Orwell's "blog:" The political journals begin

For those of you waiting out the pastoral sections of his 1938 journal (posted here in a blog-like page-a-day fashion), he's left the health retreat in Kent and is now on Gibraltar soaking up all the news he can get of the powderkeg that is Franco's Spain.

Excerpt from the 9/8/1938 entry:

Spanish destroyer Jose Luis Diez lying in harbour. A huge shell-hole, probably four or five feet across, in her side, just above water-level, on port side about fifteen to twenty feet behind bow. Flying Spanish Republican flag. The men were at first apparently prevented from going ashore, now allowed at certain hours to naval recreational ground (i.e. not to mix with local population). No attempt being made to mend the ship.

Overheard local English resident: "It’s coming right enough. Hitler’s going to have Czecho-Slovakia all right. If he doesn’t get it now he’ll go on and on till he does. Better let him have it at once. We shall be ready by 1941."

What's new on George Orwell's blog?

Seventy years ago this week, George Orwell was recuperating from tuberculosis at a sanatorium in Kent, which one imagines was a good deal less developed than it is today. His diaries were filled with the careful observations of a trained journalist-- directed, in his present circumstances, toward the gradually ripening blackberries, the muggy summer weather in Kent, sketches of an ancient burial mound nearby, and newspaper clippings on sloe gin recipes.

If the literary form sounds familiar to the contemporary reader, there's a reason:

“I think he would have been a blogger,” said Jean Seaton, a professor at the University of Westminster in London who administers the Orwell writing prize […]

Orwell as blogger? A bit of a stretch, perhaps, but the analogy suggested an inspired plan to Seaton: Make the diaries available as if they were a blog, with each day's entry in 1938 forming a post on that date exactly 70 years later. So, for example, Orwell's entry on August 28, 1938, posted today:

Night before last an hour’s rain. Yesterday hot & overcast. Today ditto, with a few drops of rain in the afternoon. The hop-picking due to start in about a week.

Not exactly Shooting an Elephant, but the man was recovering from TB, and while his diary contains no complaint about being in the hinterlands (it's hard to imagine Orwell using the word "boondocks") the point of his residence at the sanatorium was to exchange the activity of London life for the clean air and quiet of Kent.

And for those who can take reports of the local flora and fauna for only so long, on September 7th the Orwell Diaries blog moves from his personal journals to his political diary.

“The diary isn’t Orwell at his most polemic; it is Orwell at his most steady, most observant,” Professor Seaton said.

Like any good political blogger, Orwell devoured the news, making clippings and looking for shifts in public and government opinion, Professor Seaton said. “He’s partly obsessed by the newspapers because of the start of the world war,” she said. “The diary is written against this almost traumatized understanding that there is going to have to be a second world war.”

The diary entries are reproduced in full, with careful but unobtrusive annotation via hyperlinks (including Google Maps) and endnotes. The project will continue publishing his diaries on a daily basis through 2010.

I've added The Orwell Diaries to the blog list in the sidebar.

(H/t to Anne.)

Reading: Bill Moyers on media consolidation

There has been a glimmer of hope on the communication technology front this week: The FCC handed observers on all sides a surprise by smacking Comcast for blocking peer-to-peer traffic, a clear victory for net neutrality.

Of course, this was also the week that the Senate approved, and Bush gleefully confirmed he will sign, the FISA reauthorization bill that will grant the telecoms retroactive immunity for crimes at the behest of the Bush administration that neither the telecoms nor Bush will admit have occurred. (The motion passed with the support of Sen. Obama, who looks like he's going to be a better campaigner than a leader.)

And behind all this is the much larger problem: the increasing consolidation of the corporate media. That's the topic of an address by Bill Moyers to the National Conference for Media Reform Conference in June.

He's not optimistic:

We must be vigilant. The fate of the cyber-commons - the future of the mobile Web and the benefits of the Internet as open architecture - is up for grabs. And the only antidote to the power of organized money in Washington is the power of organized people at the net roots.

When Verizon tried to censor NARAL's (National Abortion Rights Action League) use of text messaging last year, it was quick action by Save the Internet that led the company to reverse its position. Those efforts also led to an FCC proceeding on this issue.

Wherever the Internet flows - on PCs, cell phones, mobile devices and, very soon, new digital television sets - we must ensure that it remains an open and nondiscriminatory medium of expression.

By 2011, the market analysts tell us, the Internet will surpass newspapers in advertising revenues. With MySpace and Dow Jones controlled by News Corporation's Rupert Murdoch, Microsoft determined to acquire Yahoo!, and with advertisers already telling some bloggers, "Your content is unacceptable," we could potentially lose what's now considered an unstoppable long tail of content offering abundant, new, credible and sustainable sources of news and information.

So, what will happen to news in the future, as the already tattered boundaries between journalism and advertising is dispensed with entirely and as content programming, commerce and online communities are rolled into one profitably attractive package?

