Foreword "Orwellian, Dude!"

[Dave Monroe]

   "Prophecy and prediction are not quite teh same,
and it would ill serve writer and reader alike to
confuse them in Orwell's case.  There is a game some
critics like to play, worth maybe a minute and a half
of diversion, in which one makes lists of what Orwell
did and didn't 'get right.'  Looking around us at the
present moment, for example, w note the popularity of
helcopters as a resource of 'law enforcement,'
familiar to us from countless televised 'crime
dramas,' themselves forms of social control--and for
that matter at the ubiquity of television itself.  Th
two-way telescreen bears a close enough resemblance to
flat plasma screens linked to 'interactive' cable
systems, circa 2003.  News is whatever the governemnt
says it is, surveillance of ordinary citizens has
entered the mainstream of police activity, reasonable
search and seizure is a joke.  And so forth.  'Wow,
the Government has turned into Big Brother, just like
Orwell predicted!  Something, huh?'  'Orwellian,
dude!'
   "Well, yes and no.  Specific predictions are only
details, after all.  What is perhaps more important,
indeed necessary, to a working prophet, is to be able
to see deeper than most of us into the human soul. 
Orwell in 1948 understood that despite tha Axis
defeat, the will to fasscism had not gone away, that
far from having had its day it had perhaps not yet
even come into its own--the corruption of spirit, the
irresistible human addiction to power, were already
long in place, all well-known aspects of the third
Reich and Stalin's USSR, even the British Labour
party--like first drafts of a terrible future.  What
could prevent the same thing from happening to Britain
and the United States?  Moral superiority?  Good
intentions?  Clean living?" ("Foreowrd," pp. xv-xvi)

"Orwellian, dude!"

www.ottosell.de/pynchon/inferno.htm

www.vheissu.be/art/art_eng_SL_hollander.htm

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