Novels Predicting America of the 21st Century - Book Report/Review Example

Three Novels Predicting America of the 21st Century The world of 2008 closely resembles the world of 1984. Not the world of 1984 and the height of the Reagan era, but that 1984 specific to George Orwell's big brother. Big Brother is watching not just figuratively, but quite literally. In Orwell's novel, the state insists that all passion, desire and love must be suppressed and repressed and can only be expressed toward the love of Big Brother. The residents of the state can love just Big Brother, but in reality the love they feel is more accurately described as the hate of everything that is not Big Brother. The reflection of this element of the novel is aptly analogous to what has taken place in America since the attacks of 9/11 and the Bush administration's clumsy politicizing of those events. Those daily exhortations to express love for Big Brother and suspicion toward all ideologies that threaten the stability of the state are mirrored by the President's own words in his State of the Union address: "Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists"(Weiner). Such a statement is the very definition of a false dilemma yet proved tragically effective. The subsequent hatred expressed to not just the terrorists who actually attacked on 9/11, but Saddam Hussein who had nothing to do with it, and the suspicion expressed toward France which merely expressed the view that being against an invasion of Iraq was not necessarily the same as embracing terrorism set the stage for what the President really desired: complete lack of oversight as he wages his so-called war on terror. The point being that people came to believe the concept that it was not even possible to be against the President and also be against the terrorist. The manner in which semantics has been manipulated over the past six years is equitable to the exploitation of language in 1984 such as that "in the end the Party would announce that two and two made five, and you would have to believe it" (80). Although most people might consider it lunacy to accept that two and two make five, tens of millions unblinkingly accepted that being against the President was equitable to supporting Osama Bin Laden. With a Congress controlled by the President's own party and a minority party cowed by the effectiveness of associating not being with the President with being in support of terrorism, the years from 2002 to 2007 resembled absolutely nothing in literature so much as the world of 1984. Anything considered even the slightest bit subversive by the government, such as peacefully protesting any policy of Pres. Bush, was cordoned off in a special section ironically named a "Free Speech Zone" (Levendosky). One might well have reminded the administration that technically speaking the entire United States is a Free Speech Zone, but to do so might result in having one's ATT phone records collected and sent to the NSA (Clinton 41). Big Brother's purpose is to create fragmentation of society by instilling fear and paranoia so that the only thing that the entire populace can rally around is the protection of what they have been misled to believe is the right and natural approach to governance and existence. By engendering the fear and paranoia of a series of terrorist attacks in their homeland, the Bush administration managed not just to rally a majority of the populace into supporting a phony war constructed on falsified intelligence, but they also managed to marginalize anyone who spoke out against the war, from the Dixie Chicks to actual weapons inspectors who had been to Iraq and reported that no WMD existed like Scott Ritter (Boyd-Barrett 29). The crude conditioning of a caste-like society in Brave New World is so much less effective at perputating an unpleasant and unfair ideology that what takes place in contemporary society today. All the low-tech electrical shock and hypnopaedia that serve to engender acceptance of the state's necessity for conformity seems almost quaintly old-fashioned in comparison to the manner in which all media is devised to condition the repression of the natural urge to rebel against the stultifying acquiescence to authoritarian dictates. Perhaps the most telling dissimilarity between Huxley's world and the world of today is the purpose behind all this conditioning according to the Director: "That is the secret of happiness and virtue- liking what you've got to do. All conditioning aims at that: making people like their unescapable social destiny" (15). Soma exists today, true enough, but not as a drug and the point is not to make people like what has to be done, but rather to make to people believe that leisure is the real point of life for which all work strives. The hallucinogenic state of escaping from the stressors of life in contemporary society is not accomplished by the majority through frequent drug use, but rather through the addictions of television and the internet. While there are some tangential analogues between life in 2008 and life in Brave New World, for the most part the novel must be rejected as a projection of a futuristic society that has already come to pass. The most striking divergence between contemporary society and that brave new world of Huxley's imagination is the rejection of family values The very concept of reproducing for the sake of procreation and all things related to raising a family is viewed as a repellant and unnatural. This concept contrasts quite clearly with the almost rabid embrace of what are known as, with no small amount of unrealized irony in many cases, as "family values." The stubborn clinging to outmoded traditions that insist upon the validity only of a one man/one woman