P A G E 14
2004
FROM PAGE 1 3 '
of misinformation dulled and confused his memory; and of
course doublethink interfaced — a large portion of his mind was
trained to believe everything issued by the Ministry of Truth no
matter how mutable or how personally the distortions were his
own conception. Every revision of circumstance was accompan
ied by instant and automatic faith in its immutability.
Winston’s instructions were faxed from higher echelons
within the Ministry of Truth. He was never candidly ordered to
alter historical record, which at any rate was little more than
fiction. Each revision of scripture was justified by other alliter
ations to scripture. Winston might question the veracity of his
assignments but he also relished the challenge they gave his
imagination to concoct the necessary sacred lies.
Someone else, if they had momentarily put aside fear
of thinking improper thoughts, might have become cynical or
obsessively dispirited. Winston's seemingly instinctual recogni
tion of hypocrisy (probably a result of his amendability) prodded
him to intellectual revulsion of militant theocracy. He thought he
was alone in his lack of faith. He could not trust anyone, which
he realized as the most powerful and compelling psychology of
control. But what to do about it he had not a clue.
Winston could not clearly remember if the past resem
bled the present. Some subliminal memory told him it had not,
that life had been much more open and pleasant. That daily life
had been lived without fear. He couldn’t be sure. His memory
was indistinct, scrubbed so often he was not sure he remem
bered anything
But startling thoughts popped into his mind as if from
nowhere. One such moment occurred during a vehement noon
time exhortation by a visiting high-level cleric against sexual
intercourse, first among cardinal sins, demanding everyone,
men and women, resist all temptation, unnecessarily warning
that death was the punishment for anyone caught in an inappro
priate and uncompromising sexual act (though the leniency of
castration was often granted men unless they were homosex
uals). Winston's mind was not upon the fulsome priest. A bit
of oldtime wisdom jacked through his synapses: Everybody
constantly thought about sex but believed prayer would take its
place in the afterlife. The reality in his lifetime was that prayer
was substituted for sex.
Vows of chastity were required of everyone.Only hetero
sexual couples selected for their spiritual purity and married by
the Order were allowed intercourse. The risk was that those who
applied for marriage and were rejected after examination faced
torture and death. Marital sex was restricted to what was called
the ‘missionary’ position, the woman on her back, the man on
top, which would be an adequate metaphor for any definitive
sculpture of Evangélica.
Winston was hungry for knowledge of the real past. He
treasured small proofs. Once he saw three pariahs at a café who
were later arrested and executed. Their names and photographs
disappeared from all records. But he remembered seeing briefly
a newspaper article about their trial, which was shown on the
only television network (‘The Holy Joy Channel'). Gospel and
fervent worship programming was mixed with inquisitional trials
of heretics, homosexuals, witches, traitors, enemy prisoners and
Jews. Executions were generally the most watched programs,
although the names of the condemned vanished and records
altered to indicate they never existed. This was a contradiction
to Winston and led to his initial questioning of the ruling dogma.
To him it was the most compelling question: What happened to
the souls of the disappeared? Did they vanish also? Of course
he knew better than to voice his question or reveal any suspicion
he gave it a thought. He was as always carefully reverent in his
demeanor.
Once he saw a very old man and risked almost certain
vanishment asking questions in a seedy unsanctioned drinking
place about the past. The old man had been struck by Al's
Hammer (perhaps aggravated by continual and contradictory
brainwashing; Winston's work) and could only recollect personal
anecdotes and old abuses whose meaning Winston dismissed
without fathoming.
One day he left the Ministry of Truth early. Sundry
dervish holograms assailed him as he walked toward his shabby
apartment building. “GOD IS WATCHINGI” the sepulchral voice
warned He entered his dreary room and sat at a table in an
alcove the peeping TV screen was unable to penetrate. He
opened a blank diary he had purchased in a small antique store
and hoarded like contraband. He looked at the first page,
hesitated a moment, then wrote passionately, nearly out of
control:
DOWN WITH GOD
DOWN WITH GOD
DOWN WITH GOD
He stopped, frightened of his own damned heresy.
From that moment he knew he was as good as dead
GOD IS DEAD! He wrote defensively.
At his lowest depths of depression and futility he met
Julia He was terrified of her at first. He thought she was a
wanton temptress in pay of zealous sex vigilantes who trapped
unwary respondents and executed them on the spot. He wanted
to crush her skull when he saw her staring at him in the Ministry
of Truth, convinced she was procured by the Inquisition to
entrap him to breach his obligatory commitment to chastity.
Always the testing of spiritual surrender. That in itself seemed
reason to cudgel her. But he was afraid to strike.
She stumbled into him one day in a corridor and pressed
something into his hand. Shaken and unexpectedly excited,
Winston unfolded the paper circumspectly in his palm, out of
sight of security screens, and at his computer added it to a stack
of scriptual revision orders He took her message off the pile
after processing a few fine-tuning adjustments to past and
present. 7 tove you," the note read. His heart surged, and he
never again thought of her as an agent of the priests. Instead
his new fear was that he was too old, too shabby, too haggard
for his years. She was young, impressively vital. She would
not want him. He told her this the first time they met in secret.
She shook her head and kissed him. "You're like me," she said.
“You hate the priests. I knew it the first time I saw you."
They made love the first few times in places she select
ed and carefully committed to both their memories the details of
their separate approaches and departures He became obsessed
DRAWINGS B Y ROGER HAYES
with her. He wanted her to be soiled, impure. She laughed and
said she was just the woman. Once he asked her if she enjoyed
sex for itself. Oh yes, she said. He rented a room finally in the
attic of a bedraggled antiques store cluttered with cheap memor-
ablia of an earlier age, to him precious icons of a far better past.
