Most of us remember George Orwell’s “1984” as a novel about a totalitarian state where “Big Brother is watching.” But it was also about words. It showed that those who control our language can thereby control a lot more.
That’s a point Orwell made explicit in one of the finest essays ever published, “Politics and the English Language,” in which he wrote:
“In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible. . . . Defenseless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called ‘pacification.’ Millions of peasants are robbed of their farms and sent trudging along the roads with no more than they can carry: this is called ‘transfer of population’ or ‘rectification of frontiers.’ “
Orwell wrote this 65 years ago, to little apparent effect. We still see our language used for “the defense of the indefensible.”
Consider the recent debt-ceiling battle in Washington, The federal government has been spending more than it collects, making up the difference by borrowing. Obviously, this cannot continue indefinitely.
So the logical solution is to go after both sides of the issue: cut spending (Do we really have to spend nearly as much on military as the rest of the world put together? Do oil companies really need federal assistance?) and increase revenues, say by eliminating some loopholes while bringing the tax rates to what they were a decade ago, when the federal government was running at a surplus and rational predictions said the national debt could be paid off by 2010.
But if you can control the terms of the debate, you can make sure only part of the solution, the part that plutocrats cherish, gets considered. Thus House Speaker John Boehner’s statement that “Washington does not have a revenue problem; Washington has a spending problem,” echoed by such luminaries as Orrin Hatch and Eric Cantor. The idea, of course, is to make sure that only reduced spending gets considered — and that’s pretty much what happened with the debt-ceiling deal.
Closer to home, let’s consider the contention over school vouchers in Douglas County.
The school board there has proposed a “scholarship program.” If your kid is accepted, you get some public money to help pay for a private school — and most of the participating private schools are sectarian. This is a direct violation of our 1876 state constitution, which forbids giving public money for religious purposes.
But even though the school board members took oaths to support that constitution, they’re still proceeding with their plans to violate it. They’re accepting contributions for a legal defense fund, and they’re working with an outfit called the Institute for Justice. Somehow, that name makes me think of Orwell’s Ministry of Truth.
You might ask “Where’s the justice in unconstitutional spending of tax revenue?” but the institute’s propaganda says this is all about “protecting school choice.”
No, it isn’t. In Colorado, parents already enjoy abundant choice about which schools to send their children to. Douglas vouchers aren’t not about choice; they’re about subsidizing choices. That is, at the meat counter, I enjoy the choice between ground beef and filet mignon. That taxpayers decline to fund my filet mignon does not deprive me of the choice — or maybe it would if I moved to Douglas County.
There, they keep trying to define the subsidies to religious schools as a choice issue, just as Washington doesn’t have a revenue problem and Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia.
Freelance columnist Ed Quillen (ekquillen@gmail.com) of Salida is a regular contributor to The Denver Post.
