The road to 1984

[David Morris]

http://books.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,12084,948203,00.html

<<< Doublethink also lies behind the names of the superministries which run
things in Oceania - the Ministry of Peace wages war, the Ministry of Truth
tells lies, the Ministry of Love tortures and eventually kills anybody whom it
deems a threat. If this seems unreasonably perverse, recall that in the
present-day United States, few have any problem with a war-making apparatus
named "the department of defence," any more than we have saying "department of
justice" with a straight face, despite well-documented abuses of human and
constitutional rights by its most formidable arm, the FBI. Our nominally free
news media are required to present "balanced" coverage, in which every "truth"
is immediately neutered by an equal and opposite one. Every day public opinion
is the target of rewritten history, official amnesia and outright lying, all of
which is benevolently termed "spin," as if it were no more harmful than a ride
on a merry-go-round. We know better than what they tell us, yet hope otherwise.
We believe and doubt at the same time - it seems a condition of political
thought in a modern superstate to be permanently of at least two minds on most
issues. Needless to say, this is of inestimable use to those in power who wish
to remain there, preferably forever. >>>

Isn't Pynchon stretching and twisting the process of normal political
discourse, ie. spin, argument, advocacy and personal weighing of opinions, into
a form of dangerous Doublethink?  Just above this paragraph he talks anout
Whitman and Fitzgerald as seeing genius in "compartmentalized thinking," and
surely all of Pynchon's own fiction exhibit this kind of "both/and" thinking. 
But in this paragraph he twists it into something perverse because it exists in
the political realm.  In my mind what he's calling dangerous is the normal
process of thought and debate.

David Morris

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