It’s hard to imagine how all of this, the political miasma that continues to drag us down with the persistence of quicksand, turns out.
As many have claimed, Trump is not the cause, but the result of the long descent of our political system, a system in which the highest court in the land has proclaimed that corporations are people and money is speech; legislators refuse to impose limits on campaign spending or the number of terms a lawmaker may serve, and a massive industry with the sole purpose of buying, one way or another, legislators' votes and presidential favors, thrives.
Even now, with the Biden administration living in a fact-based world, we're tormented by thriving remnants of a Trumpian Fantasyland where not-yet-properly-aged adults purloin sensitive documents and secrete them in the bowels of Mar-a-Lago.
Sometimes life imitates art. The torrent of lies and deception to which we've been exposed over the course and aftermath of the Trump administration was foreshadowed in Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell's predictive dystopian novel published in1949. There, a language called Newspeak, characterized by a limited vocabulary which served to reduce the range of thought, was spoken. The language had been created by the entity called "the Party," which had become, in effect, the government..
During the post-truth Trump administration, we had no need of a language like Newspeak. We already had a leader whose limited vocabulary restricted the range of communication ... and somehow our Trumpian version of Newspeak produced the phenomenon Orwell described as doublethink.
He explained it like this: “To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions ... knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both ... to forget whatever it was necessary to forget, then to draw it back into memory again at the moment when it was needed, and then promptly to forget it again ... consciously to induce unconsciousness, and then, once again, to become unconscious of the act of hypnosis you had just performed. Even to understand the word—doublethink—involved the use of doublethink.”
Remind you of anyone? Think Trump, Kevin McCarthy, Mitch McConnell ... and others, wherever they may be.
Sometimes life does imitate art.
As many have claimed, Trump is not the cause, but the result of the long descent of our political system, a system in which the highest court in the land has proclaimed that corporations are people and money is speech; legislators refuse to impose limits on campaign spending or the number of terms a lawmaker may serve, and a massive industry with the sole purpose of buying, one way or another, legislators' votes and presidential favors, thrives.
Even now, with the Biden administration living in a fact-based world, we're tormented by thriving remnants of a Trumpian Fantasyland where not-yet-properly-aged adults purloin sensitive documents and secrete them in the bowels of Mar-a-Lago.
Sometimes life imitates art. The torrent of lies and deception to which we've been exposed over the course and aftermath of the Trump administration was foreshadowed in Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell's predictive dystopian novel published in1949. There, a language called Newspeak, characterized by a limited vocabulary which served to reduce the range of thought, was spoken. The language had been created by the entity called "the Party," which had become, in effect, the government..
During the post-truth Trump administration, we had no need of a language like Newspeak. We already had a leader whose limited vocabulary restricted the range of communication ... and somehow our Trumpian version of Newspeak produced the phenomenon Orwell described as doublethink.
He explained it like this: “To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions ... knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both ... to forget whatever it was necessary to forget, then to draw it back into memory again at the moment when it was needed, and then promptly to forget it again ... consciously to induce unconsciousness, and then, once again, to become unconscious of the act of hypnosis you had just performed. Even to understand the word—doublethink—involved the use of doublethink.”
Remind you of anyone? Think Trump, Kevin McCarthy, Mitch McConnell ... and others, wherever they may be.
Sometimes life does imitate art.
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