1984: The Users Manual

"This could not be more Orwellian," Hawley claimed. "Simon & Schuster is canceling my contract because I was representing my constituents, leading a debate on the Senate floor on voter integrity, which they have now decided to redefine as sedition."

www.businessinsider.com January 7, 2021.

Tommy Tuberville had not been in the Senate very long, but he knew where to find his colleague Josh Hawley – in his hideaway office deep under the Capitol, where he could pray, nap, or hide from mobs he had encouraged but that fell prey to an excess of enthusiasm.

Hawley was sitting in his easy chair under his framed pictures of Jesus Christ and Chiang-Kai-Shek when Tuberville knocked. “Come in, Senator,” he said.

“Thank you, Senator.”

“Let’s not stand on formality. Call me Josh.”

“Sure. And you can call me Ballcoach,” Tuberville replied. “Look, we gotta talk. I saw you said that company cancelling your book contract was Orwellian. Well, I don’t know much about this Orwell guy, so I got a book he wrote called 1984. I figured it must be some kind of history book, and that it must be pretty damn bad if your book deal getting canceled reminded you of him. But now that I’ve read it, heck Josh, you might have this Orwell thing all wrong.”

“Well, eh…Ballcoach, I’ve read it a few times –”

“Oh, I’m sure you have – you went to one of those top-drawer colleges, right? Missouri State?”

“I went to Yale.”

Ballcoach nodded. “Oh yeah, Calvin Hill. Look, I don’t read that many books – maybe if I did I’d know who we fought in World War Two or what the three branches of government were,” and here he blushed abashedly. “Golly, that was silly of me, saying they were the Executive, the Senate, and the House. Everybody knows it’s the Executive, the Legislative, and the Police. But put that aside. Frankly, this 1984 could be the best book I’ve read since Old Yeller that wasn’t all Xs and Os and arrows. Look right here on the cover. It says ‘A portrait of a totalitarian dystopia.’ Now, I don’t know what dystopia is, but if it’s like dysentery or dyslexia, I bet it’s pretty bad. But I expected an attack on totalitarianism, and it turns out there’s not a word in it about totalitarianism – nothing about Obamacare or any other socialist government medical care, they’re not overwhelmed with dreamers and other rapists and murderers crawling under The Wall, and frankly, from how the book describes it, there’s not much environmental regulation either. And there’s only one lady character in the book, and believe me, she’s not Hillary Clinton. So where’s all this totalitarianism?”

“Well, you see, Tommy –”

“Ballcoach.”

“Yeah, well, you see, Ballcoach, the people in that book didn’t have any rights – like the right to storm the Capitol, or the right to have their book published. This Big Brother guy tells them what they can think.”

“Well, hell, what’s the problem there? My job was to tell my players what to think. And Isn’t that our job right now? If you didn’t tell folks Biden got most of his votes from the cardboard cutouts in empty football stadiums, they would have walked around under the delusion he won by 7 million votes. Besides, this 1984 has a happy ending – this Winston Smith guy ended up loving Big Brother. So how bad an hombre could Big Brother be? And… here –” Ballcoach said as he riffled the pages looking for a particular spot but soon abandoned the attempt, “this Winston Smith guy has a job at the Ministry of Truth. Now that’s a pretty good thing to have a Ministry for, as I see it -- rewriting old newspapers so they say the right stuff! I mean, this Orwell guy didn’t just understand Fake News, he knew what to do about it! In fact, maybe we need a Ministry of Truth – we can’t ask Newsmaxx and OAN to carry the burden on their own.”

“No, no, Ballcoach. Here – give me your book,” Hawley said, somewhat irritated, and flipped through it. “You see here? it talks about thoughtcrime. How can putting people in jail for thinking something be a good thing? It’s just like thinking about cancelling a book deal with an odious author. And what about the people who persecute folks like me who believe there is not one square inch of all creation over which Jesus Christ is not Lord?”

