"1984"

OK. So, I am not telling anyone something they don’t already know. George Orwell had a knack for illuminating dangers in culture through fiction. “Animal Farm” has been one of my favorite books since I read it at the age of eleven.

But, for whatever reason I never got around to his greater work. I was never forced to read it in school. (That probably saved me from hating it!) I told myself I would read it two years ago, when the nationalism fervor started to rear its head all around the world again. I thought again last year that I would make the time for it, but didn’t. Then, this summer with time on my hands and a beautiful, old paperback copy from the sixties just sitting on the shelf, I decided to plod through it.

It was not a plod. It is a quick, engaging read. And, in the way “Animal Farm” made plain the dangers and insidiousness of communism; “1984” seems relevant to any time in which it is read. I’m sure readers in the actual year 1984 saw parallels to the Cold War. But one can’t help feeling in today’s age of Echoes, social media, “fake news,” reality TV stars as leaders of the free world, and nationalism, tribalism, and heartless fear of “the other,” that Orwell was seeing into a potential future. It is such a cautionary tale.

Don’t ever let yourself love Big Brother.