1984-1967 That Was Then, This Is Now (and no, it's NOT backwards)

     I learned from dear old Alex Jones that George Orwell's most famous novel was supposedly published on this date back in 1948. Now that is incredible! Of course, Orwell's timeline was a bit off---he had the riots beginning right after WWII instead of the mid to late 1960s---but if you take the timeline from the 60s on he's not that off. Remember that in his book the government of Big Brother was already well ensconced by the title date while the riots of the 60s stretched well into the 70s as well. Still, his timeline when adjusted for real events seems pretty well accurate. In the light of Bilderberg and all the government scandals currently happening around the world, not to mention the egregious thefts of our constitutional rights since George W Bush, I'd like to relate a true story from my high school senior year.

     In my school we had two teachers who taught all of the senior College Prep students scheduled for the course called AMERICAN HISTORY II, which was actually American Government. I was lucky enough, along with around 165 others, to have been given an unknown first-year teacher instead of the wildly popular History Department Head. She was nothing any of us could have expected (which also occurred to her dept. head boss and the rest of the school administration but, alas for them, too late to do anything about except pray we wouldn't remember her lessons). Well, I guess God was on vacation that year. Getting back to my narrative, however, she did about the worst thing a history teacher could do. She actually believed teachers were supposed to make students think! Sort of "stealth teaching", or maybe even teaching as a "subversive activity" (there was a book by that title published sometime in the 70s, but I can't recall the author). In any case, her most insubordinate action came when, after bucking the entire township over the inclusion of 1984 and Brave New World on her required-reading list, she committed the treasonous crime of calling Orwell's book a prophesy, God forbid! (And if that wasn't bad enough, she refused to consider  them too sexually "titillating" for "impressionable" youngsters---who were already enjoying pornographic books since junior high---but I digress...)
     So, what was this "prophesy"? Let's see now. Well, there are the three principles of IngSoc: War Is Peace, Ignorance Is Strength, and Freedom Is Slavery. As for the first, she merely pointed out that we'd only been at war now since Korea, but it really wasn't officially war because Congress hadn't declared war since WWII (you know, little Constitutional quibbles like that). And then she asked us if we felt as though we were at war, which we had to admit we did not---not right in the midst of Lyndon Baines Johnson's GREAT SOCIETY, at any rate. Having "guns and butter" certainly wasn't like WWII, she pointed out. As for the second, Ignorance Is Strength, well, we weren't being told very much about Vietnam, right? In fact, she added, the govt. made sure we knew very little about almost everything. Those daily Body Counts reported in the newspapers, in which every severed finger found was automatically considered a whole person, just might be propaganda. WOW! A teacher saying our own government might deliberately lie to us? I remember my mother having a lot to say about that, none of which can be repeated due to rather coarse language. And finally, Freedom Is Slavery, about which she said we weren't really free---that the draft might well be the "involuntary servitude" the Constitution forbade, and that perhaps we needed to wake up. Boy, did the school's switchboard light up as soon as we told our parents! Unfortunately, she only lasted that one year, but I'm sure you guessed that.

     Sorry for the length of this piece, but I had to leave out lots of the things she said that day. Still, she was right. I wish I could thank her by name. She went on to become a damn good lawyer, working as an advocate for the poor and probably making peanuts for it. She remains my idol to this day. I have great expectations for those I consider my idols, but she surpassed them. I suppose we all have at least one teacher like her. Yes, welcome to 1984---but we aren't the Proles, and we are awake!