The youngest’s final book of the year in English is George Orwell’s 1984. The teacher behaved herself and drew no parallels to current events in the classroom, however, she did ask students to do so in their final paper.

It’s been many years since I read 1984 - and I read it at the same time as Animal Farm, which obviously differs as it’s about the animals. Duh! Still, the themes blur a bit.

I’m not nearly so well behaved as the teacher.

The core concept of 1984 is “doublethink”. Per Wikipedia, it’s “a form of trained, willful intellectual blindness to contradictions in a belief system.” Patriot Act anyone? Waterboarding is not torture? And Guantanamo Bay detainees are not subject to the constraints of the Geneva conventions?

The protagonist of the story, Winston Smith, works for the “Ministry of Truth”, which rewrites history to serve the contemporaneous party line. Oops, there were no weapons of mass destruction. And disbarred ex-president Clinton was the most wonderful leader since JFK.

The novel unwinds against a backdrop of a perpetual war – perhaps generated by the ruling party itself. Enough said.

I think I’ll re-read the book – it might provide more insight than newspaper reports of current events.

We just watched the movie Recount on HBO. It’s a dramatization of the events surrounding the contested Florida presidential election in 2000. It presented the point of view of both the Democratic and Republican recount committees, although it was definitely slanted in favor of the Democrats’ story.

At first, it reminded me unpleasantly of the overplayed dramatization Late Shift, but then it settled into its stride. I checked to see if the director or writer were the same from show to show – they were not.

I don’t recall the events surrounding that election all that clearly. Isn’t aging wonderful? I do remember that my reaction to the election recount frenzy was annoyed impatience. At some point, into December, I just wanted it over, I didn’t care who had won.

This movie puts a face on events for me. I don’t know how accurate and unbiased it is about the events of that year, but some of the issues outraged me. Refusing to recount, and instead insisting a recompilation of memory cards was sufficient? Hand-recounting only counties that could swing in favor of Gore? Delaying the recount by wrangling about every single ballot? Denying thousands of voters their franchise because of an overzealous flush of felons from the rolls? If I were one of the voters that had been denied the right to vote, I’d have been in front of the media and the courts on that issue!

The Florida Secretary of State was portrayed as a total ditzy, self-centered airhead. Was she really that way, and if so, how in the heck did she arrive at such a position of influence?

At then end of the day, I don’t know whether justice was served or the end result of the election was fair. I do agree that the process needed to be pushed through to completion and the election awarded, and that seemed to be a central theme of many of the judicial decisions surrounding the contest.

With apologies to Steph, who I stole this from, this is about the most hilarious equal-opportunity-bashing political humor video I’ve seen this year:

The Red State Update guys are hilarious - check out their other videos on their site.

Couple of news items that really bugged me over the last few days…

Item: Home Depot announced that it was closing down 15 locations and shelving plans for 50 more that were to be built. This, I understand, is the first time they’ve ever had to close a store and not open a new one nearby. Home Depot is having trouble due to the shaky economic conditions…folks don’t do home improvements when they practically have to take out a loan to buy gas. Now, to me, being the simplistic pragmatist that I am, this news sounds bad if I’m an investor in Home Depot. Things aren’t going good when you have to shrink your business. However, apparently, the investment community disagrees with me. Home Depot’s shares went up 5% on the announcement. Why? Well, they were going to be cutting jobs, which Wall Street loves to hear. Is it me, or is that sort of bas-ackwards? Whatever happened to new of success causing a stock to rise and news of failure causing a stock to fall? We’re banking on failure, folks…and I think that’s a shame.

Item: U. S. Senator Arlen Specter (R-Heinz Field in Pittsburgh) has decided that he’s not satisfied with the National Football League’s investigation and punishment of the New England Patriots in the “Spygate” scandal. “Spygate” involved the Patriots taping signals from coaches of opposing teams to their players on the field…a no-no by league rule as well as being, well, unsporting. The NFL whacked the Patriots for doing this. Specter, a fan of a Patriots’ rival, the Pittsburgh Steelers, thinks that fining the Patriots coach $500K, the team $250K, and taking their first pick away in the last college player draft just isn’t good enough for him, and is calling for an investigation. Look, I don’t know whether the punishment was enough or not…but hey, Arlen, how about a little investigation of how the oil companies are killing the economy with $4 a gallon gas while scoring record profits? If I hear one more story about Congress investigating a sports issue (and the other proposed investigations are into the college football bowl system and the steroids problem in Major League Baseball) I am going to write in Terry Bradshaw for every office I vote for until he wins something, which will never happen, since Terry is smarter than most politicians anyway. It makes me cringe to think that we’re guaranteed that a sitting Senator will be our next President. :::sigh:::

Is censorship ever justifiable?

I suppose the answer to that question depends on your perspective, whether you’re the censorer or the censoree.

My son is writing a paper on censorship - Merriam Webster defines it: to examine in order to suppress or delete anything considered objectionable ; also : to suppress or delete as objectionable . We also talked about what it is not – media bias, religious freedom, children’s rights, copyright or criminal law issues. Janiece had a good post on the subject today, too.

Tonight, at the dinner table we talked about some fairly major examples of controversial, often-criticized censorship.

• The banning of books from our curriculum, school & public libraries.
• China’s harsh censorship and prohibition of external information, including the Internet, print, video and audio media.
• The Islamic world’s prohibition of media, styles, and cultural influences that are considered to be Western.
• The MPAA, PMRC and ESR ratings and restrictions on movie, record and game content.
• The FCC’s restrictions and penalties on tv and radio content deemed obscene or objectionable.
• Private or public funding tied to restrictions on public information, for example, sex education in the schools.

We also discussed whether there were any instances where censorship was perhaps appropriate and justifiable in western culture. The only examples I could think of were:

• The revelation of covert CIA agent Valerie Plame’s identity by White House staffer Lewis Libby.
• Restrictions and penalties for volatile or harassing speech in the workplace.
• Restrictions, controls and removal of speech in a privately-owned forum. See my blog comment terms and conditions for an example.

Can you think of examples of justifiable or acceptable censorship in today’s society? No extra points for actually requiring me to apply censorship according to above terms and conditions.