How to Disarm a Nuclear Book

When it comes to dark dystopian visions of the future, George Orwell's 1984 is the standard-bearer, the prototype.  It's not a subtle work, by any means, but it is an extremely powerful one.  It's a dire warning about totalitarian government, an indictment of censorship, a defense of the nuances of language, and a text book on brainwashing, all rolled into one.  It relentlessly follows the logic of its premise to its most extreme conclusion.  It makes no compromises; it takes no prisoners.  It drives its point home like a railroad spike through the skull, and it achieves a sort of strange ruthless beauty as a result.  When I first read the book nearly twenty years ago, if someone would have asked me if there was one thing in this world where people could not possibly miss the point, I would have said, 1984.

But alas!  Time and experience have shown me otherwise.  I've seen quite a number of misinterpretations, misapprehensions, and misapplications of the book and it's ideas over the years.  Some read the book as a political novel, specifically a roman a clef' of Soviet Russia.  This is a strictly journalistic reading, as if the book were simply a magnification of newspaper headlines and historical events.  Although the story operates in a political milieu and the landscape has a certain Soviet touch to it, there are much more universal themes at work.  It's about the group mentality, mass hysteria, blind devotion, obedience driven by fear, the corruption of absolute power, the boot stomping on the human face forever.  It's about the individual vs. the state, reality vs. consensus, freedom vs. control.

To look at Big Brother and see only Stalin is to miss the forest for the sake of one mustachioed tree.  Big Brother is the archetypical figurehead.  In the story he serves at a galvanizing point of focus.  He consolidates the power of the party in a single individual, serving as an object of unquestioning loyalty for the people and a point of reference for the agendas of the party as a whole.  It's a mistake to look for any one person in Big Brother.  Even in the book itself, it's not entirely clear if Big Brother is a real person, and it's strongly hinted that he isn't.  It's the principle at work that matters, the people's response to Big Brother.  In fact, you could even go through and replace every instance of the name "Big Brother" with the word "God", and I think you'd be quite surprised and more than a little disturbed at the result.  In the end, Big Brother isn't nearly as important as the atrocities committed in his name.

On the other hand, the term "Big Brother" has recently developed into a sort of short-hand for surveillance of any kind.  While I can certainly appreciate the term becoming a sort of watchword reminding people of their right to privacy, such a reading of the term is a gross over-simplification.  As a result, some people fail to see the difference between the U.S. Patriot Act and a store's closed-circuit security camera.  They focus so much on the surveillance, that they forget that the issue is really about rights.  Big Brother isn't about cameras, it's about the attitude behind the cameras that says, "If they've got nothing to hide, then they shouldn't mind if we have a look."  It's about inferring suspicion, making crimes out of thoughts, and building prosecution out of pure speculation about your intentions.

And then, as with any work which has become such an iconic part of the culture, you have people who come out of the woodwork to apply their own pet theories to it.  Robert Pirsig, in Zen & the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (a book which deserves some consideration of it's own one of these days), applies a particularly misguided interpretation.  In addition to his heap of other missteps in his quest for "Quality" with a capital Q, he declares that 1984 represents a rationally efficient society.  Well, I don't know what book he was reading, but there doesn't seem to be anything particularly rational about Oceanic society, and as for efficiency...well, as Goldstein himself says in "The Book", "Nothing is efficient in Oceania except the Thought Police."  But I suppose if you imagine a world like 1984 when you think of reason, then you're going to see a reasonable world when you look at 1984.

But it wasn't supposed to end up like this.  "1984" wasn't supposed to become a pointless buzzword of paranoia that people stopped taking seriously a long-time ago, something indiscriminately applied to anyone's vague dis-satisfaction with their government, another bogeyman, another internet Hitler.  "Big Brother" wasn't supposed to be become a casual joke and the title of a reality TV show.  1984 was supposed to be the guardian, the antidote against the very world that it was warning us about.  Don't let them disarm the book.  Don't let them relieve the guard from his post.  1984 is just the sort of thing we need to keep 1984 from happening.