“Hold your horses, Josh. You’re making my point. There are people who persecute you because you know Jesus Christ rules over Creation instead of Darwin or some other magical thinking. Sure, that’s thoughtcrime. But like I say to my defense on the sideline, let’s turn things around here. We know we let those coyote hat, zip-tie dudes into the Capitol so they could drop a deuce in the hallways and defend freedom and fair elections. Why won’t we condemn them? Because they were thinking something good. But when the Black Lives Come First hoodlums showed up, the Police told them if they stood still near the Capitol, they’d get the shit beaten out of them. Am I right?”

Hawley nodded agreement.

“Well, then Schumer and Pelosi and the rest of the Jews were crying about how there was a big difference between the two situations and something about race, but I’ll tell you the real difference – it was what they was thinking. The dudes at the Capitol were thinking about how they love their country and didn’t want Cesar Chavez’s voting machines to steal the election for his Chinese communist buddy Biden. But the Black Lives Matter But Yours Doesn't crowd were thinking how they wanted to burn buildings and assault our daughters – and that was just the women! There’s the difference right there. What they were thinking was a crime.”

“Well, I agree with you there, but still –”

“No, wait, I ain’t done. Then there’s this thing Orwell’s got called doublethink. Now, first, how can doublethink be bad? Is double coverage worse than single coverage? And what’s wrong with the double-wing offense? If I want my players to hustle on and off the field, do I tell them double time it or single time it? If I want to chew gum, do I want to chew Doublemint –”

“I get it, Ballcoach.”

“Then you see my point. Here, let me read what this Orwell guy wrote.

“Doublethink … (means using) conscious deception while retaining the firmness of purpose that goes with complete honesty. To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just so long as it is needed, to deny the existence of objective reality and all the while to take account of the reality which one denies—all this is indispensably necessary.

“Now, that’s a whole bag of words, but what I hear is this – you can lie your ass off but you have to do it with a straight face and remember you’re lying, except when you’re lying, when you have to believe it.” Tuberville took a deep breath. “I think I got it right. I know you’re sore about the book thing, but this Orwell guy is on your side when you get down to it. I mean, how can you make up all that stuff about Biden stealing the election without doublethinking it?

Hawley shifted uncomfortably in his seat. “Now hang on. I didn’t say there was vote fraud. I said people think there was vote fraud and we ought to investigate it.”

“Now you’re talking!” Tuberville replied. “That there is some first-class doublethinking. It’s not Pilate washing his hands, but it’s good. And then there’s this one last thing. While he’s getting tortured – just like you’d torture an Al-Qaeda guy, I figure – Winston Smith asks his torturer why the Party wants power. And the answer is – for its own sake. Boom! And then the guy says,

“We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means, it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship.

“Now that makes good sense. Because if we can overturn the election, then there’s nothing that the antifa socialists can do anymore to harm America. All we’re trying to do is to get rid of oppressive institutions that limit our rights and freedoms.”

Hawley nodded. “Well, I can agree with that. After all, why did we want to be Senators anyway? Wasn’t it to do exactly that?”

Tommy Tuberville smiled awkwardly. “I…I guess so. But I really wanted to be a Senator because I got fired at Auburn for paying players under the table. But if this Big Brother guy doesn’t want to win football games, then I miss my guess.”

Santa Confidential!

Well, thank heavens that’s over with! Sometimes I think I’m getting too old for this stuff.

Honey, could I have another of these? This time, less vermouth? And a cherry?

Ah, that’s better.

You know, the days running up to Christmas Eve are so hectic you don’t get a chance to sit down and reflect. But now that it’s done, let me tell you a few things.

