Hello, Big Brother

By Ian Williams, AlterNet. Posted August 2, 2004.

The one unmitigated triumph of the Bush reign has been a liberal artistic efflorescence. Not only has publishing been rescued from the quasi-literate stranglehold of the Rush Limbaughs and Ann Coulters, with every Bush-bashing book flying off the shelves, but the documentary film as a genre has taken the leap from the higher numbered channels on the cable box to the actual theatre.

Fahrenheit 9-11, Outfoxed, Bush's Brain, Control Room and Danny Schechter's WMD (Weapons of Mass Deception) all deal with different facets of our increasingly Orwellian world, and it is no surprise that so many of them draw on the vocabulary of George Orwell's 1984 to describe what is happening.

In Orwell's seminal novel, Big Brother and the party control the past, because by doing so, they control the present and future. Enemies become allies overnight, and all evidence to the contrary is put down the memory holes in the Ministry of Truth, and new archives written to back up the current version.

Robert Kane Pappas's documentary, Orwell Rolls in his Grave, offers an overview about the reason for the resurgence in reliance on Orwell: that Bush and his supporters would spin all the way to graves, twirling on everyone else's on the way.

Pappas tries, with some degree of success, to show the skull beneath the skin of the modern media world. It is not just that Bush has excited such opposition from so many people, but that never before has that opposition been so muted in the media.

In effect all those angry people are buying in books, seeing in the cinemas, and buying as DVDs what it is increasingly difficult to read in newspapers or on the cable and broadcast channels: critical coverage of what is easily the most partisan and doctrinaire administration of our generation.

The first theatre screening for Orwell Rolls in His Grave was at the Angelika in Greenwich Village in July 23. There were no red carpets, no velvet ropes or cloud-illuminating floodlights, and the director, Robert Pappas, only turned up towards the end – in obligatory baseball cap rather than black tie. Which is just as well really, since just a few minutes of exposure to the performance, with pixilation and bad synching, had him as indignant as a thought policeman whose telescreens are on the blink. It was the equipment, they decided after subsequent tests. He pledges clean copies for future viewings, of which there should be many.

The film's thesis, laid out carefully and dispassionately, connects the 1980 election's October Surprise and its effective burial by a deferential media by easy stages – via the stealing of the Florida electoral college results – to the performance of the Federal Communications Commission under Michael Powell, who has tried to take the monopolization of American media even further than it has already achieved. The implication is that the media are returning the favor.

Orwell shows how words become their opposite in the hands of the perpetually braying party line. It was indeed a chilling foretaste of Fox- and MSNBC-style news. On the Scarborough Country show, Scarborough recently denied point blank that the US had ever supported or condoned Saddam Hussein's barbarities during the Iran-Iraq war – condemning the mere suggestion as unpatriotic.

Of course, a quick look at the archives will give lie to his assertions. But a lot more people look at his type of show than go moseying around in archives, whether paper or electronic. In fact, Big Brother was intellectually superior to George W. Bush. He worried about history and reshaping the past while W. neither knows nor cares about it, confident that the constant torrent of skewed media coverage will enhance the contagious amnesia that already affects so many American viewers and voters.

Pappas' film connects the way in which events disappear from public view with the corporate control of the media and its values. In effect, as deregulation has concentrated media ownership, its power has grown unchecked. It will not, of course, report on itself with any objectivity, and not only has deregulation weakened any government controls over it, the power of the media over political careers has led to a disastrously unhealthy and incestuous combination between them.

Ian Williams' work has appeared in Foreign Policy in Focus, the Nation, and Salon.

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