Certain Americans

Certain Americans seem incapable of understanding how ridiculous Rush Limbaugh sounded when he asserted that service members who advocate U.S. withdrawal from Iraq are “phony soldiers.” They never thought to ask: “How could he possibly know? He’s never served in the US military.”

Certain Americans remind me of the “proles” described by George Orwell in his novel, 1984. “Left to themselves, like cattle turned loose upon the plains of Argentina, they reverted to a style of life that appeared natural to them, a sort of ancestral pattern. They were born, they grew up in the gutters, they went to work at twelve, they passed through a brief blossoming-period of beauty and sexual desire, they married at twenty, they were middle-aged at thirty, they died, for the most part, at sixty. Heavy physical work, the care of home and children, petty quarrels with neighbors, films, football, beer, and, above all, gambling, filled up the horizon of minds. To keep them in control was not difficult. A few agents of the Thought Police moved always among them, spreading false rumors and marking down and eliminating the few individuals who were judged capable of becoming dangerous ll that was required of them was a primitive patriotism which could be appealed to whenever it was necessary? Consequently, “The larger evils invariably escaped their notice.” And, “as the Party slogan put it: ‘Proles and animals are free.’”

Meanwhile Oceania’s war without end raged on. So, too, in George W. Bush’s United States of America.
-- Walter C. Uhler