Friday for Effect

11 OCTOBER 2024

The protagonist in George Orwell's "1984" is an honest fella by the name of Winston who works at the Ministry of Truth where his job, ironically, is to rewrite historical records so that they'll align with the Party's ever-changing version of events.

He alters newspaper articles, photographs, and other documents to erase or modify any information that contradicts the Party's current narrative. This includes changing economic figures, eliminating references to "unpersons" who have been vaporized by the Party, and even rewriting entire historical events.

Winston's work ensures that all records support the Party's claims of infallibility and omniscience. He disposes of the original documents down "memory holes" to be incinerated.

While he's really good at his job, Winston is also (very secretly) deeply disillusioned by this systematic falsification of reality and his involvement in the whole process.

For example, it "appeared" that Big Brother had recently delivered a speech about the ongoing war (which probably isn’t a real thing) wherein he predicted a certain development that wound up going the other way. So, Winston's job is to "rewrite a paragraph of Big Brother’s speech, in such a way as to make him predict the thing that had actually hap-pened."

(The hyphenation is Orwell's thing, not mine.)

Another item on Winston's to-do list has to do with the fact that, a few months earlier, 'The Times' had "published the official forecasts of the output of various classes of consumption goods in the fourth quarter"…but that "Today’s issue contained a statement of the actual out-put, from which it appeared that the forecasts were in every instance grossly wrong. Winston’s job was to rectify the original figures by making them agree with the later ones."

Winston lived and worked in a brutally totalitarian, socialist nation whose government routinely "vaporized" those who got out of line. So (for most of the book), despite his misgivings about promulgating bullshit to the masses, he took the prudent option and just did his job.

I'm not sure if anyone at CBS can credibly claim that they're in fear of being vaporized.

Earlier this week, the network aired an interview with Kamala Harris during a special Monday night edition of “60 Minutes,” during which she, true to form, dodged a variety of questions about issues like the economy and illegal immigration.

To be fair, host Bill Whitaker did a (sort of) decent job in posing reasonably tough questions and, more importantly, follow-ups when she tried to avoid providing actual answers.

On immigration, he asked the not-the-border-czar, "Was it a mistake to loosen the immigration policies as much as you did?” 

“It’s a long-standing problem, and solutions are at hand," Harris claimed. "And from Day One, literally, we have been offering solutions.”

I don't know how anybody could hear that and not be inclined to scream. What “solutions” is she talking about?