For example, here's something that really frosts my snowballs, if you’ll pardon my Icelandic. Every year, just a few days before I climb into my sled, there’s always a television news segment featuring some smart-ass little physicist from the local university who says in order for me to make my rounds to the billions of good boys and girls all over the world on Christmas Eve, I’d have to travel such-and-such distance and I’d have to carry so many tons of freight, and it would take up this much space, and I’d have to go so-and-so fast, even taking into account the International Date Line. And then he says I’d violate the laws of relativity, because something traveling that fast would acquire an infinite increase in mass and time would slow, and blah blah blah, and then they all smirk like they know Einstein and you don’t. And all the adults watching the news chuckle like they’re in on the joke – Good Lord, they don’t even have the decency to ask their kids to leave the room so they don’t have hear this tommyrot -- completely disregarding the gifts I brought the smug little bastards when they were children, the letters they wrote me, all of it. And they wonder why I stopped bringing them presents and their parents had to step in and start buying them stuff to spare them from the consequences of their own actions.

And don’t get me started about Einstein, or Little Albert, as I called him. What do they know about Einstein? I knew Einstein. I brought Einstein presents. I remember his letters to me -- I remember all of the letters children write to me, billions of them. Don’t ask me how, it’s a gift. There are savants who’ll tell you what the weather was on any given day, or can instantly calculate 20-digit primes, or pitchers like Palmer or Maddox who say they remember what they threw to every batter they faced in every situation. Some folks can do it, I’m one of them. To be fair, Albert’s weren’t letters, they were more like pristine, silent wishes, but if a child’s wishes to me are that sincere, it’s as good as a letter – besides, lots of good boys and girls can't write yet. Little Albert heard about me in school from his Christian friends I suppose, and was immediately obsessed with me. I suppose he wanted presents, but I think he was more fascinated intellectually by the scope of my work, and my ability to move at unheard of speeds. He had that curiosity even then. And I recall his first Christmas wish was for a compass and a protractor. You could tell he was special.

I could probably write a book about what various children have asked me for, particularly the famous ones – Frank Sinatra, Ernest Hemingway, Eleanor Roosevelt. But that would be violating a confidence. Still, the stories I could tell – which world leaders wanted their siblings maimed, which cultural icons wanted which weapons, which religious figures asked for dirty pictures -- you can imagine.

And then there’s this -- like I said, I’ve received billions of letters over the years, but how many thank you notes do you think I ever got? I don’t understand why I’m the solitary victim of this sense of mannerless entitlement. If Aunt Minnie got a kid bunny slippers, the kid’s Mom would force her to call to thank her – or a thank you note, in cursive please, or at least an e-mail. But I can bring a kid an iPad, or a scooter, or some juiced-up STEM-based erector set she’s been hoping for with every ounce of her being, and it’ll be 300-odd days before I cross the kid’s mind again.

Another thing that pisses me off is parents who leave it to me to trim their tree. When I come down the chimney, or do whatever maneuver works with the specific HVAC system in the place, sometimes I find a naked tree next to boxes of ornaments, and tinsel and candy canes, and lights – oh, good gosh, untangling all those lights, and heaven forfend if one of the strings is burned out and I have to check every bulb for the problem – that ices my whalebone. But I have to do it, because if I don’t, the kids will wake up and come downstairs and point to the blown out string and say, “Look! Santa messed up the lights!” and the parents will smile patronizingly and look at each other in a we-were-too-busy-humping-to-get-it-right way and say, “Oh, I guess Santa didn’t do a very good job,” and pat the little shavers on the head. Arrogant, bourgeois scum! Like I’m the nanny or the housekeeper or something, there to please them!

But you can’t hold that against the kid – the kid’s probably been very good and deserves a Christmas gift, even if he’s likely to grow up to be just like the parent, or so the recent data suggest. It’s not their fault their parents are reprobates. But sometimes you read a kid’s letters you can see the telltale signs they’re going in the wrong direction. For example, the number one thing kids want is a bike, right? Sure, but there are plenty of shades of grey. A kid who writes “If I had a bike, I could do my morning paper route more quickly and then go to my Little League practice after school -- I’m the first trans girl on my team!” is getting a bike and an asterisk on my list. But then you get a kid who asks for a “Cannondale Topstone Neo Carbon 2” so they can show it off to their poorer friends (if they have any). It retails for six grand plus. I don’t bother with those -- the parents probably already have one stashed away in the garage, and even if I left one under the tree, the kid wouldn’t see it until the family got back from their skiing vacation in Zermatt.

