Big Brother
Good artist friend, Joel, sent along an image from a poster that decorated urban storefront landscapes in Seattle’s U-District, back when he and I actually belonged in the U-District, age-wise.
He meant for me to use it on my little window shade theatre, which I did, but not without editorial comment:
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I can’t think of an election year, including 1984, when Orwellian issues were more clearly in focus than they are in 2008. When Barack Obama showed up as a keynote at the Democratic Convention in 2004, you had to be sleepwatching to not know he would be back as a candidate one day. Sure enough, here he is, sooner than anyone expected. I just hope he can resist the forces of Orwellian paranoia for three more weeks.
When the Big Brother posters went up in Seattle’s U-District, they were put up by 20-year-olds who are probably voting for Barack as 60-year-olds. Some of them probably have the same hairstyles they had then and have a lot of the same music on their iPods. But, the message of that poster has now been turned against them.
Think about it: Who’s afraid of “Big Brother” and wants all of us to be? Who uses the fear of Big Brother to keep us the only civilized country where people haven’t come together to make sure they all have health care? (Then uses Big Brother tactics against our own citizens in California, when the California legislature votes to allow reasonable sale and use of medical marijuana and DEA storm troopers destroy the pharmacies.) Who uses fear of “Big Government” to convince us that we have no right to reasonably regulate Big Capital, even parroting this bushwah as Big Capital takes us all over the precipice on the greedy hunt to grab all the available capital? Who used fear of “Big Brother Stalin” and now uses “Big Brother Mohammed” to persuade us that we need to keep stockpiling weaponry and make pre-emptive strikes on small mideastern sovereign countries because their leaders look a lot like that Big Brother image? Then, in a bizarre use of Orwellian doublethink, when those same countries feel compelled to build their own stockpiles to fend off Bush Doctrine pre-emptive strikes, the counter-stockpiling is used as a reason to make the strike.
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Who is inciting voters, at this very moment, with Orwellian doublespeak suggesting that Barack Obama is a terrorist by association, because he has a Muslim-sounding name and served on a charitable organization’s board of directors with a former 60’s radical who is presently a law-abiding do-gooder?
It’s time to stop believing in Big Brother. There is no Big Brother. There’s only us chickens, and the sky is not falling. Thank God / Allah / Buddha / Goddess / Source / All That Is / The Big Kahuna / The Big Lebowski / Whatever that the under-30 folks are not buying our over-30 Big Brother bullpucky.
They’re registering to vote in record numbers because they want to move into the 21st Century where they belong. They’re a little pissed off about the mess their parents have made, but they’re not as afraid as their parents are. The parents are always afraid: Afraid of travelling faster than a horse can travel, afraid of the telephone, the television, Rock Music, Folk Music, Rap Music, afraid of computers and the Internet, apparently even still afraid of people with dark skin. G/A/B/G/S/ATI/TBK/TBL/Whatever: Please help us overcome our fear and elect Barack.
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As an admitted admirer of New Age-y sorts of ideas - within a few empirical parameters - it has bothered me a little that many of the leading lights have not weighed in on the current sur-reality. A few have, and here’s a fine example:
