Orwell was off by a couple decades

Contrary to the laments of some, we are not living in a fascist society. The United States has not become a totalitarian regime under the Bush administration. This nation is far too great to be damaged that badly in such a short time, even during a period in which we were changed forever by nineteen low-tech hijackers.

We still enjoy great prosperity and freedom, most of us living relatively carefree lives. Yet there are disturbing trends. In the area of public discourse in particular the Bush administration has shown a true Orwellian flair. Bush, Cheney, Rice, et al, seem to believe if they tell us black is white and that 2 + 2 = 5 enough times that we will eventually believe it. Take for example their unbending insistence that Saddam was an imminent threat, and a great many statements that suggested Saddam was (in)directly connected to the 9-11 attacks.

They also seem to have a penchant for obtuse, cryptic, and sometimes overly euphemistic labels. Who can forget the Information Awareness Office? How about the Clean Skies initiative that allows 520% more mercury pollution, and 68% more nitric oxide pollution? Or the Healthy Forests Initiative that calls for the "harvesting" of the forest, as Bush put it in the debate?

The destruction of language is indeed a very dangerous thing. To see how far down this dark path we have gone, I will try, just as an experiment for fun, to see if we couldn't just adopt Big Brother's three slogans of The Party:

War is Peace
Are we not sold this line almost daily? It has been repeated so much that it could be argued that this "truth" is now common knowledge. To live in peace here in America we must continuously wage war elsewhere; war is peace. We can go about our lives, happily shopping and consuming, not to be bothered by coverage of the daily carnage we inflict upon our enemies.

Pardon me, should I call them our enemies? Without so much as batting an eye, the likes of Hannity and Limbaugh will in one breath tell us that they are all ruthless bloodthirsty killers who are full of hate and should be nuked to high heaven, and in the next breath tell us how grand and worthwhile it is that we are spending our national treasury and spilling the blood of our soldiers to liberate these very same people. Perhaps a corollary slogan is in order: Love Our Enemies (to Death).

Freedom is Slavery
In the wake of 9-11 Bush and company gave us the P.A.T.R.I.O.T. Act, a namesake Big Brother would be proud of. The act was met with little opposition. Congress passed it almost unanimously, and the media made little stir about it. Even the courts, whose charge it is to uphold the Constitution, were curiously silent for a long time.

With nearly universal support and barely a word of alarm from a conforming media, the tranquilized public seems to have accepted without complaint the promise from Big Brother Bush: I will preserve your freedoms, if you will just kindly give them away.

Ignorance is Strength
Ahhhh... Where to begin with this one? Precious few press conferences. Legislation pushed through in the dark of night, trying to fly under the radar. A full-frontal assault on the Freedom of Information Act, the Federal Advisory Committee Act, and Presidential Records Act. The classification of an inordinate amount of information. Secret deportations, secret detentions, secret trials without due process of law. Secret investigations allowed under the aforementioned P.A.T.R.I.O.T. Act. Resistance time after time to be forthcoming with the public, for example the request to have some insight into Cheney's energy plan meeting.

The blanket excuse is always "national security". Seemingly this President believes the more ignorant we are of what is going on, the safer and stronger this country will be. The idea that democracy should be a somewhat transparent system of governance has been tossed on Bush's massive slag heap of the discarded norms and laws of the previous (useless) century.