Volume 1, Edition 1

Editor, David Ross
Chief Adviser, Dr. David Goodman

EDITOR'S PICKS

1) OUR MISSION
2) DAVE GOODMAN ON "Ten Myths About Nineteen-Eighty-Four"
3) Reinventing Big Brother
4) Why Did Big Brother Destroy Winston Smith?
5) Minority Report, Latest in how Hollywood Looks at Orwellian Futures

REGULAR FEATURES

Victory Gin (A listing of the latest outrages at home)
Orwell Predicted:

1) OUR MISSION: ORWELL WAS RIGHT!
Since Sept. 11, 2001 there has been a vast increase in paranoia on the part of citizens of the United States, coupled with an intense interest by the government (and others) in the science and technology of surveillance, identification methods and reading email.

The thesis of ThoughtCrime is that people have never felt so spied upon, so insecure, so possessed by the weird feeling that, despite the fact that the government agencies, such as the FBI, fouled up their mission to protect us, they have been given an almost blank check drawn on a seemingly inexhaustible bank of power and money.

In any other milieu, whether religion, business or industry, those who fail miserably are not given more power, but less. If a human mother loses her baby to wild dogs, we may sympathize, but we resist putting her in charge of a classroom. If a captain of an oil tanker misses the ocean and runs aground, he's not put in command of a fleet. But if the FBI and CIA fail to anticipate an act of war that kills thousands, they are rewarded with more power over us.

Ask yourself a variation of Ronald Reagan's famous campaign question: Do you feel more secure than you did ten years ago, ten months ago?

Does the creation of the Dept. of Fatherland Security (oops, we mean Homeland Security!) make you feel more-or less secure?

How do you feel at the airport? More secure? The various cavities of your body might not be secure from search and prodding by strangers, but you're safe, right? Do you get a frisson of fear when you open your mail and some powder falls out? Even if it turns out to be just a sample of a new sweetener?

What do the people demand when more terrorism threatens? More security measures. The question must be asked: How many locks on our doors and how many locks on our freedoms are we willing to endure to be "safe"? If a frog is dropped into boiling hot water, it will jump out. But if the frog is put in a pan of cold water and the temperature is gradually raised, the frog will parboil.

Nations and peoples are like that, and no one knows it better than the politicians, both liberal and conservative, who have learned over the decades the vital nature of incrementalism, of the slow revolution. The only difference in the last few months since 9/11 and the preceding months is that those who would seek power over us feel safer to advance their agenda at a faster pace, in the name of "national security."

In Orwell's Nineteen-Eighty-Four the party changed the past to suit itself, rewriting entire issues of newspapers, reissuing new "updated" books and tirelessly hunting down and destroying the old versions, so that, eventually, a person doubted his own sanity if he didn't accept the party's version of events.

We don't have anything like that, do we? WE could pick several examples from recent political history, where one party or the other has completely rewritten history and relied on the fact that people's memories are short. Rather than come down on one side or the other of the political parties, let's choose an example from popular culture: The growing movement among some to reissue classic works of literature with offending words or passages taken out.

In our neighboring nation to the north, they recently passed a law giving the government the right to open mail and remove offending publications that they don't like.

In view of this worldwide crisis David Ross and David Goodman have launched this newsletter. We have previously collaborated on an article commemorating the 50h anniversary of the publishing of Nineteen Eighty-Four. And Ross (among other futurists and science fiction novelists) was the subject of an article by Goodman that appeared in the online version of The Washington Times:

http://phuakl.tripod.com/pssm/archives1/futurists.htm

Dr. David Goodman has written extensively about "Nineteen-Eighty Four" for many years. As the title date approached, Goodman made several television appearances. He was criticized roundly and called irresponsible for writing an article in which he predicted nuclear terrorism. He was told he needed shock therapy.

Ross is a small town newspaper editor and the author of two science fiction novels, both set in a disquieting future.

We believe that an Orwellian future has never been closer and may already be here, although obviously in a less overt form than imagined by the great visionary novelist. Though 1984 failed as a warning to the West, it succeeded brilliantly as a forecast.

Fortunately, some media remain relatively free. The Internet remains the most free, although it is under constant assault by lawmakers and law enforcers, cheered on by most of the public, and, in the final analysis, in cyberspace no one can hear you scream as they drag you off.

We may yet see a day when people are arrested for what they contemplate, rather than what they do. All you have to do is turn on the television.

You may disagree.

That's the purpose of this newsletter. To foment a debate. To incite to riot intellectually. To provoke discussion. To piss you off, and hopefully to make you think. To take notions that may have seemed ridiculous 20 years ago, and turn them over in our hands, and see if maybe they aren't so ridiculous after all. Who would have thought a year ago that the Twin Towers of New York City would have vanished, a holocaust witnessed by billions?

Whether you disagree with us or not we offer you an informal little survey to take.

1) Do you feel freer now than you did ten years ago?
2) Do you feel comfortable uttering an unpopular thought?
3) Are YOU a thought criminal?

If so, then read this newsletter!
And, by all means, submit items (including letters) for discussion and for possible publication.

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2) TEN MYTHS ABOUT NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR
By DR. DAVID GOODMAN

Welcome to the arcane world of Orwellian depth analysis. We are
intellectuals and journalists who have endeavored to penetrate to the
heart of darkness known as "Nineteen Eighty-Four." In our
crystalline pure hearts we believe that buried in George Orwell's
memory when he wrote his most famous novel was a remarkably clear
picture of the world as it could be at the end of the century.

Hundreds of experts certified by the university establishment
have reassured you about Orwell and his motivations. They persuade you that
the book contains few predictions, and that where satire appears it is
superficial and of little consequence Should you believe these
intellectuals we have a bridge in Brooklyn and cancer, AIDS and drug
addiction cures to sell you.

Indeed, this newsletter (and its website) will dwell on clearing
up the prevalent mythology even fifty years after publication of the
book. It will disabuse you of mistaken beliefs, among them:
1. Orwell meant the calendar year 1984 when he titled the book
"Nineteen Eighty-Four."
2. The book is science fiction comparable to writings of H.G.
Wells and Jules Verne.
3. There are few if any predictions in Orwell's "Nineteen Eighty-
Four."
4. Orwell was merely a talk show host and journalist during World
War II.
5. He was a Socialist who worked with Sidney and Beatrice Webb
and H.G. Wells.
6. With them he conspired to establish a world socialist state.
7. "Nineteen Eighty-Four" satirizes Stalin's Communism and
Hitler's Nazism.
8. Orwell's first wife Eileen was a employed during the war in
low-level
government work.
9. "Nineteen Eighty-Four" is a replica of life in Stalin's USSR.
10. The book is eighteen years out of date and of little interest to us
now.

Should you believe any or all of these myths, then prepare to
open you minds to the truth. The truths about Orwell's "Nineteen Eighty-Four"
may shock you, bother you, make you wonder why the experts that write
biographies of Orwell and analyses of "Nineteen Eighty-Four" can be so
mistaken. Or they suppress information and tell lies.
In any case, fellow inmates of asylum Earth read on and be
prepared to be shocked, bothered and in awe of the whole truth.

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ORWELL PREDICTED:

In the 1970's Dr. David Goodman, a neuroscientist, and two of his colleagues counted the predictions that Orwell made in 1984. They identified 137 specific predictions, which they divided into two categories: 1) scientific and technological predictions and 2) social and political predictions. They found that about 80 of Orwell's predictions had already been realized by 1972.

More than 20 predictions related directly to psychobiology, which was Goodman's own field. As Goodman wrote: "I felt reluctant at first to discuss the psychobioligical aspects of 1984 with others in my profession: after all, it is not pleasant to think that we have been preparing a 1984 world. But because of several starting revelations, my reluctance dissolved."

First of all, it became known in 1975 that a group of brain researchers, funded by military intelligence, had been working covertly on methods of hypnotic interrogation and behavior control through ultrasonics and electromagnetic radiation. Then in July 1977, during congressional hearings on the Central Intelligence Agency it was revealed that the CIA had spent nearly $25 million studying behavior-altering drugs like LSD and pentothal.

