One of the better slogans I’ve seen lately is “Make Orwell Fiction Again,” a reference to the British writer best known for books like Animal Farm and 1984, and for his hatred of totalitarianism and authoritarianism.
He was particularly concerned with how words can be distorted by the powerful to justify or hide injustice.
Here are some lines from his “Politics and the English Language”:
In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible…
The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish squirting out ink. In our age there is no such thing as "keeping out of politics." All issues are political issues and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred, and schizophrenia. When the general atmosphere is bad, language must suffer...
Political language--and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists--is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.
For an example close to home, we need look no farther than House Bill 4011 and Senate Bill 498, which would basically stifle the teaching of history and of issues related to race and gender. They’ve been titled the “Anti-Stereotyping Act” and the “Anti-Racism Act,” respectively.
(I’ve often wondered lately how different things would be if some legislators were as concerned with sanitizing and monitoring the quality of our rivers, lakes, and streams as they are with the teaching of history and public education…but I digress.)
Fortunately, HB 4011 was turned into a study resolution, but SB 498 passed the Senate and was referred to House Education and Judiciary committees. It’s not clear now what kind of amendments might be tacked on.
It’s hard to know where to start with this, but here are some issues in no particular order:
*This is a solution in search of problems. These bills didn’t originate from any situation in West Virginia. Rather, they’re part of a well-orchestrated national effort to impose cookie-cutter legislation on states designed to foment bogus culture wars and thus distract people from their real agenda of pushing policies that make the very rich richer at the expense of everybody else.
This is why we can’t have nice things.
*This would have a chilling effect on public education, which is already under attack in West Virginia in so many ways. There seems to be an effort now to punish teachers and school service workers for winning during the historic 2018 work stoppage.
*Sticking with the issue of undermining public education, these attacks also seem to be consistent with other none too subtle efforts to promote the privatization of education for the sake of profit. And sticking with the theme of history, we’re moving from extracting wealth from strip mining the land to doing the same with public education funds.
(What’s next? Oh yeah, state parks, as in HB 4408.)
*It’s impossible to look at American history without considering race, starting with the impact on indigenous people during and after “the Columbian exchange”—another Orwellian whopper—to the Middle Passage of the transcontinental slave trade to the role of slavery in shaping the American economy (agriculture, manufacturing, banking, finance, insurance, transport, etc.) to the Civil War to post-war Klan terror and sharecropping to Jim Crow to the Civil Rights Movement to mass incarceration and beyond. Yes, there are some horrific things there, but there’s also a lot of heroic and inspiring acts as well. Keeping people ignorant of them isn’t doing anybody any favors.
*It’s just as impossible to appreciate West Virginia history without discussing race. There are huge events like the biracial raid on Harpers Ferry, the Civil War and the creation of the state in 1863, but we’ve also been graced by brave individuals who made history here, whether they passed through or were born here.
Those include trailblazing educators like Booker T. Washington and Carter G. Woodson; groundbreaking legislators like Elizabeth Simpson Drewry and Minnie Buckingham Harper; scholars and advocates like W.E.B. DuBois; attorneys like J.R. Clifford; math and science geniuses like Katherine Johnson; rank and file union coal mine leaders like Dan Chain aka “Few Clothes Johnson;” white labor leaders and civil rights champions like Walter Reuther, and more.
*Speaking of history and manipulating education in the interests of the powerful, generations of West Virginians already experienced a censored version in 8th grade West Virginia studies classes that left out the history of our colonial economy and multi-ethnic labor struggles, something that only changed in the 1980s with films like Matewan and books like Denise Giardina’s Storming Heaven.
*Then there’s the idea that sometimes learning can make kids uncomfortable. I get that. It happened to me lot too, usually in any math class after 7th grade--or when I was required to read Great Expectations in 9th. But real education is about challenging our minds. As an adult, I’ve come to appreciate subjects like algebra…and Pip’s journey to insight and adulthood.
*Finally, if we ever want to keep our brightest in the state or invite others to come from elsewhere, it might be good if we stop publicly embarrassing ourselves.
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