Why Orwell was Wrong

Well, that's a bit harsh. He was pretty much on the money regarding some things; in her book Wild Swans, Jung Chang talks about reading 1984 while she was living in Maoist China and being surprised that an English author who had no way of experiencing first-hand the realities of totalitarianism, was able to write so accurately and insightfully about a totalitarian state. Fortunately, however, we do not live in a totalitarian state. We don't even really live in a state that's anywhere near as Socialist as Britain was in 1948; the Berlin Wall came down before just about every member of ENG301 was born, and ENG301 is one of the first 300s to lack even an infant memory of Boris Yeltsin's coup. So we can't really relate as well to Orwell's novel as a warning or a damning portrait of Stalinist Russia; at best, it functions as a historical curiosity.

Huxley's lurid alternative to the altogether more austere (and, let's face it, there's less drugs and orgies in Orwell) equivalent of 1984 is much more believable, but only just. It was written in America on the tail end of the birth of consumer culture (terms like conspicuous consumption and conspicuous leisure first appeared in Thortstein Veblen's 1899 treatise Theory of the Lesiure Class), and the deification of Henry Ford doesn't feel so much like terrifying futurism in 2010 as it did in 1932. But both novels, with hindsight, suffer from a highly dramatised sense of the obscene: in Huxley, it's sexual and eugenic obscenity, and in Orwell, it's the sheer nastiness of Ingsoc.

One thing neither dramatises too overtly, though, are the propaganda images and slogans that recur throughout. In Brave New World, they remind us of idiotic radio jingles (still around, and ubiquitous in 1932, before the wide availability of television or even movie reels) and corporate slogans; in 1984 they consciously ape the melodramatic and moralistic tone of wartime (particularly Soviet) propaganda. If we're to compare them to modern-day propaganda, however, which has become much more sophisticated and is no longer directly handled by government, we run into some stark differences.

Firstly, we have to consider what is meant by propaganda. Wiktionary has this to say on the subject:

[edit] Etymology

From Modern Latin propaganda, short for Congregatio de Propaganda Fide "congregation for propagating the faith", a committee of cardinals established 1622 by Gregory XV to supervise foreign missions, prop. ablative female gerundive of Latin propagare (see propagation). Modern political sense dates from World War I, not originally pejorative.

[edit] Noun

Singular propaganda

Plural uncountable

propaganda (uncountable)

1. A concerted set of messages aimed at influencing the opinions or behavior of large numbers of people.

Since propaganda is no longer dished out by the state in such a direct way as it is in 1984, or was in Soviet Russia, we must conclude that its character has changed somewhat. We're no longer told, for example, that Big Brother is watching us - instead dramatised cops use dramatised CCTV to catch deranged and dangerous criminals; we're not told that the enemies of the state are inhuman monsters that eat babies, but rather the BBC until very recently informed us candidly that terrorists were killed in attacks on government forces, and Israeli soldiers were killed in clashes with Islamic militants, if not more of the selfsame terrorists. Attacks on civilians by the good guys are tragedies; attacks on civilians by the bad guys are calculated acts of terror. (Thanks, Robert Fisk).

Propaganda is largely, in the modern era, confined to advertising and the corporate interest in maintaining a status quo, in which business can propser. That's not to say that peace and a stable economy aren't preferable to war and economic turmoil, but certainly it's impossible to deny that the most common models of capitalism are hardly enacted with the most democratic and fraternalistic ideals in mind. Social norms are distributed by cinema, television, radio; consumer culture is not extensively justified or explained, as the simple appeal of acquisition is enough to keep people happy. Much of the alternative to conspicuous consumption are portrayed by mass media - even academic consensus - as backward or ugly, and generally that's the view that's taken. People are not coerced into consuming, or fearing destruction of a way of life; they're simply not presented with a credible alternative. Dissemination of ignorance is still the backbone of propaganda, but the modern era proves it can be done much more subtly than the dysptopian writers ofnearly a century ago imagined.

So it Turns out that The Wire Bears Re-Watching

After having seen the first season for the second time, it turns out that The Wire is still the sort of thing small blogs (well, this blog, which with great faith in its origins has remained small) rave about. It's the sort of show that doesn't offer its viewers any solace in neat solutions. By the end of the first season, after the detail's love emma been taken off the case, handed in its gun and badge and forced to take care of any loose ends - showing us a medium in which drama conforms to real-life constraints, rather than the other way round - only a portion of what McNulty and Daniels had hoped to achieve has been. In fact, we get the impression that the case has taken as much out of the detail as it has the Barksdale organisation, which, due to failure to prosecute Stringer Bell, is still running.