In 1978 Goodman returned to the list of 137 Orwellians predictions from six years earlier. "This time I found that over 100 of the predictions had come true," he wrote. "There is no doubt in my mind that "1984" describes a future that is clearly possible."

*****************************************************************************

WHO WAS GEORGE ORWELL?

Eric Blair, known to the world by the pseudonym George Orwell, was born in British-occupied Indian in 1903. His family returned to England when he was four.

In his youth, Blair was fascinated by ghost stories and what he would later call "Utopia books." His favorite write was H.G. Wells and the utopias Wells envisioned would play a large part in shaping the works of George Orwell. From an early age he knew he wanted to be a writer.

He returned to India in 1922 and joined the Indian Imperial Police. He soon came to detest the imperialism of Great Britain, although he didn't leave the service until 1927.

He moved back to Britain with the iron resolve to establish himself as a writer. For the next few years he lived among the lower classes in England and France and, in 1933 published his first book, "Down and Out in Paris and London." Blair decided to make a clear break with the past by adopting a pen name, George Orwell. By the time he married Eileen O'Shaughnessy in 1936 three of his novels had been published. That year he wrote his first major work on politics, "The Road to Wigan Pier," which deals with issues of class and socialism in England.

That same year the Spanish Civil War broke out and by the end of the year Orwell was preparing to go fight with the Loyalists (Socialists) and gather material for a new book.

His experiences with the quarreling of the orthodox Left in Spain made him bitterly disillusioned with communism, although he continued to call himself a revolutionary socialist.

Wounded in the fighting, he returned to England, where he also suffered from tuberculosis. He began writing fulltime, a variety of works from novels to essays to reviews.

Rejected for health reasons from military service in WWII, he worked first for the BBC and later as a literary editor of The Tribune. London's wartime sufferings helped form the backdrop of much of 1984.

During the last two years of the 1939-45 war Orwell wrote Animal Farm, an allegorical satire of the corruption of communism in Russia. The novel's success elminated Orwell's financial problems. Soon he moved to the island of Jura, off the Scottish coast, where he began his last novel: "Nineteen Eighty-Four."

He fashioned a vision of the future that has haunted the West ever since. He finished the first draft of 1984 by 1947 and a second draft in 1948, by which time tuberculosis was seriously affecting his health.

The book was published in 1949 and in January of 1950 he died.

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VICTORY GIN, the latest outrages at home:

The FBI is now visiting libraries all over the country and trying to check on the reading records of people that it suspects are terrorist or have links to same.

So far, most librarians, who are among the most dedicated of civil libertarians when it comes to privacy, have held the line against this kind of intrusion, but how long can that last?

The Justice Department is declining to comment, except to point out that under the Patriot Act that Fatherland Security is authorized to conduct such searches and under the same law librarians can get in a lot of trouble if they comment on the scope or subject of the searches.

*****************************************************************************

First casinos, and then Big Brother? A company called Viiage Technology Inc. recently acquired Biometrica Systems, which owns the right to face recognition technology that is used in gambling casinos to recognize known cheats. This technology was originally developed at MIT and uses something called "eigenfaces" which can map particular characteristics of person's face and check them against a database. But such technology has the capability of being used over the Internet to identify web surfers and make sure that they are who they say they are. Who else might be interested? John Ashcroft?

*****************************************************************************

Virginia Beach, Virginia has become the second city in the nation (the first was Tampa) to introduce face recognition software on surveillance cameras, according to a report July 5 by the Associated Press.

The system is being tested along the city's oceanfront resort strip and police planned to have it fully operational by the end of July.

"This is a Big Brother contraption" Kent Willis, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Virginia was quoted by the AP. "It is a device that allows the police to take pictures of citizens who are doing nothing wrong while they're in a public place."

The city already has ten closed circuit TV cams watching the oceanfront. But now they have added the same face recognition software mentioned in the story just above this one..