Julia was much more aware of the past than Winston.
She revealed herself as a Jewess, so far undetected as a result
of her public fervor for the ruling theology. She inherited the
continuing scholasticism of her religion and its intense oral
tradition that survived the incessant rewriting of scripture. The
Old Testament belonged to her people; they lived it and wrote
it, and most envious to Winston, bound Julia inextricably to a
community of time from which he was isolated. Although he
yearned for a known ancestry he was a creature of discontinuity.
He was without a coherent past, barely even a present, and
when he was eventually found out as a heretic and made to
vanish, no trace of his life would subsequently exist.
Both knew they were doomed. They knew it when they
rented the attic room from the sympathetic elderly owner of the
antique store, who seemed to cherish the historic curios in his
shop and seldom sold any. Renting the room hastened the
certainty of their discovery, but they were tired of planning
elaborately detailed trysts in the countryside or in abandoned
tenements. They wanted a place they could call their home,
however briefly before the Inquisition captured them.
It was inevitable they would take the greater risk yet
logical next step of seeking out the opposition underground so
fanatically denounced and hunted. Winston was certain one of
the high priests at the Ministry of Truth was simpatico. He had,
indeed, based his entire personal revolt on his faith in the priest
as his mentor. Once he had exchanged a quick glance with the
priest and read into it intellectual recoil at the hypocrisy and
plain stupefied malevolence that represented itself as godly
omnipotence. A second occasion he was approached by the
priest and engaged in a brief conversation that firmly indicated
intimacy with the forces of reform and change.
It seemed only natural that Winston and Julia accept
a veiled invitation to the priest’s personal quarters, though a
mistake of timing put them together at the outside door. They
were let in quickly by a servant. As they followed him down a
long hall, Winston and Julia marveled at its opulence. Winston
found it difficult to compare the richness of art and furnishings
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with his own mean room. He felt elevated at the thought of such
a high level priest risking everything for intellectual freedom.
Julia, from a long tradition of religious intolerance and betrayal,
was more restrained in her enthusiasm as Winston introduced
her.
Julia left first. Just as Winston was about to scurry out
the door, the priest gave him a book disguised as a Bible and
said it would explain everything A flurry of work prevented him
from reading the book for several days. During a weeklong
observance of intolerance against the Great Satans the war
changed and the predominant enemy became the Asian
Pagans. The Ministry of Truth was compelled to immediately
revise all records and media to affirm that the Pagans were the
enemy all along, which was difficult due to the immense official
effort to enflame public hatred of the Great Satans, who, of
course, remained an implacable enemy despite the transfer
of pious pique.
One evening Winston took the book to the attic room
above the antique store a couple of hours before Julia was to
arrive. He read about the political subversion that underlay
perpetual spiritual war, the manipulation of religious fervor to
attain material goals. Actually a single goal. Power. Pure and
Supreme. Absolute.The power of God. Not a benevolent God.
History proved the weakness of benevolence. Raw power,
violent and cruel was the creed. The power of the Big Bang
the instant God created the Universe with a mighty clap of
hands. That was the power the Holy Order intended to wield
over the world, the most elemental power possible. Sanctioned
by the mandate of celestial supremacy, the priests set about
spiritually sanitizing their increasing flocks, virtually perpetual
wirebrush cleansing of the faithful while always watchful for
contagiously faithless heretics. The Order was in conflict with
any person, creed or idea that did not recognize its supremacy,
and opponents were not forgiven or reformed. They were
mercilessly hunted down and exterminated without any record
remaining of their brief existence.
The establishment of a militant theocracy had been
absurdly easy. The Christian evangelical movement rose rapidly
from spurned obscurity to political dominance, using a combin
ation of dynamic evangelism, television, money and high-tech
methods of advertising and propaganda (as well as sanctified
corruption) to win local and national elections and mandate laws
that discriminated against homosexuals, assertive women, non-
Christians and other pariahs.
The longheld fear that communism or socialism would
ultimately triumph was startlingly reversed when the major
communist empires and socialist states collapsed; more start
ling was the rapid rise in the vacuum of conservative religious
orders all over the world that not only quickly dominated their
parent religions but wrested political control of nearly half the
planet with blinding swiftness.
American evangelists had endured a half century quietly
organizing, clinging to harsh doctrines that tolerated no deviation
from ancient scripture and waiting for the internal collapse of
Great Sodom (the United States), which they were certain would
occur at the Millennium. Liberal democracy was especially
demonic to the protectors of oldtime religion. Women debased
in the marketplace, not as chattel but as aspiring corporate
CEOs, flaunting unspeakable feminism at the devout faithful.
Deviant homosexuals boldly challenging traditional values.
Heretical sects such Buddhists, Muslims and abominable
Catholics practicing their heresies openly. And the Jewish
problem awaited solution.
Great Sodom was perfidiously sabotaged from within
by the evangelical agenda which practiced political subversion
and theft of elections. Freedom of religion disappeared when
the evangelists triumphed at the polls.The first act of the Sacred
Ecumenical Council, as Congress was renamed, was to abolish
all other religions in favor of a state religion established by the
Holy Order, which had usurped the Presidency. The next act
was to purge heretics. Massive roundups and executions in the
early years set a pattern still followed of sanctioned inquisition.
Arrests and executions were a daily routine. Public trials and
executions entertained and terrified the faithful. The fear of God
inspired love of God as terror inspired faith.
Winston’s own memory was confused. He thought he
once knew about the spread of evangelical fervor that reformed
the western hemisphere. TV preachers infected an ever Increas
ing public with negative platitudes that encouraged isolation and
persecution of heretics, homosexuals, free-thinking women,