Or, a puppy. There are some kids who ask for a puppy that’s been abandoned, a puppy stuck in a pound somewhere that they can take home and love. You love to see a kid write a letter like that. I remember when I got Timmy’s letter asking for what turned out to be Lassie, that was special. But then you get something like, “Dear Santa, I would like an American Kennel Club registered Labradoodle puppy. My best friend Betsy at the Chapin School has one that’s very cute and I’d like you to give me one that’s much cuter than my friend Betsy’s.” I actually got that from a little girl 30 years ago, and she lived in a penthouse apartment in Manhattan – what’s she going to do with a big dog like that? Who’s going downstairs to walk it? I brought her a play kitchen, since no one in her family had ever seen the inside of a kitchen or was ever going to. Regardless, she grew up and married a guy named Jared and now her kids write letters to someone called “Father Maccabee” whom, I can assure you with complete confidence, does not exist.

Then there’s the question I get most often – what do you really look like? Frankly, you already have a good idea. When Clement Moore wrote that poem in 1822, he described me so precisely as an obese, red-festooned B&E perp – right down to the finger-on-the-nose updraft trick-- that I spent most of the next year worrying if I’d somehow forgotten to use my magical ability to make myself invisible. I can do that, Just like I can freeze time while I work or eat all those cookies without going into diabetic shock. Thomas Nast also had a good guess, better than the Coca-Cola version with that rosacea on my cheeks – I look like I’ve had Botox in that one. And as for that Dutch blackface thing, don’t start me.

Here’s one I always get -- do you and Mrs. Claus really live at the North Pole? Well, yes, we always have, but last July we went outside and there was water up to the front door and a Russian freighter went by. It’s been getting worse every year. So we’ll winter over up here, but the toy operation looks like it will be moving to Vietnam pretty soon. I feel bad for the elves, but they will get a nice buyout package. After all, that’s why you have unions.

And finally, yes, I have flying reindeer, although there’s no Rudolph – if he really had a glowing red nose, the wolves would rip him apart in a minute flat. But here’s something most folks don’t know -- Blitzen wasn’t one of the original eight. He replaced a buck named Pollux. But a couple hundred years ago, we were all done with our route and heading home over Mongolia, when there was some trouble with the sled and I crash landed in the Siberian tundra and Pollux’s leg was shattered by the impact. It was a few days before the elves sent help and it was touch-and-go for a while. Meanwhile, Pollux’s situation was getting worse.

So, we ate him. I felt bad about it, sure, but you know – I’m Santa. The show must go on.

And now, a word.

Four months, eighteen posts, I hope you've enjoyed this arc as much as I have. I want to thank many of you for your flattering responses and for sharing the site with others.

We're going to take a few weeks off now, just to rcatch our breath and think about where we go next. We'll be back around the end of January. But in the interim, we'll send out a survey to readers asking about what they think, what they like and dislike, and so on. Look for it in early January.

Happy New Year and best for 2021. A better year awaits.

The Great Conjunction

Skywatchers are in for an end-of-year treat. What has become known popularly as the “Christmas Star” is an especially vibrant planetary conjunction easily visible in the evening sky over the next two weeks as the bright planets Jupiter and Saturn come together, culminating on the night of Dec. 21. It’s been nearly 400 years since the planets passed this close to each other in the sky, and nearly 800 years since the alignment of Saturn and Jupiter occurred at night, as it will for 2020, allowing nearly everyone around the world to witness this “great conjunction.”

-- NASA

Jupiter and Saturn were all smiles when they ran into each other in the southwestern sky.

“Why if it isn’t Mr. Ring-a-Ding!” Jupiter shouted as his fellow planet approached. “Saturn, how the hell are you?”

“Jupiter, you bloated ball of helium! Imagine running into you here in the night sky! How long has it been?” They thoughtfully substituted an elbow bump for a handshake or embrace.

“Give me a minute,” Jupiter said. “Last time I saw you -- 1623! Am I right?”