"If you go to the ocean I don't think you should have an expectation of privacy," said a city official.

******************************************************************************

ET, Phone Home: We KNOW where you are!

This month's Popular Science reports on the new E911 technology, which allows your cellphone's location to be tracked within seconds. Of course, for emergencies this is great idea, but as with all such technological advances, there's a downside.

We all will be paying for the phone company's ability to find us, with a 50 cent per customer monthly charge. While the phone can direct its owner to the nearest gas station, it can also be used for spam like advertising purposes. In the new Spielberg film "Minority Report," we see examples of this kind of ubiquitous spying for the sake of commerce.
Popular Science gives the example of a trucking company that uses a location-based service network to monitor employees, to know when and where they are taking their breaks.
Needless to say, such technology could be used by the government to track our every movement. Time may come when we'll LOOK for dead zones in our cell phone's service area.

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3) REINVENTING BIG BROTHER
By JON BROMFIELD

Winston Smith was sitting in his chair, facing the telescreen,
dutifully waiting for the four-o'clock Two Minutes Hate to begin, when
he heard a knock on his door.

His guts suddenly felt full of ice water, his heart leaped
against the confines of his ribcage as his testicles tried to crawl
into his belly, for a happy moment he both welcomed the terror and
eagerly awaited the endless black peace soon to follow.

Then he heard a second knock.

They never knock twice.

He got up, shuffled across the splintering floorboards of his
flat, and opened the door.

The girl was barely out of her teens, he guessed, attractive in a
soap-n-scrub sort of way, with grey-blue eyes, clear skin, and long
blond hair gathered behind into a pony tail that poked out of the back
of a yellow baseball-type cap. The cap matched her jumpsuit, which
was strangely clean and crisply pressed. Equally strange, the red
ribbon that would have identified her as a member of the Junior Anti-
Sex League was missing from her slender yet shapely waist. Instead, a
broad leather belt loosely hugged her hips; tools and things Winston
didn't recognized hung from it.

"Good afternoon, sir. My name's Julie, and I'm here to install
your new Oceania Protective Systems A-4000 Series SuperViewer! May I
please come in?"

Winston felt his jaw drop stupidly, shocked that a member of the
Party, even one so young (especially one so young!) would make a
request rather than a demand - and that so politely! He stood aside
without a word, and the young woman strode briskly into his shabby
room.

He followed a moment later and found her standing before his
telescreen, appraising it critically, rubbing her chin between thumb
and curled index finger.
"Wow," she said, "this is a real antique, an INGSOC Model 3, I'd
guess, maybe a 2, early government issue. It was installed when you
moved in?"

"Yes," Winston replied. "Over twenty years now."

"Twenty-one years, four months," the young woman said, tapping at
a small device she had quickly pulled out of a case strapped to her
belt. "You were assigned this flat November 11th, 1982 by the
Derbyshire Housing Council, you moved in November 14th, if we can
believe the old records." She made a tsk-tsk sound. "And you are
Winston Smith, Number 6079, widower, no living relatives, semi-retired
from Minitrue since 1984, partial disability."
"You know all this, from that machine?" Winston asked.
"And more," the girl replied. "Ah, I see you're a Level Sixteen
priority - that explains why you haven't been upgraded before."

"I'm a good comrade," Winston said.

"Yes, well, if you'll excuse me. This will take approximately
fifteen minutes."

Winston was happy to excuse her, especially as it allowed him to
watch her work without the burden of maintaining his end of a
conversation. He hadn't had a woman in his flat in over ten years, and
he welcomed the faint irritation of sexual desire her womanly figure
aroused, like a querulous old friend almost forgotten.

