when the suburbs are well and tactfully patrolled, it's very hard to turn away and ask what might be happening elsewhere, or even what might really be taking place here. No one really loved Big Brother. But Seinfeld and Buffy? Britney? Oprah? Irresistable.
For the West, the world merges with its televised doppelganger and drifts farther and farther away. But Prozac keeps us from worrying too much about it. And besides one can always hit the remote.
Or even write a book about political courage. Provided it doesn't disturb anyone important.
The End
