Thursday, April 27, 2006

In USA, television watches YOU

Crazy ForeignersThe Miracle of Science

Oceania has always been at war with… ahh shit. Who’m I kidding? Here I am with a story about a new video display in development by Apple that contains image-collecting cells interlaced with the image-emitting ones, thereby permitting a fully functional two-way video screen, and all I can come up with are Yakov Smirnoff and George fricking Orwell.

Is there an office I need to report to, to have my pundit-pass torn up? Or at the very least stamped “HACK” in giant red block capitals?

[Wik] Speaking of George Orwell, I just read a fascinating brace of books. First was Orwell’s debut novel, Burmese Days, drawn from his experience in His Majesty’s colonial service, and about the deranging effects that colonialism has on colonizer and colonized alike. Apparently Orwell had some problems with the system.

Shortly after reading that, my loving wife the librarian handed me Finding George Orwell in Burma, by Emma Larkin, an American author raised in Southeast Asia. A few years ago, Larkin returned to Myanmar in order to visit all the places that George Orwell either wrote about or himself visited while in the Service, with the notion of making a book out of the trip. Along the way she uncovered the terrible and disheartening fact that Orwell is viewed by those few intellectuals who manage to endure under Myanmar’s insane regime as a veritable prophet of their misery. In the back rooms of shops, in apartments with the shutters closed, in groups of two and three so as to not require an official “gathering” permit, people meet to read, exchange, and discuss books, handing moldering paperbacks by Western authors from hand to hand, racing against time and mildew to absorb the text before the books fall to pieces or they are discovered, detained, and disappeared by the government’s vast network of informants. In this sub-sub-sub culture, this demimonde of intellectual resistance, they treat 1984 as though it were the roadmap to the system that rules their world.

Being that Myanmar’s military rulers do in fact intrude in thousands of ways into every moment of every person’s life, spoon feed the populace “news” that advances their purposes, mandates constant public displays of love for the rulers and hatred of the enemy (both internal enemies of the state and the puppeteers that ostensibly move them from abroad) and acts vigorously and without scruple to crush out every spark of independent thought, it turns out that in Myanmar, 1984 isn’t merely a chilling if slightly hokey novel for seventh-graders. It’s goddamn holy truth.


Posted by Johno on 04/27/06 at 10:15 AM
Crazy Foreigners • The Miracle of Science • Permalink