The girl opened a thin but wide case she had carried in with her;
it looked rather like an artist's portfolio. She withdrew what
appeared to be sheet of cardboard, about a half meter wide, perfectly
square, smooth and blue-grey like her eyes, trimmed with a black
plastic band. A small knob of glass was set in the middle of the
bottom side; it glittered like a lizard's eye.
The girl held the telescreen up for inspection. Seeing Winston's
curious look, she said, "It's a beauty, isn't it? Four point one
megapixels resolution in the pickup, two point five on the liquid
crystal display, spherical four-millimeter lens to eliminate all blind
spots." Her expert gaze went to a corner of the room where a table and
chair were placed outside of the old telescreen's field of view. "The
photoreceptors are sensitive to infrared and can see you even when the
lights go out, or when you're sleeping. It will even read your body
temperature and compare it with your bio-profile in the Central
Database, for signs of fever or agitation."

"I am often sick," said Winston, "but never agitated."

The girl smiled and ignored his comment. She turned and
approached the old telescreen, the new one held before her, just as if
she were preparing to hang a painting on the wall. The new telescreen
was designed to fit over the old one and must have had some type of
magnetic clamping mechanism. Winston heard four distinct clicks as
the girl set the device. She took a step back and surveyed her work.

"That's all it takes?" asked Winston.

"Jus' about!" the girl responded. "The Series A-4000 connects to
the old wiring through electrical induction, for both power and video
feeds. Now its just a matter of synchronizing OPS's software with the
Party's old mainframes."

Winston was stunned. "What is this `OPS?'" he asked. "What
ministry is it in?"

The girl had taken another device from her belt and was pointing
it at the new telescreen. It looked like a pistol but shot only quick
pulses of light from its barrel. She paused in her work to look
quizzically at Winston.

"What ministry? None, of course. OPS is a private company."
She touched the front of her cap where, Winston now noticed, there was
silver stitching of the three letters. "We operate as an independent
contractor," she added proudly.

Winston's head was beginning to swim. "Independent?" he
stammered. "The Party allows private businesses?"

"Of course, sir. Since 1997, the year of the Great
Accommodation."

"`Great Accommodation?'" Winston repeated, the words like
unfamiliar food in his mouth.
"It started when someone at Minitrue, I think his name is
Bartlett Roget, discovered that fully half of all the telescreens in
operation at the time were non-functioning, and another fourth
seriously degraded or compromised."
"I never heard."

"Not surprising," the girl said. "Imagine if word had got out
that so many people were unmonitored. Scary to even think about!"
She shuddered and resumed shooting the new telescreen with her bullets
of light. "So comrade Roget realized that certain functions of the
government were just too crucial to be handled with such inefficiency,
things like armament production, tax collection, and, especially,
surveillance, and couldn't be entrusted to --"

Suddenly the telescreen flashed on, displaying a bright, full-
colour image of a young man wearing the same type of yellow jumpsuit
and cap as Winston's guest. He was handsome and slouched against a
large gleaming console studded with countless toggles and buttons.

"Hi, Freddy!" I'm at Unit 4B, Victory Mansions, Derbyshire,
London. How are you receiving?"

"Hi yourself!" the young man responded. "You're looking good,
babe, like I could lick you right through the plexiglas!"

Julie giggled and winked at the telescreen.
Winston had to sit down. This display of youthful lust was more
unsettling than the news about private companies.

"Ready to synch with Minitrue?" Julie asked.

"Ready. Okay, now keep it clean, `Big Brother is Watching You!'"
Freddy intoned the last five words in an deep, ominous voice, then
laughed and said, "Data streaming set, synchronizing - now!"

The telescreen went blank for a few seconds, then it came back
on, only now the screen area was divided in half. On one side the
young man could be seen, still at his console, but his manner now
stiffly professional. The other side showed a non-descript middle-
aged woman wearing a blue Party jumpsuit as wrinkled as her make-up
deprived face.

"OPS, Higgins 4507 here," the young man announced crisply. "We
have completed replacement of superannuated telescreen, residence of
Smith, W, Number 6079, Victory Mansions. Are you optimized?"
The middle-aged woman looked into the camera watching her and
replied in a bored voice, "Optimized, Higgins 4507. Main computers
confirm installation. Minitrue credits forty-five hundred dollars to
OPS's account."

