I haven’t cataloged all the waypoints on this journey, but I can remember some – those especially meaningful to me. Like Orwell’s character, Winston Smith, I am an observer of such things – New Speak, for one.
At some point, zealots co-opted reproduction as a tool to impose their will upon the rest of us. Perhaps they succeeded by being able to use religion to persuade others of their moral superiority. I think the Catholic church of the Middle Ages accomplished much the same – it didn’t play out so well for non-Catholics, science, and human progress. More recently, freedoms have become inverted step by step.
Freedom of Religion once meant the ability to practice whatever faith one wished. Now it means having the ability to impose majority religious beliefs on others and using those beliefs to discriminate against others – effectively inverting the original meaning of freedom of religion. I think that I hear echoes of the Middle Ages.
Freedom of the Press once meant having the freedom to speak and publish your ideas without having them censored by the government. That freedom too has been eroded and ultimately inverted. It now means having the freedom to weaponize media as a propagandist’s tool. The German governing party did that in the 30’s – it didn’t end well for Jews and later for them as well. The free mainstream media, the Fourth Estate, has now been rebranded The Enemy of the People that reports fake news whilst the propaganda outlets, their authors and talking heads, are lionized as they forsake civil discourse for lies and incitement – another American inversion.
With the help of the Russian disinformation machine, Americans put a rapist, conman, tax cheat, ignorant, politically inexperienced, charlatan now indicted felon, in our White House rather than a woman who was a former Secretary of State. His Ignorance was Superior to her Experience – another inversion. I don’t think that having a boisterous braggart as President makes America look strong or Americans particularly discerning voters.
With the help of Moscow Mitch McConnel, Trump managed to invert the Supreme Court from one with a Liberal-Moderate majority seeking to ensure equality and social justice (racial, ethnic, voting rights, sexual) for all to a Radical Conservative supermajority of textualist flimflam artists hellbent on rolling back all that liberal equality and social justice nonsense. The court’s most recent decision to turn a blind eye to South Carolina’s patently racial gerrymander effectively inverts the meaning of the Constitution – Justice Sotomayor laments. It definitely flies in the face of the Declaration of Independence’s claim that all men are created equal and that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights. This court believes that state governments endow men with their rights, and that some may be endowed with more rights than others.
Trump forcefully cleared Lafayette Park of peaceful protestors so that he could have a photo-op in front of St. John’s Church while holding the Bible upside-down – a case of Biblical Inversion, I think. His mob of January 6th insurrectionists carried upside-down American flags as they attacked Capitol police – and through their actions effectively inverting the meaning of the American flag, a symbol of American unity, to one of division and rebellion.
There are other signs of the American Inversion, and I think that it all means that George Orwell was right about almost everything. The only thing he didn’t anticipate was that democracy would cling tenaciously to the human heart for another 40 years after 1984.
And me? I know what waits for us in Room 101 – a second Trump term.