“1623! Seems like yesterday! Well, you look good!” Saturn said cheerily, then added, perhaps tactlessly, “I see you still have that red spot.”

“Yeah, yeah, it doesn’t change very much. No one knows how I got it.”

“Is it active?”

Jupiter shrugged. “Turns out, yes.”

“You ought to see a doctor about that,” Saturn advised.

“Oh, enough about me!” Jupiter protested, changing the subject. “You -- you look great! Your rings – so shiny, lustrous! You’re the envy of the solar system!”

“Oh, this old bling? Frankly, you get up close to them, they’re just swarms of cosmic rubble, no big deal, really. So, what’s the news by you?”

“The usual. Rotating, orbiting Sol, thousand mile-an-hour ammonia windstorms, getting hit by stuff. You?”

“The same,” Saturn said.

“Let me tell you -- I got whacked by an asteroid about a dozen years ago, ouch! The thing must have been the size of the Terra in the inner rings!”

“Ooooh! That’s gonna leave a mark!”

“It kicked up quite a plume. And twelve years before that, it was a comet. Boom! Right in the flank!”

Saturn was sympathetic, but realistic. “Well, what are you going to do? You’re a big planet, you’re going to get plunked. I got dinged a few years back, too.”

“Asteroid?”

“No! Get this – a spacecraft!”

“What, made by creatures?”

“Uh-huh!”

Jupiter’s expression became severe. “Where does it stop? You hear them buzzing by, there’s got to be a limit. When the Terrans were ferrying themselves to their moon and back, who gave an eruption? But you got to respect your neighbors.”

“Absolutely. They crap on their own planet and then go bother us.”

Jupiter nodded resignedly. “Yeah, but what are you gonna do? They’re fascinated by us -- they knew who we were before they built pyramids.” The two nodded in agreement before he smiled and changed the subject. “So, how many moons do you have now?”

“Sixty-two,” Saturn replied proudly.

“Sixty-two! Well, look who’s got the big mass! Do you have pictures?”

“Yeah, yeah, here, take a look. We’ve only named fifty-three of them. You need a very high-powered telescope for some of them. They’re really just balls of ice.”

“Shh! Don’t let them hear you say that stuff,” Jupiter chastised. “They’ll think you’re not attracted to them. Besides, they’re lovely moons – not like those little brats, Deimos and Phobos.”

“That whole Mars family’s a pain. I can’t believe you have conjunctions with him.”

The two tittered as Jupiter looked at the pictures. “Oooh, this one’s nice! What a moon! So big, lovely yellow color…”

“Of, that’s Titan. You’re not supposed to have favorites,” Saturn blushed, “but, well, he’s a good moon. Rocky core, methane lakes, dunes of frozen hydrocarbon particles, all sorts of features. And his own atmosphere! I’m very proud of him. And this one…is Enceladus.”

She’s adorable.”

“Liquid water!”

“Ooooh,” Jupiter cooed. “You must be very proud.”

Saturn could not help but smile. “But she erupts in geysers. I wish she’d settle down.”

“Sooner or later they do. Wait a minute, who’s this?”

“Oh yeah. That’s Hyperion.”

“She’s –”

“Yeah, she’s nonspherical. It’s OK, you can say it.”

Jupiter could not help but be taken aback. “Really!”

“And she has an elliptical orbit, too.”

“Oh, my!” Jupiter gasped, quickly recovered. “But different isn’t wrong anymore.”

Saturn agreed. “There was a time when a non-spherical moon was seen as worse than wrong -- perverse, aberrant. And a non-elliptical orbit! Don’t start me!”

“Well, it makes no difference, as far as I’m concerned. I mean, what would you rather, that she was out somewhere in the asteroid belt, like Ceres?”

“Don’t even say it! I’d never see her again! She's my moon and I'm her planet and we exert a strong gravitational pull towards each other. That ought to be enough.”

“I agree,” Jupiter commiserated. “Besides, you know how it is. Moons start out close to you, but then they start to drift away. It happens to every planet. I guess it’s just centrifugal force.”

