I find this on Page 24 of my dog-eared Signet paperback edition
of George Orwell’s 1984.
“It was almost normal for people over thirty to be frightened of
their own children. And with good reason, for hardly a week
passed in which the ‘Times’ did not carry a paragraph describing
how some eavesdropping little sneak — ‘child hero’ was the
phrase generally used — had overheard some compromising remark
and denounced his parents to the Thought Police.”
Orwell was obsessed with the totalitarian figures of his time,
especially Joseph Stalin, from whose regime he got the model for
the above. The great Soviet purges of the 1930s systematically
used children as political informers against adults. One wonders
how many people went to the Gulag based on the forced, twisted
testimony of kids. Which brings me to a school bus full of the
latter in Rexburg, Idaho, though I find them for the most part
innocent, and not malignantly Orwellian. Their value here is as
an exhibit for their potential as tools for manipulation.
The day after Election Day some grade-schoolers on the bus were
heard to be chanting in singsong “Assassinate Obama.” When bored
with that, they switched to “Assassinate Obama and Kate” (poor
little Kate, whoever she might be, but her presence does
illustrate the episode’s trivial nature). Anyway, the bus driver
overheard this, and some parents got wind of it secondhand from
their kids. In short, the Madison County School District was
notified. An official e-mail was sent to all administrators,
teachers and bus drivers stating this behavior should be met with
strong disapproval. News of the scandal reached a Twin Falls TV
news station, which devoted a short segment to it. It seems that
due to the kids’ ages (six to eight) that the United States
Secret Service wasn’t interested. But Jill Kuraitis was.
Kuraitis is the “Idaho Editor” for “New West,” a Lefty regional website
based in Missoula, Montana, and devoted to Western politics,
culture, recreation and business (mostly Green). I find it
amusing and visit everyday. It’s Missoula’s own online New York
magazine. If you want to know where to get good coffee, wine or
sushi in Missoula — check New West. There are local blogs (New
West-Missoula, New West-Bozeman, New West-Boise). I’ve always
thought of it as a sort of home-away-from-home newsletter for a
million expatriate Californians. But back to Jill Kuraitis.
She’s one of the website’s “citizen journalists” and writes
regularly. In September she penned a hysterical screed about
Sarah Palin. It was impressive; worthy of the Huffington Post or
Daily Kos. “She was the head cheerleader who got there by
bullying others and having her mother pull strings. She was the
girl who would be your best friend one day, then turn on you the
next and use your confidences against you….Winning was
everything.” You get the idea. It was a species of trite sputum
usually found in biohazard containers in the exam room of your
doctor’s office.
On November 13, Kuraitis posted a
column about those naughty kids in Rexburg. She called the
Madison County School District to ask: “What is being done to
find out if the parents of these kids have created a home
atmosphere where that kind of language and thinking is okay?”
E-mails were exchanged with a district “spokesperson” named Janet
Goodliffe. Goodliffe’s final communication: “I don’t know what
you mean. It’s not even like that. It was the day after the
election and the kids were just chanting, really little kids,
like six, seven and eight.”
But Kuraitis is undeterred. She writes: “I’m not saying all six
year olds would have known what they were saying. But most would
[Really?], and some kind of swift and serious action should be
taken to figure out where they got the swill they were
regurgitating. The kids and parents should be questioned by law
enforcement, if only to emphasize how serious the incident was.”
Kuraitis continues her piece by decrying yet another one of those
hangman’s noose incidents, this particular one in rural northern
Idaho, with a man named Ken Germana under investigation by the
Spokane office of the U.S. Secret Service. “I hope authorities
throw the book at him.” I would guess that Kuraitis found nothing
wrong with Sarah Palin hanged in effigy in California as a
Halloween prank.
Since the election especially the left has adopted a paranoid
stance concerning President-elect Obama’s safety. The fact that
President Bush has for the last eight years stoically endured the
most vicious opprobrium the left had to offer, including starring
in the plot of novel that speculated on the virtues of
assassination, doesn’t faze the Jill Kuraitis’ of the world. The
double standard is glaringly apparent.
But Kuraitis can’t comprehend that. With her laser glare focused
on six year olds and misanthropic hermits living in the woods,
she ends her piece wallowing in histrionic gobbledygook: “I’m at
a loss about how to stop this stuff, but that doesn’t stop me
from using my fury to try to think of something constructive.
It’s an enormous concept with thousands of years of history to
try to fight hate and violence, but we have to start somewhere.”
I think George Orwell would have been fascinated by Jill
Kuraitis. In one tiresome piece she has managed to display both
definitions of the word “Orwellian”: that related to the
political and to the linguistic.