The young man politely said thank you, but the woman merely
reached out and flipped a switch, turning off her camera. The image
of the young man expanded into the empty space and once more took up
the entire screen.

"You goin' to Brighton for the weekend?" the young man asked
Julie, on his lips a wolfish grin, his loose and casually carnal air
reappearing.

"Maybe. This one makes my quota. Gonna be warm, you think?"
"Eighty degrees and clear, according to the weather satellite."

"I'm there!"

"Seeya!"

The young man disappeared; his image replaced by a far less
handsome, not-so-young man repeating, in a voice straining to sound
excited, the glorious achievements of the fifteenth Three-Year Plan.
"Well, that takes care of everything. Thank you for your
cooperation, Mr. Smith. OPS hopes you enjoy your new Series A-4000
SuperViewer!"

"Weather satellites." murmured Winston.

The girl gathered her things. Winston got up and walked over to
the new telescreen. The glass eye swiveled in its socket to follow
him. The movement startled him, and he jumped back.
The girl gave him a reassuring chuckle. "Amazing, isn't it? The
Series A-4000 has an Artificial Intelligence chip built in. It will
follow your every move, learn your daily routines. Gross deviations
from norms are downloaded to Central for logging into your file, until
such time as they can be evaluated."

"Evaluated? By who?"

The girl's eyes narrowed in thought. "I'm not quite sure.

There's to be another wave of privatizations soon, of the most
inefficient bureaus. Until then, the data will just accumulate, I
guess. But don't you worry; we have multiple backup systems, so the
information is perfectly safe. Comforting to know, don't you think?"

"Yes, very," said Winston.

He followed her to the door. She shook his hand and strode off
to the stairs, ignoring the elevator.

"Excuse me, miss!" Winston called out.

The girl stopped and looked back. "Yes, Mr. Smith?"

"Can you tell me, if you know.what is the most inefficient bureau
in the Party?"

"Oh sure! Everybody knows that! The Ministry of Love is really
bad, especially the Bureau of Executions. Why, their caseload's
backlogged for years!" She crinkled her cute little nose in disgust at
the thought of such professional incompetence. "Rumor has it they
will be outsourcing soon."

"I'm sorry," Winston said. "'Outsourcing?'"

"Subcontracting the work. Yeah, now that you mention it, I
remember: SOMA Corporation is bidding on that one. Boy, they're
really good! They'll be up to speed in no time!"

"That is comforting to know," said Winston and waved good-bye.

His eyes followed her as she descended the stairs, her large but
firm breasts bobbing charmingly; he then returned to his room. He
poured himself a tall glass of Victory Gin and settled into his chair
to watch the new telescreen. A news bulletin was reporting Oceania's
latest great triumph over the brutal forces of Eurasia - or was it
Eastasia? - on the always critical Malabar front. He drank the gin,
choking only a little, and waited for the delicious warmth to spread
from his stomach. He paused before taking a second sip and gave a
grateful, silent toast to free enterprise.

It wouldn't be long now.

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4) WHY DID BIG BROTHER DESTROY WINSTON SMITH?
By Jefferson P. Swycaffer

"It is insoluble, by man or machine." Patrick McGoohan, "The
Prisoner."

George Orwell's cautionary novel is very British. It is
sometimes difficult for pragmatic Americans to understand why.
Nations have a consciousness, and in that group mind, they have
group nightmares. The American nightmare is, and has been for a very
long time, the "sneak attack." We react very strongly to events such
as Pearl Harbor or the World Trade Center attack. Our consciousness
was forged by cowboy movies and linear wars, where one meets the enemy
face-to-face and triumphs. Japan's national nightmare is the fear of
nature going on a rampage. Since Japan is a land of earthquakes,
volcanoes, typhoons, tsunami, and periodic severe drought, this is not
unreasonable. This comes out in their popular culture -- monster
movies -- and their public policy -- they are more keenly aware of
Global Warming than anyone outside the Maldive Islands.

The British national nightmare is creeping bureaucracy evolving
into a faceless and grey totalitarianism. This is what the rejection
of Thatcher's Poll Tax was about; this was the basis for the
(unwinnable?) computer game "Bureaucracy," by Douglas Adams. And this
is what Orwell's book was about.