                   

My Favorite Part of the Resurrection Story

The story of the resurrection of Jesus Christ is one of the cornerstones of Christianity.  It is the "good news" of the Gospels.  It is not my intention with this post to delve into the meaning and impact of this story in any kind of general way.  Nor am I going to attempt to unravel the apparent discrepancies between the different Gospel accounts of the story.  Nor am I going to attempt to definitively determine what degree of the story is fact or fiction, or whether it is completely one or the other.  As the ringmaster of this nuclear carnival, I reserve the right to put these matters off until another day, or indefinitely if I choose.  For now, I just want to consider one teeny, tiny little detail of the story.

In the story as it is told in the Gospel of Luke, after his resurrection Jesus appears to the disciples in the rooms where they are staying.  While they were staring at him, hardly believing their own eyes, he simply asks them if they have anything to eat.  Now, there aren't many moments bordering on the cute or the comical to be found anywhere in the Bible, but this always brings a smile to my face.  You can picture the disciples standing there with their eyes wide and their mouths open as Jesus strolls in and asks, "You guys got anything to eat around here.  I'm starving."  And why wouldn't he be?  After all, he hadn't eaten for three days.  Strangely enough, of all the details of the story, this one seems to feel the most authentic to me.  If I were to believe any of it, it would be on the basis of this.

Consider, for a moment, the possibility that the story is entirely fiction.  Some ancient storyteller sits down to make all this up.  He reaches this incredibly significant moment where Jesus returns from the underworld and appears before his disciples.  It would seem to be an occasion for some great revelation, some profound statement, the imparting of some incredible secret about life beyond the grave.  Having him ask for something to eat completely underplays the moment, almost comically.  It seems especially out of character for ancient literature, where the characters were usually towering, and yet quite wooden, archetypes.  They barely ate at all, let alone upon their triumphant return from the grave.  Hercules would have broken up out of the ground on a bull of fire that he had tamed in Hades.  Jesus quietly, calmly asks for a meal.

The moment is so absurdly apropos, that if it is fiction, then it's almost a literary anachronism.  It would be like discovering a painting with linear perspective thousands of years before the Renaissance.  It displays a depth of sensibility, involving a subversion of dramatic effect that would have been completely alien at the time.  It's almost...ironic, ages before writers had the sophistication or self-awareness to be capable of such a thing.  It's such a little detail, and yet so oddly appropriate.

Of course, one could make the argument that the detail is included because they wanted to drive home the point that Jesus' resurrection was a physical one.  They wanted to make the point that he returned in the flesh, not merely in spirit.  I completely agree.  Whether fact or fiction, this is undoubtedly why the detail was included in the story.  But this just goes to demonstrate how revolutionary Jesus was, even as a character in a book.  The people of the Bible are in general more human than their counterparts in other mythologies, both literally and in the quality of their depictions.  Zeus and Apollo were gods.  Moses and Abraham were men, and as such, their stories are far more grounded, realistic, and relatable.  But there is no where that this is more evident than with Jesus himself.  Although he is the most divine person in the Bible, he is also, ironically, the most endearingly human.

It is as if, in driving home the point of Jesus' humanity, the writers of the Gospels were forced to really consider for the first time what those truly human qualities were.  Whether they were chronicling or manufacturing the details of Jesus' life, they were forced to break the mold of those old wooden archetypes.  As a result, the Jesus we read about in the Gospels has a substance, a vitality that the Greek, Roman, and Egyptian gods do not.  When he has to be woken from a nap when the disciples were afraid of the storm, it's oddly touching to thinking of Jesus taking naps.  When he turns water into wine, we want to consider him a friend.  We sympathize when he steadily maintains his patience in the face of Peter's continual lack of understanding.  We understand his fear and his ambivalence in the Garden of Gethsemane.  We feel his pain on the cross.

This is something we almost take for granted now, but at the time it was groundbreaking.  Not only the human character, but the human being, was seen in a new light.  Christianity gave rise to a concern for the individual soul and inner life that was unheard of before.  In telling this story of God walking among us as a man, and by considering in wonder the things that made him human, we became aware of ourselves for possibly the first time.  Even by the simple act of asking for something eat, Jesus Christ changed the world.