More News about our retoric

I was going to write just about the newest edition of "Tom Sawyer" which had removed the "N" word from the writing. But with what has happened in Tucson I also comment on what has happend there, and the news reporting that followed.

First let me say the Saturday shooting was a terrible thing. It truly saddens me. It would be wonderful if we lived in a world where such things never happened, but we don't.

In the news since there has been a lot said about conservative comments leading up to and being responsible for this terrible event. There is no proof of that, it is just easy for the liberal press to make such accusations.

There are some things to consider here. This is not the first or only such attack, here or in other countries. Consider in my lifetime, John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Jr., Robert Kennedy, Sharon Tate, John Lennon, and attempts on Gerald Ford, and Ronald Reagan to name a few. All these and more were public figures, attacked for various reasons, but primarily because they were public figures. There attackers were primarily individuals with warped and strange ways of thinking. Dare I say, "crazy?"

Attempting to assign blame for any of these is a tall order. Primarily you can only blame the attacker.

Yet very many of the "news" programs are calling for some kind of reaction against the conservative people's right to speak.

These attacks are not new. We have endured them for a very long time. They are known as censorship. Whether it be in the form of being, "politically correct" as in the case of "Tom Sawyer," or "toning down" the political verbiage, it seems to be a popular cause.

I believe it is a dangerous path to pursue. In 1948, George Orwell wrote his classic tale, "1984." It was required reading when I was in English Lit. There is an Appendix to the book. It is titled, "The Principles of Newspeak." Orwell was very insightful, and what he wrote is close to what we now see happening. Orwell predicted that Newspeak would be the language of the land by 2050. Well, we did not see all the terrible consequences in his book by 1984, but perhaps he only had the date wrong. After all, with all the security cameras, cell phone videos, YouTube and FaceBook how far away can it be. You can read the Appendix (the whole book if you like) on line here.

A quote from the appendix will help me make my point for those who do not wish to read the whole thing.

The purpose of Newspeak was not only to provide a medium of expression for the world-view and mental habits proper to the devotees of Ingsoc, but to make all other modes of thought impossible. It was intended that when Newspeak had been adopted once and for all and Oldspeak forgotten, a heretical thought — that is, a thought diverging from the principles of Ingsoc — should be literally unthinkable, at least so far as thought is dependent on words. Its vocabulary was so constructed as to give exact and often very subtle expression to every meaning that a Party member could properly wish to express, while excluding all other meanings and also the possibility of arriving at them by indirect methods. This was done partly by the invention of new words, but chiefly by eliminating undesirable words and by stripping such words as remained of unorthodox meanings, and so far as possible of all secondary meanings whatever.