DWill wrote:. . . I like the statement of George Orwell: the hardest thing to see is what is right before our faces. Now please don't anyone think that I'm claiming immunity to this kind of blindness. But I can't avoid applying Orwell to the fact of Donald Trump's genuine and acute destructiveness. It isn't immediately apparent to all that our president engaging in a taunting match via twitter with a rogue nuclear power, is a siren blast telling us he's unfit for the office?
The most "Orwellian" aspect of Trump has to be his rather cavalier attitude towards the truth. And so we have the "fake news" (and now "fake books") mantra being thrown about when its convenient—but usually when the real world doesn't quite mesh with his skewed (and narcissistic) perception. For example, on the day after inauguration, Trump asserted that his inaugural crowd numbers were higher than Obama's, a claim later repeated by press secretary Sean Spicer. When various media outlets challenged this claim, Trump's team went into denial in a big way. Kellyanne Conway even claimed that Spicer was relying on “alternative facts"—a cringeworthy term that could have well been used by O'Brien, one of the Party leaders in Orwell's book, 1984.
This is just one example. Trump has made numerous claims that are simply false. During the campaign, he told many doozies, including that he never supported the war in Iraq. To be fair, it seems entirely impossible that Trump simply doesn't remember supporting the war in Iraq. But does that really matter? Again, there are hundreds of examples of distortions and inconsistencies and outright lies made by this president. It's on record, much of it on his twitter feed.
In 1984, Orwell's "newspeak" is the official language meant to limit the freedom of thought—personal identity, self-expression, free will—that ideologically threatens the regime of Big Brother and the Party. Obviously we are nowhere close to that kind of totalitarianism. And so Ant makes a good point here. But on the other hand, the fact that a large segment of our population still supports a reality TV president, who seems to not even understand the difference between fact and fiction, does illustrate how a Big Brother might come to power. I doubt it will ever happen under Trump because he is frankly not competent enough to stay in power.
Orwell's famous essay,
Politics and the English Language, is probably a better indicator of our times. In this essay, Orwell describes how those in power can warp language for political gain. Many politicians are liars to some extent—they have to say the right things to be elected in the first place—and they also know how to dance around a question. Ronald Reagan famously once said "mistakes were made" instead of "oops, I messed up." But we have never seen a president so transparently disingenuous as Donald Trump. He doesn't hide what he doesn't know because he doesn't
know that he doesn't know. Trump is the ultimate Dunning-Kruger president.
But we live in an increasingly transparent society and Trump's problems with the truth are glaringly obvious to most people. I don't know what will come out of the Russia investigation, but clearly the Trump administration is an absolute circus. All he would have to do is shut the hell up and most of that would stop. The fact that he doesn't, that he
can't, shows how unfit he is to be president. What is incredibly scary is how many people are willing to tune out the "fake news" and the "liberal media" in exactly the same way that creationists dismiss scientific evidence because it interferes with their religious beliefs. Many wise men have said that for the American experiment to work, we need a well-informed citizenry. What happens when we exchange being well-informed for willful ignorance? We now have a good taste of what that looks like.