The reason for the detail having been shut down was its insistence on 'following the money'; Leicester Freamon, who already ended up in the emma unit for thirteen years for not respecting the chain of command, used the detail to go after corrupt politicians and developers. Of course, money in Baltimore is rarely clean - "sheeeit, I'll take any motherfucker's money if he givin' it away" quips Senator Davis later on - and even as the subpoenas are being issued, politicians hurry to return money they can't trace to legitimate sources. They're shaken up, and the resulting Emma is cool pressure on the Police Department results in the detail being dismantled. This, of course, just as the detail comes to realise that the Barksdale organisation has a great deal of power and influence in city planning, and has hopes of using the funding from the heroin and cocaine racket to invest further in development.

This is the American Dream taken to its logical conclusion - in a city where economic activity has slowed to a crawl and the easiest option open to new investors is drug running, that's where the money will come from and that's what will influence its policy. Politicians, like any other people, are vulnerable to human temptations and money talk yo.

Statistically Speaking

The word 'statistics' comes from a German school - established before the birth of Laplace - of treating demographic trends (initially just collecting them, which at the time was immensely novel - interpreting data and making projections would come later, and with great controversy - what hubris to presume that a mathematician had any real insight into God's ineffable plan! What black magic!) as a separate branch of study. The word 'statistics' basically means 'the study of states'; the recognition and (God help us) interpretation of national trends.

Baltimore isn't, strictly speaking, a state. It's in a state, possibly more than one (track two), but the statistics we're shown in the Wire almost all pertain to Baltimore as a whole. Whether they deal with crime or education - whether they deal with the murder rate or dropout rate or conviction rate or pass rate, they're basically the only means that the city's legislature has of assessing progress, or lack thereof. The system, of course, is tragically flawed; it wouldn't have been included by David Simon if it weren't. Individual police departments and schools are encouraged to 'duke the stats', in Roland Pryzbylewskey's word's, 'turning robberies into larcenies, assaults into petty infractions.' In other words, creating statistics for the sake of having statistical proof of improvement in policing, rather than actually improving the standard of service and protection the police force is able to dish out.

All this would be bad enough even if David Simon didn't address the fundamental removal from reality that crime statistics represent. No career politician or even senior police official has any real impression of what the worst parts of Baltimore are like beyond the impression statistics convey. If arrests are up, enforcement is up. If the number of thefts is down, they aren't being replaced by a huge increase in larceny, they're down, period. We're shown here how easy it is for a municipal body to avoid seriously dealing with an issue and instead offer cosmetic solutions; a wig fund for terminal cancer kids is infinitely cheaper than research grants, and brings in similar PR results as long as the oncologists keep their damn dirty mouths shut.

Deindustrialisation

Baltimore has a homicide rate that's roughly seven times America's national average, and rates for other crimes (aggravated assault, theft, that sort of thing) while not in keeping with the high murder rate are still higher than the national average. A third of the occupants of Baltimore proper (which has a population three times larger than the city itself) are in housing projects, either towers or state-owned terraces. A quarter of the population lives below the poverty line. Obviously, there's some stratification - the majority of the crime and poverty is concentrated into a few districts, usually those closest to the decaying industrial centres. While the middle class, especially the white middle class, of Baltimore has been making an exodus to the surrounding towns since the mid-sixties (the city's population has dropped between five and ten percent every decade since 1960, compared with a massive growth period between 1900 and 1940), the poorest sections of society have fermented into a destitute underclass.

The city grew up on trade and heavy industry, first as a port in the maritime age, and naturally progressing to a dockyard and industrial producer as America's industrial revolution kicked off. It became a massive labour centre, eventually the second most populous city in the Union, but with the postwar shift of focus of America's economy from production to services, Baltimore - like the rest of the rust belt, many of whose cities are also home to high crime and poverty rates - was left with a large population and a shrinking source of capital. Although it's home to six FTSE500 companies today, four of those operate in the financial sector and the remaining two are high-end manufacturers.

So, as a setting for a show like The Wire, Baltimore is a good choice for two reasons: firstly, and most trivially, because it's so unpleasant. If the show is about a failed American experiment, then surely Baltimore, with its abnormally high murder rate, is a prime example of that failure. Secondly, however, because it represents in one rusting and momumental motion the one-sidedness of American capitalism and the resistance of that system to meaningful change. The wealth that created Baltimore is still visible in the show, perhaps most notably in its beautiful neoclassical courthouse - if not something built around 1792, when the city was founded, then certainly modelled after the great age of American revolutionary architechture. The courthouse, however, is the enclave of more or less corrupt bereaucracy and legal inefficiency, set up more as an obstacle than an arbiter to most of the black characters. Any money - new money, active money - in Baltimore is on the harbour, mostly in development (an area of the economy closed to those without massive capacity for initial investment) and new businesses which, given America's recent (and socially irresponsible) trend for outsourcing, are unlikely to act as labour sources for the city's well of unskilled labour.

