Posthuman Blues

Two Minutes Hate

"As usual, the face of Emmanuel Goldstein, the Enemy of the People, had flashed on to the screen. There were hisses here and there among the audience. The little sandy-haired woman gave a squeak of mingled fear and disgust. Goldstein was the renegade and backslider who once, long ago (how long ago, nobody quite remembered), had been one of the leading figures of the Party, almost on a level with Big Brother himself, and then had engaged in counter-revolutionary activities, had been condemned to death, and had mysteriously escaped and disappeared. The programmes of the Two Minutes Hate varied from day to day, but there was none in which Goldstein was not the principal figure. He was the primal traitor, the earliest defiler of the Party's purity. All subsequent crimes against the Party, all treacheries, acts of sabotage, heresies, deviations, sprang directly out of his teaching. Somewhere or other he was still alive and hatching his conspiracies: perhaps somewhere beyond the sea, under the protection of his foreign paymasters, perhaps even -- so it was occasionally rumoured -- in some hiding-place in Oceania itself."

--George Orwell, "1984"

Someone at the party last night was playing Information Society on a Sony boom-box. Remember Information Society?

This evening, I caught my first take of mainstream media coverage of the Saddam thing through the plastic partition of a Kansas City Star vending stand ("Special Coverage" emblazoned in blood-red letters). I could really care less. At this late stage in the Iraq mess, capturing Saddam Hussein is so much light entertainment. The Baath regime is no more; we obliterated it as thoroughly as we obliterated Baghdad. Thrusting a grizzled, beleaguered Hussein into the limelight is creepily similar to broadcasting prerecorded footage of Emmanuel Goldstein in "1984"; we need to be reminded who to hate lest we begin evaluating this whole massively absurd situation for ourselves.

Hussein certainly deserves to stand trial, but I'm not interested in BushCo's inevitable theatrics. USA Today loudly reports that Bush wants a public trial. Of course he does. I imagine he'd also endorse a public stoning.