In the book, there is no "why." They destroy Winston Smith
because they can. They do it with no more reason or cause than a boy
has when he burns insects with a lens. It is an allegorical extension
of Naziism and Stalinism. It is a nightmare.

The world has changed since 1948. The Nazis are but a memory;
the Cold War is over. Human understanding of the world has increased
manifold. We've been to the Moon; we comprehend Plate Tectonics;
we've broken the codes of DNA. More than ever before in human
history, we know why things happen.

This is why, in my opinion, the movie, 1984, starring Richard
Burton and John Hurt, is better than Orwell's book. The movie takes
the same story, but adds one vital element.
Orwell hadn't heard of Game Theory. He couldn't have. He didn't
know about self-replicating molecules. He didn't live to see the
breakup of the Soviet Union.

He didn't know -- or at least didn't tell us -- why Winston Smith
was destroyed. That was what was added to the tale by the movie.
Winston Smith was destroyed, because that is the way that the
system reproduces itself. Winston Smith was singled out as a capable,
competent, intelligent person. He was a candidate for leadership. He
had only one flaw: he was still human.

The entire ordeal was there for the purpose of making him over,
of recasting him into the form of a leader. He had to be made into a
man who could -- and who certainly would -- do to others exactly what
had been done to him.

Richard Burton's character -- cold and chill and yet patient --
was simply a man who, in his own turn, previously, had been taken to
Room 101 and relieved of his humanity.

It was not an act of caprice, as it was in the book. In the
movie, it was the most perfectly rational act possible. It was Big
Brother...spawning.
#
Footnote: do you imagine it to be fiction?

In parts of the world, female genital mutilation is practiced.
At a certain age, a girl is held down by her female family, and a
razor blade or shard of glass is used to slice away portions of her
vulva. There is no anaesthetic. The child screams in pain, and there
is a fountaining of blood. The injuries take months to heal.

Who is it, you might wonder, who would do such a thing? It is
done, in nearly every case, by a woman who once had suffered exactly
the same ordeal.

Medical school interns work insane hours. They are expected to
perform 16 hour shifts in hospital, and often work well beyond that.
The months of their internship is a hellish ordeal. Every student who
has ever been through it vows, when he becomes a doctor, that he will
put an end to this brutal and sadistic practice. But when it is over,
and when he has a measure of freedom, he rarely follows through.

The old doctors who enforce the ordeal are the ones who hated it
bitterly when it was done to them.

5) MINORITY REPORT IS LATEST OF HOLLYWOOD'S 'ORWELLIAN' FLICKS
By DAVID ROSS

The most chilling thing about Steven Speilberg's brilliant "Minority Report" is not that the "Dept. of Precrime" can predict that a murderer will strike before the murderer himself is aware of his homicidal urge, it's that as the citizen of the future walks through the mall, or enters a building, his retinas are scanned and 3D images greet him like old friends.

Sort of like Amazon.com's customer recognition, wherein they recommend books based on your previous purchases taken to its ultimate, distasteful conclusion. You're forced to the conclusion that if The Gap and Pepsi all know you on a first name basis, imagine how much the government knows about you! It's also, coincidentally, product placement taken to new heights in film. I wasn't looking all that hard, but I spotted about 20 placements during the space of about fifteen minutes.

"Minority Report" is an honorable entry in a short list of films that have, if not inspired directly by Orwell's Nineteen-Eighty-Four, been its intellectual cousins or bastard children. This future is Big Brother with a human face, which is probably how it will probably be achieved. Instead of Orwell's boot forever smashing a human face (which we have tried to capture with our logo for ThoughtCrime) we have a government pillow forever smothering us with kindness and concern. The Dept. of Precrime is so benign in its purpose, catching the criminal before he does the crime, how could anyone but a lunatic civil libertarian or terminal paranoiac oppose it? And, in one of the opening scenes we see supercop Tom Cruise burst into a Georgetown home just in time to prevent a man from killing his wife after he discovers her in bed with another man.

