In his commencement address to the class of 1984 at Texas A&M University, Vice President George Bush, making a familiar point, invoked George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty Four. Mr. Bush spoke of the novel as a prophecy that will not come true as long as America and her allies “stand together, firm and strong, in defense of freedom.” … This bellicose interpretation of Nineteen Eighty Four is nearly as old as the novel itself. When it first appeared, some American rightists hailed Nineteen Eighty Four as a vivid anticommunist manifesto – a misreading that Orwell himself publicly repudiated. … Vowing to oppose “Big Brother” by keeping the U.S. permanently mobilized, Vice President Bush spoke exactly like the fictitious managers of Big Brother’s own regime, who also strive to keep their system “firm and strong” against the enemy. … His proclamation that the governments of, say, El Salvador, Chile, Honduras, and Guatemala are “freedom-loving” recalls the perverse official language of Oceania, where the “Ministry of Peace” promotes war, and the “Ministry of Love” promotes torture, and so on. Miller, Boxed In (309)
Aside from proving that history is doomed to repeat itself, there is an interesting intersection of criticism and ideology in here. Bush sees in Orwell’s novel a vision of an enemy, and onto that vision he graphs the vast, communist empire – not because the text suggests it, but because he is incapable of thinking critically about his own position. Rather than investigate the text, he holds it up as a mirror and finds (erroneously) confirmation of his own simple philosophy. Mark Crispin Miller – who, as is evident from even this short passage, is not a Republican – effectively interrogates Bush’s misreading and points out that Bush has in fact assumed the very position he claims to be against.
It is, in fact, a skill of anti-theory (or, as has been stated before, anti-thinking) – to suggest you hold the opposite position that you do, by means of a distortion of words and their meanings. If the “Clean Air Act” and “No Child Left Behind” aren’t Orwellian descendants of the “Ministry of Love,” I don’t know what is.
Boxed In is a work of critical analysis that takes the tools of literary criticism and applies them elsewhere, most notably to television. Mark Crispin Miller was a student and professor of Renaissance poetry by day, and an author of pop-culture essays on film, TV, and music by night; eventually, the walls between those two efforts came down. I’ll be spending some time with it in the next few days as I venture further into these (as yet embryonic) ideas about criticism.
