Freakin’ Anthony Burgess horrorshow
Read that Washington Post headline again. Is there anything you’ve read lately that encapsulates the ultraviolence the MAGA cult is committing against the United States of America (land of the free, and all) than “Red states threaten librarians with prison”?
Who knew “A Clockwork Orange” (1962) was to be so prescient? Anthony Burgess published Clockwork during the Cold War, in the year the U.S. and the Soviets came closest to nuking each other. Laced with Nadsat, the Russian-based teen slang Burgess invented and put into the mouth of his thuggish protagonist, the book itself was designed as a subtle form of conditioning.
Burgess wrote in 1980, “The novel was to be an exercise in linguistic programming, with the exoticisms gradually clarified by context: I would resist to the limit any publisher’s demand that a glossary be provided. A glossary would disrupt the programme and nullify the brainwashing.”
As we’ve seen:
Two senior Republican lawmakers, the chairs of the House Intelligence and Foreign Affairs committees, say their colleagues are echoing Russian state propaganda against Ukraine.
Researchers who study disinformation say Reps. Mike Turner, R-Ohio, and Michael McCaul, R-Texas, are merely acknowledging what has been clear for some time: Russian propaganda aimed at undermining U.S. and European support for Ukraine has steadily seeped into America’s political conversation over the past decade, taking on a life of its own.
In the 1960s, it was the hippie counterculture that coined “Better Red Than Dead” in reaction to the threat of nuclear war. These days, MAGA Republicans show off T-shirts celebrating their negative partisanship: “I’d rather be a Russian than a Democrat.”
Demonizing political rivals, banning books, threatening librarians with prison, spouting Russian propaganda aimed at destroying the United States is what the Party of Trump considers ultranationalist ultrapatriotism.
And, of course, bearing “assault weapons, Confederate flags, and swastikas,” threatening fellow Americans with “a bit of the old ultraviolence.”
Even against their own, Mike Johnson.
The Post explains that while Democrats are attempting to pass measures to “prohibit book bans or forbid the harassment of school and public librarians,” their “library-friendly measures are being outpaced by bills in mostly red states that aim to restrict which books libraries can offer and threaten librarians with prison or thousands in fines for handing out ‘obscene’ or ‘harmful’ titles.” Republicans claim their laws are about pornography:
But other lawmakers say [the bills] are ideologically driven censorship dressed up as concern for children. They note that, as book challenges spiked to historic highs over the past two years, the majority of objections targeted books by and about LGBTQ people and people of color.
The bans are a Republican reverse-Ludovico Technique aimed not at forcing children to read but Brezhnev Era censorship designed by right-thinking “patriots” hoping to prevent children’s exposure to ideas they deem wrong-thinking.
Imagine Stephen Miller back in the White House next year. Then get busy working to elect Democrats up and down the ticket.
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