The road to 1984

[Paul Mackin]

On Thu, 2003-05-08 at 16:09, David Morris wrote:
> 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.



Very much so, David. Pynchon's real-life examples of Orwellian
Doublethink are as lame as anything in the Introduction. How could any
reasonable person object to including a nation's military into something
called the Department of Defense?

Seems to me Pynchon is on the verge of trivializing Orwell's nightmare
creation. For Orwell doublethink is a metaphor for perversity and
horror, not PR or spin.

P.