It is a time of freedom and fear, of Gaia and of borders, of many paths and the widening of a universal toll road, emptying country and swelling cities, of the public bought into privacy and the privacy of the public sold into invisible data banks and knowing algorithms. It is the time of the warrior's peace and the miser's charity, when the planting of a seed is an act of conscientious objection.

These are the times when maps fade and direction is lost. Forwards is backwards now, so we glance sideways at the strange lands through which we are all passing, knowing for certain only that our destination has disappeared. We are unready to meet these times, but we proceed nonetheless, adapting as we wander, reshaping the Earth with every tread.

Behind us we have left the old times, the standard times, the high times. Welcome to the irregular times.


 
In George Orwell's 1984, a totalitarian regime governs under a series of slogans, including this one: "who controls the past, controls the future." The Ministry of Truth in Orwell's novel employs agents to scan the historical record for facts that would embarassing to the Party, then delete them from the record to avoid such embarassment. The totalitarian Soviet Union employed this tactic often, airbrushing "purged" officials out of old photos.

Taking a page from Orwell and the Soviets, the White House has rewritten its posting of George W. Bush's speech of May 1, 2003, changing the phrase "President Bush Announces Combat Operations in Iraq Have Ended," to the ever-so-much-more convenient "President Bush Announces Major Combat Operations in Iraq Have Ended."

More Soviet-style truth management: The Bush Administration has eliminated all reference to comments made by United States Agency for International Development administrator Andrew S. Natsios. Natsios aided the pro-war pep rally of the Bush Administration by announcing in an interview with Ted Koppel on ABC that the reconstruction of Iraq would only require an investment of $1.7 Billion on the part of the United States, with all other costs to be paid for by other countries. A transcript of this interview was prominently placed on the USAID website during the summer, but now all reference to it has been eliminated.

When confronted with evidence of the elimination of this information from the government database, a USAID spokeswoman requested time to investigate, and then reported back that the information was removed because ABC would have required payment for the government to continue to post it. The trouble with this story is that ABC says not only that nobody from ABC requested payment or the removal of the information, but also that as a matter of policy it would never charge the government for such information. George W. Bush and his apparatchiks just can't handle the truth.

Read all about it in today's Washington Post. Thanks to Dana Milbank for putting the pieces together.


Posted by James Cook at 3:00 PM. # (permalink)




Return to the Irregular Times Main Page

Read our Blog Archives