Teaching a lot of Orwell this spring in a writing class focused on questions of economic equality and justice. I mean inequality and injustice. Haven’t read him in a long time. Plan to re-engage here with Orwell as I reread his work.
1.
Orwell is too rational. I mean that in the best way, but he’s an idealist realist, and his ideals lead (led as he changed) him to prescribe and proscribe (and so rationally). To scribe ( “Why I Write”). Politically. And he’s on the right side most agree, picking an Orwell from the pile. You can be a neocon ex-Trotskyite like Hitchens and agree (in fact, claim Orwell for your very own, you imagine yourself “the O of our times” and are ever the contrarian, and imagine Iraq your own private Catalonia). You can be a Chomskyite retro-anarcho-syndicalist and agree, again and in another — radically different own private Catalonia. You can be a bland centrist and Orwell is so rational and preaches against extremes — this is what you remember from Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four, you think — and you blithely use “Orwellian” in conversation in precisely the lazy and sloppy fashion proscribed in “Politics and the English Language” to mean any number of things in any number of lazy sloppy moments. You can be a libertarian a la Ron Paul and love Orwell for his nightmare visions of malevolent total state power. You can be a right-wing pundit on Fox and use “Orwellian” in just the same fashion as the bland moderate. You can be on Democracy Now! talking to Amy Goodman and Orwell is there for you. But in the end, the thing is, this is just what “Politics and the English Language” wants to fight (my brain almost typed “militates against,” but then thought better). He would hate the word “overdetermined.” He would appreciate the irony of his name and its adjective form being so.
Thinking about Liu Xiaobo too. Liu Xia’s “ugly doll” photographs, as well.