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Welcome to 1984 (Chris Hedges and George Carlin)

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Mic True Son:
Is it "Welcome to the Prison" or "Welcome to the Nightmare" ?

"The American Dream ... you have to be asleep to believe it."  ~ George Carlin

"You know what they want?  Obedient workers."  ~ GC


--- Quote from: Chris Hedges ---The artifice of corporate totalitarianism has been exposed. The citizens, disgusted by the lies and manipulation, have turned on the political establishment. But the game is not over. Corporate power has within its arsenal potent forms of control. It will use them. As the pretense of democracy is unmasked, the naked fist of state repression takes its place. America is about—unless we act quickly—to get ugly.

“Our political system is decaying,” said Ralph Nader when I reached him by phone in Washington, D.C. “It’s on the way to gangrene. It’s reaching a critical mass of citizen revolt.”
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Also, see truthdig (A Brave New Dystopia[/url]

george

religion is bullShit

"The longer you live, the more you look around, the more you realize, something is fuucked up.  Something is wrong here ..."  ~ GC


--- Quote from: Fernando Vallejo ---El hombre es una máquina biológica programada para eyacular y todo lo demás es hipocresía, palabrería, cuentos.
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Man is a biological machine programmed to eyaculate and all the rest is hypocrisy, talk, stories,etc ~ (Thanks for the translation Raul of Paraguay)

Mic True Son:
I think that, because George Carlin had been so vocal about his own mother's powerful influence on the development of his sensibilities, I will place this nod to Sandra Newman here.

Mutilated wrecks, with teeth and nails removed in the Ministry of Love, creep around London on all fours.

Nineteen Eighty-Four… as told by Julia

from The Spectator


--- Quote from: Camilia Cassidy ---If Orwell’s novel is a fable of ideology gone wrong, Sandra Newman’s book is the story of a young woman who believes in nothing.

Sandra Newman’s Julia has a connoisseur’s nose for body odor. When she gets close to another person or animal, she almost always notices their smell — manly, dusty, dungy, a hint of talcum powder. When she suppresses emotion, she sweats. She sprains her wrist and tears rise “of themselves like sweat.” In a pivotal scene, she unblocks a gruesomely overflowing toilet. This abundance of bodily functions feels like a reminder of George Orwell’s original Julia in Nineteen Eighty-Four, whose physical abandon makes her an object of desire and symbol of rebellion.

This fantasy is punctured in Julia. Bodies are sensuous but they are also skin-crawlingly horrible. Mutilated wrecks, with teeth and nails removed in the Ministry of Love, creep around London on all fours. Suffering and sensuality become two sides of the same problem when Julia is confronted with flesh-eating rats: “They wanted a meal. But that was all they wanted.” Not malevolence, just bodies being bodies: “These were animals,” she says, and might be talking about the humans too.

Unexpectedly for a novel riffing on Orwell’s political dystopia, it seems like it wants to be the opposite of political. The way bodies are handled — their need for comfort, their impulse for survival — doesn’t leave room for much else. Beliefs and relationships dissolve into delusion or “sham.” If Orwell’s novel is a fable of ideology gone wrong, Julia is the story of a young woman who believes in nothing. The book dispels many of Nineteen Eighty-Four’s ambiguities (the curtain draws back and reveals Big Brother, a senile old man who has soiled himself) and lacks its conviction. Sometimes this allows for subtler shading but often it just feels apathetic and directionless.

After her time in the Ministry of Love, Julia begins reading novels produced by machines, with titles such as War Nurse. Her life quickly takes on the flavor of these books. She bounces along in a jeep with soldiers who quote Wordsworth and remind her of the airmen she idolized as a child. It feels like the false ending of Terry Gilliam’s Brazil but without the punchline revealing it as escapist fantasy. Of her own complicity in murder, Julia reflects: “One had no choice. One tried to be kind whenever one could. One survived and then one was sorry.” By the end, Julia only longs to put roses in her hair and take a bubble bath in a golden tub.

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