Trump, 1984 And All That

I'm sure you've heard them. Otherwise-smart folk opining on the Trump phenomenon of 'Fake News', and saying "oh no, it's just like doublespeak in 1984 - Orwell was right!"

It's such a shame, though, the education system failed these people, by not informing them Orwell was writing about political reality at that time. It was not in any way a prediction, nor especially a Sci Fi, so much as it was a satire of the world as it was then, in 1948.

Having just returned from Russia, where he read "We" by Zamyatin (a genuine Sci Fi book by the way), he combined the two, imagined how the UK/Europe etc would respond and, yes, caught something genuine. He heard doublespeak every day. Anybody who lived through the War did. Anybody who lived through the past 50 years has. It started with Edward Bernays and it's now called Media Training.

It also strikes me as quite odd that the words "post-factual" were rewarded with some kind of "exclamation of the year award" by the Offline Dictionary Dyctionaery in 2016. Odd not least as it became a common epithet in 2006, 7 and 8, yet failed to be "new" the way it now is. The irony.

Trump, of course, deserves no apologist, yet accusers blame the culture, the media, the internet, when they should just blame the man. The hand-wringing over media, however, deserves our consideration.

Pretty much my whole life has been lived in the post-modern era. Marked as commencing with the Kennedy assassination, we have become a society who live in our media.

They say we all remember where we were. I was just six at the time but I sure as heck recall the night like it was yesterday. Our dog, Vick, was run over and killed that night and me and my family were already in mourning.  It was a dark, wet and cold November night. Vick, as usual, was touring the shops to get his scraps, and, much loved personality as he was, he crossed the street on the Zebra Crossing in front of our house. We lived on a roundabout and it was busy his and my whole life, so I guess he figured, better cross the street like a human in a place like this.

That night, though, aged 15 in dog years, his luck ran out. The mortified driver was nearly on the crossing by the time he noticed Vick and the deed was done.

So the mourning in our house was pretty deep when suddenly the news arrived. The BBC were cancelling that night's episode of Doctor Finlay's Casebook halfway through because some fellow in America had been shot. Doctors Cameron and Finlay were laid off, along with the receptionist Janet, so that the BBC could act as a piece of state machinery and pay varieties of tribute to the American guy who had been shot.

This was news to us kids too - but not in the same way. We'd grown up understanding that folk got shot all the time in America, and that was just part of the deal. If I'm honest, it only added to the glamour of the place.

Fast forward to present time and the Americans have elected a rich, unprincipled and racist media star as their president. I hope my US friends will not think it impertinent of me to remark that there was little new in that regard.

Equally, the fellow is unbelievably selfish, egotistical and acts like a giant child. Again, not much is new.

He attempts to dominate the media though. Perhaps hoping to engineer a relationship in the same manner of the way UK and US Media operated as machinery of state when falsely promoting Colonel Gadaffi to the purely honourary role of chief terrorist in the 80's and 90's, simply to deflect from the Syrian debacle, and justify a variety of odd incursive behaviours (citation: "Hyper Normalisation" by Adam Curtis). The main difference in Trump's case, it seems to me, is not any of the above, so much as the fact our Media now are distributed enough to resist.

No longer tied to a few networks per country, let alone to purely television as a distribution medium, the Media instead is calling out every false step as it happens. Yes, Trump has the codes, but so did Reagan. Yes, he is a climate change denier, but even Obama was (please forgive me) at best 'lukewarm' on delivering the revolutionary societal and industrial change needed to arrest that decline.

So the optimist in me seems to be winning. Trump is not new. Detestable yes, but hardly a startling figure on President's Row. He is full of bluster and vanity, anger, vile thoughts and actions. He is appallingly sexist, and casually racist. He will fit right into the country club for the Washington elite then. Walk this way Mister Donald, sir.

The media though, are not having it. Their role has gained strength in it's diversity, and I would like to praise the journalists of the US for calling out their own monster. Even Fox News have denied the Inauguration Millions. That is an independence that will carry them into the future. Somehow, in some way, it feels like the unstoppable distribution networks provided by the internet have finally found a positive role in society. And that is everywhere. Not just the USA.

In Iran, the "Happy" kids were released after a  force-nine Twitterstorm. In China, even Winnie The Pooh is banned, yet cannot be quelled. The very medium the message is carried on, has itself become the platform of the weak.

So yes, Orwell got it right. Right for 1948. Right in Animal Farm. Right about the all-too human desire to stop others saying vile things about one. Heck, he was even right about the Aspidestra, and nobody is even mentioning that (not even me - that's for another time).

But he was wrong wrong wrong (that's quite wrong) if he was trying to predict the future (which he wasn't). The television in the corner, the very medium of Big Brother, has itself turned on the autocrats. The loudspeaker talks back and the echo chamber of Office has been dismantled by the very machinery of state. So thank goodness for Doctor Finlay, Doctor Cameron and, especially for Janet. If it wasn't for trios like you, 'Rag, Tag and Bobtail', and 'Clarkson and the Rabble' we would never have reached the stage where the rambling incoherences of a ridiculous ruler could be publicly exposed in real time in minute by minute updates on Huff Post. The Fifty year rule is dead, long live the three second rule and all hail Phase Two of the Post-Modernist Zombie novel "2084", the yet-to-be written satire that will inadvertently predict the future for the next generation.