The following was a post in response to the topic “Literary Political Figures” at the Missouri Review Blog. Check out this and the rest of the responses here

Big Brother

I’ll go with an obvious one: Big Brother – really a valid “literary politician/ political figure” or “literary monster” despite his arguable existence in the first place. I remember my first and only reading of 1984 with mixed emotion. In my 9th grade english class, the reading of 1984 was the one month out of the year students would wipe the drool off their desks and actually care about reading. For some reason Orwell was the one guy everybody dug. Of course, for the few of us who stayed awake, that meant we had to do more to get an A than go through the motions – meaning the teacher would ask and let linger in the air until the silence became awkward for everyone (while the teacher lost their focus wondering why the ever signed up to “Teach for America” in the first place), followed by the chime-in, last-minute save.

Anyway, Big Brother. I was too naive to feel haunted by Big Brother. Maybe it was because I read it well after the Cold War…with no real understanding of the Cold War. I guess by then we had pretty much been full of the idea that Orwell was wrong and Huxley was right, to paraphrase Neil Postman. How many people would buy a television if they knew it stared back at them? If they were on sale, probably more than you’d think. I did like the idea of fighting the system. I was very into handing out socialist pamphlets during high school, but I really did it for the George Washington University socialist group parties. Hoards of pseudo-Marxists would get drunk in one bedroom apartments and throw books at each other. Most of the parties were called something like “the communal struggle (of getting sober).”

1984. All I can think is, with that much oppression, the sex must have been great. –Seth Graves