Last year, the investment firm of Piper Jaffray predicted that much of the business model for new media would be just that kind of hybrid. They called it "communitainment." (Oh, George Orwell, where are you now that we need you?)

Across the media landscape, the health of our democracy is imperiled. Buffeted by gale force winds of technological, political and demographic forces, without a truly free and independent press, this 250-year-old experiment in self-government will not make it.

Moyer's essay is going onto the Readings list on the sidebar.

Reading: Frank Rich on Bush's connection to reality, such as it is

And I remember frequent Discourses with my Master concerning the Nature of Manhood, in other Parts of the world; having Occasion to talk of Lying, and false Representation, it was with much Difficulty that he comprehended what I meant; although he had otherwise a most acute Judgment. For he argued thus: That the Use of Speech was to make us understand one another, and to receive Information of Facts; now if anyone said the Thing which was not, these Ends were defeated; because I cannot properly be said to understand him; and I am so far from receiving Information, that he leaves me worse than in Ignorance; for I am led to believe a Thing Black when it is White, and Short when it is Long. And these were all the Notions he had concerning that Faculty of Lying, so perfectly well understood, and so universally practiced among human Creatures.

Jonathan Swift, A Voyage to the Houyhnhnms

Political language--and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists--is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.

George Orwell, "Politics and the English Language"

Frank Rich's essay on the tattered remains of the relationship between the 43rd President and what most of us tend to call "reality"--the break-up really does have an Edward Albee feel to it, with the recriminations, the dark family secrets, and the whiff of bourbon--made it out from behind the NYTimes Select firewall with unusual speed today.

Perhaps the mainstream news media feel some urge to play catch-up on the whole Bush bashing thing.

With a title like "Has He Started Talking to Walls?", there's little room for confusion about where Rich is heading, and much of the buzz about the essay has tied it into the question of whether Bush is--you know--losing it. (Its appearance the same weekend as this piece by Paul Craig Roberts, with the even less ambiguous title "Is President Bush Sane?", no doubt stoked the flames.)

You can read it for that--and welcome to it--but there's another point that Rich makes that is no less important, and spares us the chase through the forensic, legal, and clinical markers of sanity.

There's also a linguistic dimension to the current spectacle of the presidential turban becoming unwound: As simply put as I know how: Whether or not he is crazy, he certainly talks that way. More so with each passing day since the midterm election, it seems.

Rich writes:

When the president persists in talking about staying until "the mission is complete" even though there is no definable military mission, let alone one that can be completed, he is indulging in pure absurdity. The same goes for his talk of "victory," another concept robbed of any definition when the prime minister we are trying to prop up is allied with Mr. Sadr, a man who wants Americans dead and has many scalps to prove it. The newest hollowed-out Bush word to mask the endgame in Iraq is "phase," as if the increasing violence were as transitional as the growing pains of a surly teenager. "Phase" is meant to drown out all the unsettling debate about two words the president doesn't want to hear, "civil war."

When news organizations, politicians and bloggers had their own civil war about the proper usage of that designation last week, it was highly instructive - but about America, not Iraq. The intensity of the squabble showed the corrosive effect the president's subversion of language has had on our larger culture. Iraq arguably passed beyond civil war months ago into what might more accurately be termed ethnic cleansing or chaos. That we were fighting over "civil war" at this late date was a reminder that wittingly or not, we have all taken to following Mr. Bush's lead in retreating from English as we once knew it.

It's been a familiar pattern for the news media, politicians and the public alike in the Bush era. It took us far too long to acknowledge that the "abuses" at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere might be more accurately called torture. And that the "manipulation" of prewar intelligence might be more accurately called lying. Next up is "pullback," the Iraq Study Group's reported euphemism to stave off the word "retreat" (if not retreat itself).

In the case of "civil war," it fell to a morning television anchor, Matt Lauer, to officially bless the term before the "Today" show moved on to such regular fare as an update on the Olsen twins. That juxtaposition of Iraq and post-pubescent eroticism was only too accurate a gauge of how much the word "war" itself has been drained of its meaning in America after years of waging a war that required no shared sacrifice. Whatever you want to label what's happening in Iraq, it has never impeded our freedom to dote on the Olsen twins.

When historians one day catalog the flora and fauna of corruption during the Bush era, not least on the list should be the corruption of language. Others have tried it--Ronald Reagan called the MX Missile the "Peacekeeper"--but only the Bush administration has worn us down to such an extent that so many of us have stopped even trying to keep it all straight.

The Rich article is going onto the Readings list on the sidebar.

(Tip of the hat to Philip Roth--who no doubt's been wondering when he could finally update his resume with "mentioned at p3"--for first juxtaposing the Swift and Orwell quotes.)

Sex and the GOP: Theory and practice

The practice:

The federal government's "no sex without marriage" message isn't just for kids anymore.

