Lies to truth: In today’s Miami Herald, Leonard Pitts takes Bushco to task for lying about its lying lies. He draws an eery parallel to George Orwell’s 1949 novel, “1984,” with this quote:
‘The Party said that Oceania had never been in alliance with Eurasia. He, Winston Smith, knew that Oceania had been in alliance with Eurasia as short a time as four years ago. But where did that knowledge exist? Only in his own consciousness, which in any case must soon be annihilated. And if all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed — if all records told the same tale — then the lie passed into history and became truth. `Who controls the past,’ ran the Party slogan, ‘controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.’ ” — from 1984 by George Orwell
Pitts then lists five different occasions when George W. Bush used the term, “stay the course,” and then Bush’s latest lie from Oct. 22: “Listen, we’ve never been stay the course . . .”
In the world Orwell invented, words had no objective meaning beyond that assigned to them by the Party, whose slogans, not incidentally, were, ”War is Peace,” ”Freedom is Slavery” and ”Ignorance is Strength.” In that world, there was no past — or rather, the past was what the leaders said it was, and it was a waste of time to check for yourself, because all books, newspapers and other records were constantly being updated to reflect whatever the new reality was.
Thus, ‘Oceania had never been in alliance with Eurasia.’ Much as we now learn that the Bush administration’s policy toward Iraq has ‘never been stay the course.’Thus, ”Oceania had never been in alliance with Eurasia.” Much as we now learn that the Bush administration’s policy toward Iraq has ”never been stay the course.” And never mind that the president and his henchmen have spent three years pounding that phrase like nails into the public consciousness.
”Stay the course” doesn’t work anymore, not with most of the nation united against the war, so the White House announced last week that the phrase would no longer be used. That’s their prerogative. But it’s quite a leap from won’t be used to never has been used.
So did we dream these last three years? Is ‘’stay the course” just something we mumbled in our collective sleep as we twisted in our collective sheets? Or do we learn something here about the administration’s level of respect for our collective intelligence?
It is not, by now, surprising that the president and his surrogates rewrite the past. We’ve seen that before, after all. Seen it with John Kerry the war hero ”traitor,” with John Murtha the Marine ”coward.” Saw it with WMD, which, it turned out, were not the reason we invaded Iraq. (Where’d we ever get that idea?) What’s painful, though, is that we see it so quietly, see it, as the citizens of 1984 did, with apparent acceptance.
