George Orwell's favorite poem, which he recited out loud to himself over and over again while on night patrol duty during the Spanish Civil War, was written by a Catholic priest from some rural English parish in the 19th century, after a lifetime of studying the ancient speech patterns left behind centuries prior by those who preceded him in dwelling there.
The thing one you must understand about Orwell - and more to the point, about the world we've inherited after a century of struggle - is that he started out as an imperial police officer in Britain's subject state Burma, under the aegis of a king whose ancestors had won various wars centuries prior, and was thus, you see, the king.
This world he grew up in was modern enough for such things to be troubling even to those like Orwell whose politics had been most fundamentally informed by an Edwardian childhood filled with Kipling and romanticism and empire. But it wasn't so modern that the globe was not still divided up chiefly by empires justifying their atrocities via concepts that just a few decades later would be considered too crankish to take seriously.
Years later, Orwell became a key figure in the fight that is always correct, whether it be decided by infantry or debate: the fight against everyone, on every "side", who expects you to lie on behalf of the grand objective, which is always justified, along with those in charge.
Not everything is Stalin or Hitler or Mao. But then our public intellectuals are hardly Orwell, Goldman, and Nehru, which is why I'm forced to evoke those names from the past, my only solace being that each seems smaller than gods, somehow, when one gets to know them - but still larger than us, the people for whom they sacrificed, probably without ever feeling in their bones the possibility that we would squander everything they sacrificed, right or wrong, for good intent or ill, on a scale we cannot contemplate.
Orwell was lucky insomuch as he actually got a chance to shoot some of these people during one of those periods when political violence was not only permitted, but accepted by most everyone in public life as morally superior to just sitting around and watching the tanks rolls in and the millions die.
No one was shocked in the 30s when Orwell went off to Spain to fight for mankind. Everyone thinks its remarkable that I made a few sacrifices and took less explicit risks to oppose Palantir and the like, and then DOJ's bid to criminalize linking, and then the BOP's ongoing crimes against a small subset of the hundred percent of Americans who will violate America's psychotic version of "the law" at some point in their lives, likely without having any idea that they are now criminals, too, and subject to the same fate as any of those they've left to the mercy of bureaucrat-cops, as their children will be just a few years hence, under a system that will have gotten worse. The silver lining will be the calm and well-being that comes with being drastically severed from a nation that can no longer pretend with such ease that it is a citizenry, and the natural heirs to Solon and Pericles, rather than a feckless rabble that smells vaguely of Weimar.
I guess what I'm trying to say to my colleagues in the media, in my own circuitous fashion, is that when I ask you to reform, I'm not really asking. I'm threatening you personally. What form the consequences will take I leave to your imagination, especially if you're capable of imagining that an institution which does not regulate its conduct towards the public is hard to reform from within, but easy to terrorize from without. I should know.
Here's that poem. Keep your knife sharp.
Felix Randal
by Gerard Manley Hopkins
Felix Randal the farrier, O is he dead then? my duty all ended,
Who have watched his mould of man, big-boned and hardy-handsome
Pining, pining, till time when reason rambled in it, and some
Fatal four disorders, fleshed there, all contended?
Sickness broke him. Impatient, he cursed at first, but mended
Being anointed and all; though a heavenlier heart began some
Months earlier, since I had our sweet reprieve and ransom
Tendered to him. Ah well, God rest him all road ever he offended!
This seeing the sick endears them to us, us too it endears.
My tongue had taught thee comfort, touch had quenched thy tears,
Thy tears that touched my heart, child, Felix, poor Felix Randal;
How far from then forethought of, all thy more boisterous years,
When thou at the random grim forge, powerful amidst peers,
Didst fettle for the great grey drayhorse his bright and battering sandal!
⏭ Barrett Brown is a former imprisoned journalist and a current activist, essayist and satirist.
No comments