Crowds listen attentively, cheer their favorites, and boo their adversaries. There is applause, laughter, high 5-ing. Attach and counter attack – parry and thrust, block and maneuver. Before and after, pundits predict and analyze, replays are broadcast endlessly Major networks show or print highlights (or low-lights) - brilliance or bloopers. The masses consume it like food to the starving and are never fully appeased until the next contest begins.
State or national, primary, congressional, or senatorial – welcome to the theater of our electoral processes. Political theater – designed not to truly raise issues and foster a true debate of ideas, but media rating machines designed to make money from commercials, make the media outlets look good, and provide a lot of talking with not much real conversation, dialog, or substance. More junk food for our minds. The only thing more appalling, more ridiculous, and more filled with mindless drivel are the national nominating conventions.
Perhaps you’ll agree with my personal opinion that what passes for political debate today is showmanship, salesmanship, and a bunch of one-dimensional characters portrayed in a theatrical setting, all designed to put on a good show, yet inform us of very little except what political leaders and the powerful forces behind them want us to hear. There is no true debating done; some bickering, perhaps, between characters, but no true debate of the merits and perils of any single point of view. If you don’t share this opinion, you have taken the bait - lure, hook, line and sinker - and they have reeled you into their nets. Why? What’s in it for them?
To understand their motivation, I’d like you to listen to what George Orwell said, in his book “1984”, about the means used to control the masses (the Proles, as he called them in his book): “So long as they (the Proles) continued to work and breed, their other activities were without importance. Left to themselves, like cattle turned loose upon the plains of Argentina, they had reverted to a style of life that appeared to be natural to them, a sort of ancestral pattern ... 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 their minds. To keep them in control was not difficult.”
For those who are familiar with the writings of George Orwell, you’ll probably know this before I say it; for those who aren’t, consider this: Orwell wrote the book just after WWII, in 1947-48, and it was first published in 1949 - for most Americans, before we were born. Those who know and appreciate Orwell’s writings find him a master of irony, allegory and metaphor, and also very prescient; “1984” is no exception. What did he observe about the world in 1948, and our world today, that even now rings prophetic? Let’s look again at the last two lines of this passage: “…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 their minds.”
Does that sound like a pretty average life today? Working hard, perhaps in a physically taxing job? How many of us also work hard 5 or 6 days a week? Worrying about and caring for our home life and our family? So many of us with family can attest to how important family and home are. Orwell says they quarreled among neighbors – sound familiar? Films (movies, either in the theater or streaming to out TV sets via the internet), football (or any major sport – the NFL, or MLB, or NHL, NBA, Soccer, F1, Indy Car, NASCAR, NHRA, College football, and the many others), beer (I’ll bet you can name a handful of the 50 most popular beers) and above all, gambling (we have the casinos, OTB, video or online poker tournaments, and the multitude of lotteries and scratch-offs state and regional governments run across the country) - these activities “filled up the horizons of their minds” . Sure sounds like us, doesn’t it? These normal everyday activities of life appear as natural to us just as they did to the Proles. They’ve consumed our lives to the point where they have “filled up the horizons of (our) minds.” Orwell’s turn of phrase is keen, too – the horizon of our minds –meaning basically as far as it is possible to see (or think) in any direction. Pretty much includes everything that takes up the majority of our thoughts, and at the same time establishes a conceptual boundary to them.
Orwell foresaw the lives of many, many middle-class families, and especially those who live at or near the poverty level. Families just like yours and mine – with lives completely filled up by the activities we perceive as important. Everything we see: the good, the bad, our goals, our history, family, friends, work, leisure activities; all lie within that horizon. And we don’t look any farther. A vast majority of Americans can’t see beyond it. They just can’t – what’s beyond is outside their reality. So, Orwell saw, back in 1949, what our lives are like today – and what did he say about this? About our not being able to see beyond the horizon?
To understand the last line of the quote, you have to know the society in which Orwell set his story. Orwell’s society was broke up into two main groups –Party members, (basically the upper middle and upper class of the society – the majority of “Party members” and the ultra-rich Party elite – those with the real power) and the rest of the population, the Proles. Just two groups, Party Members and Proles. Haves and have nots. you also need to understand that these lines were never actually uttered by any character; they are presented as part of the background narrative of the protagonist, describing the Party’s point of view of and about the Proles. So, when Orwell concludes this description with the line “To keep them in control was not difficult” this is stated as a matter of fact, not as an opinion – it is simply the way things were. The Proles were easy to control when these mundane everyday activities and interests were constantly on their minds, occupying all their thoughts and all their waking hours. Similar thoughts are constantly on our minds, too They keep us from seeing the larger reality. We can’t see beyond the horizon – to the reality of the larger world. And that makes us, too, “easy to control.”
The political theater acted out before us on the national media stage during any given election cycle is just another part of the world within our horizon, just another of the many things that we are told “must” concern us; simply something else to occupy our minds. The “show” is just another tool of the Party to keep us from seeing the truth beyond the horizon – and “easy to control.”
Dorothy sang of a world “somewhere over the rainbow”; Star Trek directed us to “boldly go where no man has gone before”, Mulder told us that “the truth is out there.” And it is, once we allow our thoughts, and our perception of reality, to venture past the horizon.
Think about it.
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