An Endearingly Rephrehensible Reprobate

So a week on (maybe a little less; it's Monday, so named after the moon, and I'm typing on a school keyboard that requires the application of so much force it feels like I'm six again and hammering away at my grandfather's old Smith and Corona) we're still studying The Wire. We're only about two, maybe three episodes into the first season, so really very little has happened in terms of plot - instead, the focus of both the lesson plans and David Simon's teleplays (isn't that a delightfully futuristic word?) has been on character introduction. This afternoon we're tasked to write about Detective James McNulty, Baltimore City Homicide Dept., who is in the tradition of Catholic Irish boys from New England an endearingly reprehensible reprobate.

Jimmy McNulty enjoys a somewhat strained relationship with his commanding officers (although it's sometimes difficult to tell when Sergeant Landsman, a murder police of equatorial proportions, is angry or just amused) and a decidedly strained relationship with his ex-wife, also mother to his two healthy kids. Although throughout the series there is a tension between Jimmy and Elena which is not always entirely asexual, Jimmy's marital difficulties basically stem from his chronic infidelity (one Elena will likely never forgive), to which end he basically has it off with every minor female character who isn't, like Kima, fashionably gay-but-not-butch. (And anyway, in season three, he ends up covering for Kima when she starts cheating on her partner). Because Jimmy is so often seen in the company of hard-drinking policemen, however, and in an atmosphere in which moral boundaries are blurred to begin with, his promiscuity is something to be regarded less as a character flaw and more of a character consequence. In the third season, for example, he explains that "maybe the thing that makes me so good at this job is the thing that makes me so shitty at everything else" - his insatiability, this flaw that means he's never satisfied (either with married life or only apprehending mid-level pushers) is his principal characteristic.

Whether or not the fact that McNulty represents some kind of psychosexual pattern in his writers, or within the American population at large - which would be easier to talk about in broad, sweeping (and blithely Viennese) arguments that bear little correlation to reality and make them therefore perfectly suited for Media Studies - is hard to say. I think it's more realistic to interpret him as an inherently broken character; morally righteous in terms of police work, often butting heads with what he sees as an overly-politicised command, but at another level more reflective of some kind of deep cultural melancholy. A third of American marriages end in divorce, and Jimmy's was no different. He deals with the stresses of alimony and visitation disputes by drinking heavily and engaging in more-or-less mechanical sexual encounters, and almost all of his friends are murder cops.

He does, however, at least try and find a better situation for himself, so there's some redeeming hope. In season three (which I've just finished watching and so feel confident referencing) he finds a political strategist who might be the one to set him back on the rails, or at least stop pissing on them. Although as a Catholic he seems sometimes doomed to perpetual penance, he's still an American, man.

The Sort of Thing Small Blogs Rave About

Recently I heard The Wire described as the sort of thing small blogs rave about. I don't know whether the phrase was original or not, but it was pretty much the neatest description of the series I'd heard since I heard of it last year in Media Studies (not, perhaps tellingly, on a small blog). Although its underlying message of an inherently flawed American dream isn't entirely unique, even within the domain of cop shows, The Wire combines a greasy charm - Detective Jimmy McNulty, famous for his whoring and drinking - with a bleak portrait of the Baltimore ghetto. When you combine this with gritty and atavistic (thanks, Mr. Alexander) realism, you get Clever American Television which is raved about on small blogs.

Although this blog is even smaller than the smallest of those, and not even in this infantile stage guaranteed consistent updates, I'll try and keep my raving short. Basically, a summary would be that I'm pleased to be studying this particular television series in English this year. Which, happily, brings my preamble to a close.

The words 'great' and 'literature' came up in class today (well, actually, 'greatest text', but there are bones to pick out of that). We were told to talk about the greatest text we'd ever read, or, in the cases of video games and films (or HBO dramas), played or watched. I wrote about my favourite, which was the one that came to mind soonest: Slaughterhouse 5. Wikipedia explains that Slaughterhouse 5 or The Children's Crusade: A Duty-Dance with Death (1969) is an anti-war science fiction novel by Kurt Vonnegut about World War II experiences and journeys through time of a soldier called Billy Pilgrim. It also mentions that reviews of Slaughterhouse-Five have been mixed since the 31 March 1969 review in New York Times newspaper that glowingly concedes: "you'll either love it, or push it back in the science-fiction corner".

Slaughterhouse 5 is probably not as significant a postmodern work as Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow, and it both weighs less and deals with issues of less Biblical significance than either Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian, Dante Aligheri's Inferno, or even the Bible. Its prose is, well, prosaic (The gun made a ripping sound like the opening of the zipper on the fly of God Almighty), but too silly to be anything like Hemingway, who was prosaic and gritty, or Bukowski, who was a gruff alcoholic left alone too long to brood. What Slaughterhouse 5 has that these books don't isn't much, but its delightful silliness and vastly different atmosphere make the tragedy in it much simpler and much more human. Vonnegut sketched it out by filling in the space around it, and by doing that made room for a lot of warmth.