President Donald Trump's Senior Counselor Kellyanne Conway talks about “alternative facts” and Bowling Green with Record columnist Mike Kelly. Michael Karas/NorthJersey.com
George Orwell’s dystopian novel “1984” has enjoyed record sales in our Trumpian age of “alternative facts” and “fake news.”
Yet what the first year of Donald J. Trump’s brutish and bombastic presidency reminds this writer of is not so much the totalitarian torment of “1984” (though in Washington today, two plus two often does equal five), but the deep disillusionment of “Coming Up for Air,” a lesser known Orwell novel published in June 1939, a few months before Hitler invaded Poland.
The novel takes place “between the wars,” as the saying goes, with the multilateral dream of the League of Nations awakening to the reality of fascism, xenophobia and another European march toward war. Its protagonist is George Bowling, a self-described “fat man of forty-five” and a World War I veteran who works in insurance. Like many in Europe and America today, Bowling needs an escape from the propaganda and paranoia of the time. “Hate, hate, hate,” he thinks to himself. “Let’s all get together and have a good hate.”
Our story begins after Bowling won 17 quid at the race track, a secret he happily keeps from his wife. Having no mistress or pressing vices, he decides to take his winnings and do a bit of surreptitious fishing in the country town of his youth, Lower Binfield. Indeed, his favorite fishing hole calls out to him from “before the war,” when “the world was big enough for everyone.”
Unlike Bowling, Orwell — born Eric Arthur Blair on June 25, 1903 — was too young to fight in World War I. But he had seen a preview of World War II and its aftermath in 1936 when, at the age of 33, he moved to Spain to “join the militia to fight against fascism” and Franco’s Hitler- and Mussolini-backed nationalists. As he wrote in “Homage to Catalonia,” his memoir of his time at the Spanish front, where he narrowly survived being shot through the throat, “All the war propaganda, all the screaming and lies and hatred, comes invariably from people who are not fighting.”
Alas, nationalist propaganda that preys on economic and cultural insecurities — targeting immigrants, refugees, religious and ethnic minorities, society’s most vulnerable — is back in vogue in Europe and the U.S., and the claustrophobic “hate, hate, hate” that Bowling flees in “Coming Up for Air” sounds only too familiar.
As Lionel Trilling wrote in his 1952 preface to “Homage to Catalonia,” many of Orwell’s contemporaries had “written off as anachronisms the very forces that were at the moment shaping the world — racial pride, leader worship, religious belief, patriotism, love of war,” and were themselves deluded by “their love of abstractions.” Yet Orwell “knew what war and revolution were really like, what government and administration were really like. From first-hand experience he knew what communism was. He could truly imagine what Nazism was.”
What Orwell didn’t imagine was how a relatively small group of terrorists and religious fanatics would successfully undermine basic civil liberties and concepts as fundamental to Western democracy as habeas corpus. Or how responsible journalism would struggle to compete in a digitized “attention economy” where inflammatory posts or tweets go viral while fact-based reports and arguments fail to attract eyeballs. Add to this the recent exodus of millions of refugees from war-torn Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen and Sub-Saharan Africa, and societies are struggling to cope, and too often seeking out scapegoats.
All of which makes the quiet solitude of fishing sound very attractive. An ugly tide of nationalism and intolerance is again on the rise, and time far from the crowd would be good for any soul.
As the English poet Ted Hughes said of fishing, it provides “a connection with the whole living world . . . some form of communion with levels of yourself that are deeper than the ordinary self.”
So, what did Orwell’s red-faced insurance man find when he finally made it to his sacred fishing hole? Sadly, and clearly another lesson for our time, a rubbish dump — a “great round hole, like an enormous well, twenty or thirty feet deep,” half-full of tin cans. “It’s a pity they drained it,” said Bowling to his local guide. “There used to be some big fish in that pool.”
Michael Judge of Iowa City is an adjunct professor at the University of Iowa School of Journalism and Mass Communication. He is a former editor at the Wall Street Journal.