By Carol Lucas
Where were you in 1984? As I tried to answer my own question, I realized that for me it was pretty easy. I was teaching English in the same classroom I had occupied for the previous 11 years.
My older daughter was two years from high school graduation, and we were starting to look at colleges. Pretty much a mundane lifestyle lived by many at that time.
So then I decided to research that year to determine what I may have missed, what was exciting … or not. One article declared it was a banner year, from Ronald Reagan’s re-election to Bruce Springsteen’s epic Born in the USA.
Other memorable happenings included the Apple release of the first Mac. In 1984, no one called the computer a Mac; they called it a Macintosh (after the kind of apple).
The longest baseball game was played, lasting 8 hours and 6 minutes, 25 innings.
By the way the Chicago White Sox won it, 7-6.
Some other interesting facts were of a financial nature. You could see a movie for $2.50. The average household income was $21,000, and the typical home cost $72,000. Furthermore, you could fill your gas tank for $1.10 per gallon.
On the musical side, Prince’s When Doves Cry topped the charts. Other hit singles included What’s Love Got to Do with It by Tina Turner, Footloose by Kenny Loggins, and Jump by Van Halen.
You may be thinking, “This is a small, fanciful trip down memory lane, but what’s the point?”
I would have to agree except to say that my initial research was to find information about the George Orwell book 1984, and that took me to the above information. A side trip, so to speak.
So to my original quest: the Orwellian look into the future, published in 1949, and the foretelling of what the author believed our world would look like just 35 years later. Please keep those figures in mind as you continue to read.
The opening sentence of the novel reads “It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.” Those of us who write have been told numerous times to use a ‘hook,’ a sentence that will grab the reader immediately. This one certainly fits the bill, including the bad luck associated with the number.
The dynamic entrance into the world of Oceania tells the story of Winston Smith, a citizen of a miserable society that is trying to rebel against the Party and its omnipresent symbol, Big Brother. Winston works for the Ministry of Truth, and his job is to alter the history of Oceania to fit the government’s current narrative.
The primary theme of1984 by George Orwell (a pen name for Eric Blair) is to warn readers of the dangers of totalitarianism. The central focus of the book is to convey the extreme level of control and power possible under a truly totalitarian regime. It explores how such a governmental system would impact society and the people who live in it. Anyone starting to get a sense of where I am going with this?
Interestingly enough, the classic dystopian novel was challenged in 1981 in Jackson County, Fla., because the book was declared “pro-communist and contained explicit sexual matter.” The novel offers insight to those under the leadership of oppressive regimes; this book has been banned and even burned. I might add that nothing appears to have changed in Florida in 40-plus years, but I digress.
I found one critic who stated the following: “No novel of the past century has had more influence than George Orwell’s 1984. The vocabulary of the all-powerful Party that rules the superstate Oceania with the ideology of Ingsoc (Newspeak for English Socialism) — doublethink, memory hole, unperson, thoughtcrime, Newspeak, Thought Police, Big Brother — they’ve all entered the English language as instantly recognizable signs of a nightmare future. It’s almost impossible to talk about propaganda, surveillance, authoritarian politics, or perversions of truth without dropping a reference to 1984.”
Throughout the Cold War, the novel found avid underground readers behind the Iron Curtain who wondered, “How did he know?”
The book was challenged alongside other subversive and dystopian stories such as Orwell’s Animal Farm and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, but has since become known as one of the most significant rationalizations for freedom of speech and expression.
I pulled out my old brown-page copy of 1984 and many memories popped up, as well as the realization that I now had to use cheaters to read the very small print. I taught all of the above mentioned novels in my English classes over the course of 32 years, and to my knowledge, no student was irreparably harmed. Hopefully the theme of the dangers of totalitarianism resonated sufficiently at the time. However, if we are to believe it was a banner year, as indicated at the beginning of this piece, it may well have slipped past as just another English assignment.
As I wrote this evening, a song popped into my head, unsolicited. “In the year 2525, if man is still alive, if woman can survive …” Will it take that long?
Today we are faced with an onslaught of “perversion of truth.” People are being asked to deny, negate, and erase what they have seen and heard with their own eyes and ears. Many are buying into this. We can only hope and pray that those with sound judgment and a will to speak openly, thousands of Winston Smiths if you will, choose to step forward and make their voices heard.
Carol Lucas is a retired high school teacher and a Lady’s Island resident. She is the author of the recently published “A Breath Away: One Woman’s Journey Through Widowhood.”