Now the government is targeting unmarried adults up to age 29 as part of its abstinence-only programs, which include millions of dollars in federal money that will be available to the states under revised federal grant guidelines for 2007.

The government says the change is a clarification. But critics say it's a clear signal of a more directed policy targeting the sexual behavior of adults.

"They've stepped over the line of common sense," said James Wagoner, president of Advocates for Youth, a Washington, D.C.-based non-profit that supports sex education. "To be preaching abstinence when 90% of people are having sex is in essence to lose touch with reality. It's an ideological campaign. It has nothing to do with public health."

Abstinence education programs, which have focused on preteens and teens, teach that abstaining from sex is the only effective or acceptable method to prevent pregnancy or disease. They give no instruction on birth control or safe sex.

The National Center for Health Statistics says well over 90% of adults ages 20-29 have had sexual intercourse.

But Wade Horn, assistant secretary for children and families at the Department of Health and Human Services, said the revision is aimed at 19- to 29-year-olds because more unmarried women in that age group are having children.

Government data released last month show that 998,262 births in 2004 were to unmarried women 19-29, the ages with the most births to unmarried women.

"The message is 'It's better to wait until you're married to bear or father children,' " Horn said. "The only 100% effective way of getting there is abstinence."

The revised guidelines specify that states seeking grants are "to identify groups ... most likely to bear children out-of-wedlock, targeting adolescents and/or adults within the 12- through 29-year-old age range." Previous guidelines didn't mention targeting of an age group.

USA Today, 10/31/06

The theory:

She began to enlarge upon the subject. With Julia, everything came back to her own sexuality. As soon as this was touched upon in any way she was capable of great acuteness. Unlike Winston, she had grasped the inner meaning of the Party's sexual puritanism. It was not merely that the sex instinct created a world of its own which was outside the Party's control and which therefore had to be destroyed if possible. What was more important was that sexual privation induced hysteria, which was desirable because it could be transformed into war-fever and leader-worship. The way she put it was:

'When you make love you're using up energy; and afterwards you feel happy and don't give a damn for anything. They can't bear you to feel like that. They want you to be bursting with energy all the time. All this marching up and down and cheering and waving flags is simpIy sex gone sour. If you're happy inside yourself, why should you get excited about Big Brother and the Three-Year Plans and the Two Minutes Hate and all the rest of their bloody rot?'

That was very true, he thought. There was a direct intimate connexion between chastity and political orthodoxy. For how could the fear, the hatred, and the lunatic credulity which the Party needed in its members be kept at the right pitch, except by bottling down some powerful instinct and using it as a driving force?

George Orwell, 1984

(Cross-posted at Preemptive Karma.)

Erudite biases: Begging the question

The Chicago Manual of Style has opened the door to allowing "they," "them," and "their" as gender-neutral third-person singular and plural references (e.g. "Everyone opened their book")--thus letting it catch up with the everyday grammar of my Midwestern roots.

Until recently this was universally regarded as substandard, and not everyone is comfortable with it yet, nor is it appropriate for every occasion. In fact, even the CMS, ruling it fair game in its 14th edition, has had misgivings in the 15th--but I consider this the same as taking your finger off the checker: you can't take the move back. I still think the best solution is often to rewrite the sentence to obviate the problem; the second best is to explore "his or her" options, and the least desirable is "him/her" constructions--but "they/them/their" is now in-bounds.

This is one of several rules for which many of us got our knuckles rapped in school, holdovers from the days when the standards of Latin grammar were the benchmark. Relaxing them allows careful writers greater control over shades of meaning, and makes it easier to avoid clunky, graceless sentences. Finally, it can often allow prose to better catch the structure and cadences of standard American English. So--with appropriate considerations for context and writer's ear--"they/them/their" is fair game.

But I'm not ready to buy into the "conventional usage has long since changed--deal with it" argument regarding the common misusage of "begging the question."

The argument for acceptance in the latter case isn't so much the unwise pursuit of Latinist purity, it's simply the belief that, if enough people do something wrong long enough, it becomes right.

I don't think that rule applies to entire expressions in quite the same way it does to conventions of grammar. There's no argument about regionalisms, dialect, etc. (as with they/their/them), that supports changing "begs"--only the appeal that many people liked the highfalutin sound of the phrase enough to want to use it, but not enough to bother learning what it meant.

I don't really feel much pressure to hop on board that train.

And I suppose in the back of my mind is the argument, a la Orwell, that when you've lost the ability to express a distinction, you're well on the way to losing the distinction itself. How much easier would it have been to force Bush's Social Security phase-out plans to a standstill, for example, if more people were comfortably familiar with the idea that hiding your conclusion among your premises is usually a sign of either sloppy or dishonest thinking--in part because they still had a common phrase that handily expressed the idea?

So one can argue that this makes me a snob--or worse, I suppose, a philosopher. But the only plea I'm willing to cop to is being a preserver of distinctions.