Silenced. By Fear of Power.

 

I'm getting angry.

Angrier than usual.

Which is going some.

I'm angrier not only because of the destruction of the industry by "malefactors of great wealth" but also because everyone sees it but, to my ego-centric eyes, I'm the only one talking about it.

I just ran across an article in Monday's "Wall Street Journal." Their paywall is strict, their politics are retrograde and their logic is nefarious. But they provide another point of view and an outstanding book section, and the world's best writer on cars, so I subscribe.

The headline above sucks. In so many ways. Not the least of which in saying that groups tried to ban 4,240 titles last year, we were given no context.

I read a bit further and saw this graph:

Then, I got to these two adjacent paragraphs:

So, we're attempting to ban more than ten-times the books than ever before. 

I believe this trend, this rush to intolerance, is related to my text dialogue above. And is yet another impetus of my burgeoning anger.

What's happening here, in our self-annointed era where 'transparency' is heralded, is a folding-in of freedom of expression and free-speech. My well-tuned ears are philologically-minded. They notice things I've learned from George Orwell. As a "culture," we are using fewer words. Our ability to express and understand complicated thoughts is diminishing. We no longer have the words. (By way of comparison, Shakespeare knew twice as many words as a modern human.)😢

I also notice things I learned from Viktor Klemperer, a diarist, who chronicled his life as a Jew living in captivity alongside the Nazis and his post-war life living as a captive under the Soviet-East German police state in Dresden, Germany. His book "The Language of the Third Reich" taught me more than I learned from the 15 literature classes I took during my college years. 

If reading ain't your thing no more, you can watch Stan Neumann's documentary on Klemperer, "Language Does Not Lie."  If viewing something serious ain't your thing no more, you can think about the four words in the title. Unless, thinking ain't your thing no more.

The point in all my anger brings me back to George Orwell and another small set of words you might think about if being human is still your thing.

“In a time of deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.”   

There's some debate on the provenance of that sentence. No real debate on its meaning and importance. 

Bad things are happening in our world, but more specific to this dopey and in consequential blog, our industry. Money and livelihoods are being stolen by a few dozen men from a few thousand people. They're like cheaters when you're playing Monopoly. You're playing a game. They're playing to kill. They cheat to get all the money and all the properties.

They've taken it from you. 

They'll leave you living on Social Security. Which they will then attempt to take from you.

Stay silent, my friends.

You have nothing to lose but your everything.