definintion of the marriage unit were behind the successful anti-gay agenda of the 2008 elections. Although certain elements of Brave New World can clearly be said to have a reflection among modern society, the overriding concern of the wholesale rejection of the family unit as the defining entity of civilization has not yet come to fruition. If modern society resembles any work of literature as closely than 1984 it would be Fahrenheit 451. It is almost impossible to decide which book more closely resembles contemporary America, but ultimately Fahrenheit 451 must be rewarded only runner-up status because the Bradbury fails to generate a broad enough tapestry of how the government utilizes the manipulation of information to conduct illegal actions both domestically and internationally. The only place within the book where Bradbury comes close to touching upon the full dimension of the political state of America at the present time is Faber's assertion that "Those who don't build must burn" (89). Within this simple statement lies the true measure of the Bush administration's distrust of intellectual engagement on any policy from the side standing in opposition to them. Where Fahrenheit 451 is most successful in predicting the American of the first decade of the 21st century is not in the wholesale acceptance of crude measures of obstructing the pursuit of intellectual independence such as burning books, but in the anesthetized state of Americans doped upon the omnipresence of television that requires the sacrifice of critical engagement that is an inherent part of authentic literacy. The sad truth is that the overwhelming majority of Americans living in the 21st century do not need firemen to come between them and their books. Reading literacy has been dropping consistently in American throughout the past decade and while the good news is that other forms of reading media are replacing books, the bad news is that the level of not just critical sophitistication, but just plain old-fashioned spelling and grammar have also been dropping (Vogt 6). Book burning is simply an outdated and inconvenient mode of information control when society has replaced the very desire to read with more easily controlled transmission of information such as television and film. Media conglomeration has created a situation in which almost all mainstream media outlets are owned by just eight companies; the fewer people who deliver the news, the easier it is to control the transmission and the less needs there is a need to burn information because most information will never be transmitted (Shah). The alternative to those forms of media is the internet and the transmission of information there requires no cyber-fireman because the corporate controlled media conglomerates working in unison with the lawmakers their contributions support have successfully instituted the widespread belief that information found on the internet is somehow less accurate than the information these corporate behemoths decide is necessary for the public to know. Brave New World appears to be least analogous to the current American culture and society, although Huxley's invention of soma carries with it the unmistakable semblance of the deadening effects of addiction to everything from alcohol to chat rooms on the internet that keep people from taking the intiative to find out for themselves things that the mainstream media have no business interest in pursuing. Fahrenheit 451 certainly has elements within it that would make some Americans feel as they were reading a novel written about contemporary society. The lack of intellectual discourse or even interest in pursuing the almost ridiculously obvious holes in the Bush's administration's justification for invading Iraq until after the war had turned into a disaster and public opinion turned against the war seems like a scene that comes straight from Mildred Montag's room filled with inane television programming (Wycliff). But that novel lacks the grounded insight into the increasingly lapsed interest in reading that no longer necessitates any need to burn books. It is within the pages of 1984 that is discovered a world in which eavesdropping on private citizens is accepted as a necessary means of security during the heightened tensions of an endless war. It is the engendering of paranoia that drives people to turn their friends and lovers over to a government that considers torture to be a necessary means of maintaining a perverted sense of freedom that is found not only in 1984, but in 2008. Works Cited Boyd-Barrett, Oliver. "1 Understanding." Reporting War: Journalism in Wartime. Ed. Stuart Allan and Barbie Zelizer. New York: Routledge, 2004. 25-42. Bradbury, Ray. Fahrenheit 451. Chicago: Ballantine Books, 1996. Clinton, Kate. "Can You Hear Me Now." The Progressive July 2006: 41. Huxley, Aldous. Brave New World. New York: Harperperennial, 1989. Levendosky, Charles. "President Bush: Make Those Protestors Disappear." The Humanist Jan.-Feb. 2004: 4+. Orwell, George. 1984. Signet Classics. New York: Signet Classics, 1977. Shah, Anup. "Media Conglomerates, Mergers, Concentration of Ownership - Global Issues." Global Issues : social, political, economic and environmental issues that affect us all - Global Issues. 10 Dec. 2008 Vogt, Maryellen. "Book Reading Drops, Says New Survey; Has It Simply Been Replaced by Other Forms of Literacy." Reading Today Aug.-Sept. 2004: 6. Weiner, Allen S. "The Use of Force and Contemporary Security Threats: Old Medicine for New Ills." Stanford Law Review 59.2 (2006): 415+ Wycliff, Don. "Sleeping watchdog | Commonweal | Find Articles at BNET." Find Articles at BNET | News Articles, Magazine Back Issues & Reference Articles on All Topics. 10 Dec. 2008 . Read More