They nodded together, deferent to the ways of the universe. “And you?” Saturn asked eagerly. “How many?”

“Seventy-nine.”

“Seventy-nine moons? Who’s got the big mass now?! The last time I saw you, you just had the Galilean quadruplets – wait, wait, give me a minute – I can do this -- Io, Europa…”

Jupiter smiled. “So far, so good.”

“Ganymede – “

“That’s right. One more…”

“Calisto! Am I right?” Saturn asked proudly as Jupiter nodded. “How are they doing?”

“Well enough. Io’s having her first volcanic activity – fountains of lava miles high!”

“Poor thing. How old?”

“A billion years, I figure.”

“So young! Other than that, she doing alright?”

“The doctors say she’s caught between my gravitational pill and those of her larger sibs. Generates a lot of heat.”

“The middle moon’s always the most active. Say, did you hear about Pluto? Downgraded!”

“No!”

Saturn tried not to be judgmental. “I can see their point. Between you and me, he’s so damn little he ought to break free of Sol’s pull and just find an orbit through deep space, where he’d get some respect. And a better name!”

“Pluto is some kind of a dog or something, right? If he was an asteroid, he’d be Moskowitz-Lupowitz N-424 or something.”

“He’s never been on the same plane as the rest of us.”

“Can you imagine the Terran creatures sent some object to fly past him? To see what? Ice? They could have opened the refrigerator!”

“And did you listen to that disc they put on the thing they sent?”

“Chuck Berry!”

“Absolutely. Was that supposed to be the music of the spheres or something? The only song I know is Holst’s The Planets.”

“And the surface pictures! Forests, deserts, oceans”

“Planet porn,” Jupiter scoffed. “Do we post pictures of churning blue clouds of methane?”

Saturn nodded emphatically. “Exactly. And they’re so beautiful!”

The two heavenly bodies shared a quiet moment before Saturn spoke up. “So, 1623, huh?”

“Oh, yeah. That’s a long time,” Jupiter replied, animated by the memory. “Galileo’s little peepshow. Big boats all over Terra taking people across their liquid ocean. And some of them packed together in chains – what was that about?”

Saturn shrugged. “Beats me. If I judged creatures, I couldn’t do my job.”

“I agree. But what a miserable lot! Terra must be embarrassed. People in chains, famine, disease – witches! Don’t like the weather, blame a witch! Crop fails – blame a witch! Remember how they used to burn them?”

“Sure, but I’ll tell you what was even worse than 1623 -- 1226!”

“Boy, that’s a while ago! The Crusades! Genghis Khan!”

“If he were a planet, he’d have so many moons he could fill the Kuiper Belt on his own!”

“And how about 6 BC!”

“6 BC!,” Jupiter roared with laughter. “That's a ways back, but I remember! That was a riot!”

“Yeah, those three guys with the turbans. Remember how excited were they to see us?”

“Yeah -- Balthasar and Melchior racing around, gathering spices and gold and loading them onto their camels, hollering about how you and I being together meant the Son of God was being born somewhere below us!”

“Like we were a neon sign, right?” Jupiter said, laughing in agreement. “LOOK! SON OF GOD BELOW THIS SIGN! And the third one – Gaspar, wasn’t it? -- rolling over on his blanket and saying, ‘Relax, it’s just Jupiter and Saturn, go back to bed.’”

They smiled and sighed together once again.

“So, where you heading?” Saturn asked.

“That way,” Jupiter replied, indicating the southeast.

“I’m going there,” Saturn said, hitching his thumb to the northeast. “Great seeing you, but you know, can’t stop.”

Jupiter nodded. “Yeah, I gotta go – places to be, people to see.”

“Well, that’s how it is when you’re us. When will we run into each other again?”

Jupiter shrugged. “2400 or so? Somebody will figure it out.” He looked out into the vast expanse of space, where he was headed. “Well, you take care of yourself. Keep spinning!”

“And you, big guy,” Saturn replied.

And with that the two friends parted.