Orwell was right

"These three men symbolize the nobility of public service, the good character of our country, and the good influence of America on the world."

-- George Bush, in presenting the Presidential Medal of Freedom to Ambassador L. Paul Bremer III, former CIA Director George J. Tenet, and retired Gen. Tommy Franks.

Can anyone doubt that language itself is taking the path predicted by George Orwell and, through abuse and sheer repetition of lies, is becoming meaningless? This article from Harper's compares the echo chamber that was the Republican Convention (and the right-wing strategy of the endlessly repeated Big Lie as a whole) to, on the one hand, the Marabar Caves:

E. M. Forster had somehow captured, in 1924, the essence of the 2004 Republican National Convention — not just my reaction to the Garden but the feel of the place. In the scene my friend had in mind, the elderly Mrs. Moore has found herself on a long day trip out of Chandrapore, her destination the famous Marabar Caves. Inside the darkened chamber, she is confronted by an extraordinary and disturbing echo:

Whatever is said, the same monotonous noise replies, and quivers up and down the walls until it is absorbed into the roof. "Boum" is the sound as far as the human alphabet can express it, or "bou-oum," or "ou-boum," — utterly dull. Hope, politeness, the blowing of a nose, the squeak of a boot, all produce "boum." Even the striking of a match starts a little worm coiling, which is too small to complete a circle but is eternally watchful. And if several people talk at once, an overlapping howling noise begins, echoes generate echoes, and the cave is stuffed with a snake composed of small snakes, which writhe independently.

That was it precisely. It was more than just the sound, though. It was the sameness of the sound. And here Forster was prescient once again:

The crush and the smells she could forget, but the echo began in some indescribable way to undermine her hold on life. Coming at a moment when she chanced to be fatigued, it had managed to murmur, "Pathos, piety, courage — they exist, but are identical, and so is filth. Everything exists, nothing has value." If one had spoken vileness in that place, or spoken lofty poetry, the comment would have been the same — "ou-boum."

That was the convention. It was all the same — not a single position or conflicting positions but every position and no position. The words at the convention were like every color of the color wheel, spinning into white.

... and, on the other hand, to Dostoyevsky's vision of totalitarian belief:

One of the wonderful odd facts about Laura Bush that reporters love to trade is that her favorite passage in all of literature is "The Grand Inquisitor" from The Brothers Karamazov. At first this might seem an odd choice, given that the inquisitor in question has promised to burn Jesus (or God, if you will) at the stake for the crime of giving man the knowledge of sin and then abandoning him to his own devices. The inquisitor saw this as a had deal, and being a serious man he saw it as his own burden not only to remove that knowledge as best he could but also to take away the choices that such knowledge implied, for it was giving man the freedom to sin that was the worst crime of all. As he tortured Jesus, the inquisitor explained to him why his own system was far superior to that of the Father. "This is what we have done," he said. "We have improved upon Your creation and founded it instead on miracle, mystery, and authority. And men were delighted that once more they were led like sheep, and that that terrible gift which had brought them so much suffering was lifted from their hearts at last."

This is typically understood as an ironic passage that in fact celebrates free will as God's most profound and mysterious gift to humanity Dostoevsky would have much to discuss with Didion and Breytenbach. But perhaps Bush himself had discussed all of this with his wife on some voluble night of his reckless youth and he had missed the joke. Or maybe he thought the inquisitor had a pretty good point. Either way, and although he couldn't have meant to make such an awful pun, maybe he truly is, as Joni Mitchell once sang, trying to take us back to the garden. Maybe he sees this awful "boum" as a gift to the people — a gift of existential ignorance, freely given and freely taken.