Pen-Elayne on the Web

Double Plus Good

Robin's just started reading my well-worn copy of 1984 on our long trips out to see realtors in Jersey and Staten Island (so much for a relaxing vacation week!). The book is still the best example I know of how spin works to control citizens' thought processes to the point where normal debate is effectively shut down and rendered incomprehensible to those same citizens. I'm coming up against victims of this Department of Thought Control (which went into high gear after 9-11 but then, of course, we were at war with the Terrorists of Eastasia rather than the Secularist Dictator of Eastasia... with whom we've always been at war, at least since 1991 because before that we weren't, we were shoring up both the Secularist Dictator and the Terrorist Leader at the same time weren't we? god my head hurts) a lot on some of the comic book message boards. It's not their fault they can't grasp how many civil rights Ashcroft & co. keep violating and stripping away; after all, they reason, Michael Moore and Noam Chomsky are allowed to speak and actually make money from their anti-government observations, so obviously dissent is never punished, and we demand you show us proof that it is (because we're too lazy to do a 2-second search at the ACLU website)! And okay, that whole regime change thing in Chile might have been a little heavy-handed, but it was worth it! Look at them now, they're a flourishing democracy! No "disappeared" there, no sirree!

Much of this explains why I often get a greater sense of comradery and relief from perusing my corner of the blogosphere than from foolishly engaging in political discourse with ill-informed, insistent fanboys whose worldview is at best limited. (The discussion mentioned above came from this thread talking about the Mark Millar-written upcoming miniseries Superman: Red Son, postulating "what if the Kryptonian rocket had crash-landed in 1950's Ukraine instead of the US?", in case anyone's interested.) On blogs I can read neat stuff like (via Tim Dunlop, link at sidebar) Rob Schaap's marvelous "Dismalist's Blogcyclopaedia of the Iraq 'Debate'" and think, "Yes, some people do get it!" And in these uncertain times, the existence of critical thinkers with enough energy to analyze the spin and point at the naked emperor should hearten us all.

A couple poster updates: My ex-husband (who refers to me only as a "fellow blogger" rather than "fellow blogger and ex-wife" but since the dear lad doesn't have a comment section I can only make fun of him here) sent me this great one which reminds me a lot of the old Firesign routine by the Preacher in How Can You Be... ("--nointed with oil on troubled waters? Oh, Heavenly Grid, help us bear up thy Standard, our Chevron flashing bright across the Gulf of Compromise, standing Humble on the Rich Field of Mobile American Thinking, here in this Shell we call Life--"); and one of the fine female bloggers listed on the sidebar brought my attention to this poster section of the very funny Whitehouse.org site.