But it turns out that Precrime is built on a sandy foundation. First of all, all of the murders are predicted by a threesome of gifted "Precogs" who hang suspended in their own kind of hell. They have visions about future murders and it is up to Cruise's team to take the visual clues that the Precogs broadcast and find the murderer before he does the crime.
There have been two film versions of Orwell's novel.

The 1956 Columnbia Studios version, starring Edmund O'Brien as Winston Smith, Jan Sterling as Julia and Michael Redgrave as O'Brien, was not anywhere as good as the novel, or the 1980s version, but it certainly chilled me to the bone when I was a child watching it on the black and white "telescreen." Malcolm Arnold's brutal, hard-driving score haunts me still.

The later version, released in 1984, with John Hurt and the final screen appearance of Richard Burton, captured the squalor or grey despair that so permeates the brilliant novel. Hurt, who always looks as though he is in pain, was the perfect actor to play Winston Smith, the non-hero, plagued with infected ulcers on his legs, thin, sickly. Not the sort of man you'd expect to have a beautiful rebel, played by Annie Lennox, to fall in love with.

"Brazil", Monty Python alumnus Terry Gilliam's brilliant look at an Orwellian future (or is it the past) set "sometime in the 20th Century" combines black humor with a bleak look at an industrialized society whose only natural vistas appear to be on its billboards. Gilliam virtual invents a sub-genre of movie humor: duct humor (also called "junk deco"). His hero, played by Jonathan Pryce in the role of his career, is a career bureaucrat in a nameless, faceless department very similar to the department occupied by Winston Smith.

"Brazil," (1985) with its bizarre camera angles, homages to classics like "Citizen Kane," haunting variations on the popular song of the 1940s, has a number of memorable walk-ons by stars (such as Robert DeNiro, Eric Idle) and future stars, such as Bob Hoskins, is not just a treatment of a totalitarian state, it is a send-up of the modern technological society, with all sorts of "futuristic" (for the 1940s, anyway) gadgets that mainly don't work. Instead of Big Brother, the people of Gilliam's fantasy are oppressed by Big Bureaucrat, who demands that everything be filled out in quadruplicate, even demanding a receipt from the widow of a man that the state has just snatched from his home. Just as horrifying is the twisted, and, it seems, thoroughly unsuccessful plastic surgery industry, which turns society matrons into hideous charactures of vanity with melting faces. And, for those who have never seen it, it has nothing whatsoever to do with Brazil the country.

In "Fahrenheit 451" when Cyril Cussack's fire captain asks his protégé, Montag, played by Oskar Werner, what he does on his days off, Montag answers, "Not very much, sir. Mow the lawn." To which the captain asks, "And what if the law forbids that?" "Just watch it grow," says the seemingly compliant Montag.

But he won't be quite so malleable for long, and soon Montag begins to wonder why the state insists on burning all of those books and sending goon squads through the streets shaving the heads of non-comformist long-hairs. Francois Truffault's adaptation of Ray Bradbury's novel about non-comformity is different from the novel, yet it's sweetly reassuring ending, with all of the outcast "book people" memorizing classics of literature in order to preserve them, is a powerful cinematic image. And, given the reality of a totalitarian state, probably not as likely as the ending in 1984, if more palatable.

Montag's wife and love interest (two different people) are played by one actress, Julie Christie, who seemed to be in all of the interesting movies of the 1960s. His wife, Linda is a drug-happy, mindless fool who can't understand why her husband suddenly starts hiding books in the toaster and under the seat cushions.

Clarisse, one of the book people, causes Montag to start to
question his job and the society he lives in.

It's comforting that movies like "Minority Report" continue to be made and that people continue to question the "perfect state." Unfortunately, most people, upon viewing it, will not cheer the fact the Precrime is brought down, they will cheer because they will think it's a shame that Prescrime didn't work perfectly well.

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READ A CHAPTER . . .
. . . Of David Ross's novel "Cranium," which posits a future wh