Imagination is more important than knowledge.

Okay. Here's the deal.

I had an assignment. Read 1984. Report on it with a partner.

I'd never read it. John, my partner, suggested it would be good. So I got it from the library.

Big mistake.

It literally felt like my soul was vomiting. I hated it. It was the most cynical, horrid story I'd ever, EVER read. To think for one moment that it could actually come true makes me want to scream in disgust.

No offense to all of you who liked the story, but...WHY? Why do you like it at all?

Yes, it's gripping and dramatic but for the love of God, the character of O'Brien alone makes me want to rip the book into shreds and PEE on it! The man is scum. The Party is scum. No, I'm wrong, the Party in 1984 represent things worse than trash. They've stopped being "people". They're less than "things". Their ultimate end is power.

Sick. Sick. Sick.

And Orwell? Why am I not surprised with this? British socialists of the 1930s rejected such liberal values as democracy, humanist art, freedom (as reduced to market freedom), Progress, and rationality on the basis that liberalism as an organism was a failure! And yes, Orwell was a self-described Socialist. He felt that British democracy of 1939 couldn't survive the war. He got himself proved wrong after the war. The war and the revolution can't be separated, he discovered.

You know what else he found out? He had Tuberculosis. He died at the age of 46 of a burst artery in his lungs.

I know plenty of people like 1984. I don't know why though. Yes, it's dramatic. Yes, it really GETS to you. Creeps you out, I suppose. But still, I'll be honest, for a so-called "cautionary tale", it reads less like an everyday man's look at what the world could be and more like a cynic's nightmare vision on democratic socialism taken to the extreme.

I think it was Karma that got to Orwell. He didn't just look into the abyss. He put one foot in it.

I won't do that.

I believe. I BELIEVE that good is a force more powerful than evil, than greed. O'Brien denies that civilization can't be founded on fear and hatred and cruelty. He denies that the Earth is not the center of the Universe. He denies that the Earth is older than man. These are the words of an ignorant hypocrite who's sole purpose is to wean down an innocent man until he's finally broken. I'd sooner bite through my own hand to break free and sink my teeth into his neck or bite through my own tongue than listen to his spew.

Just because you refuse to acknowledge that a car is coming towards you at 50 miles an hour doesn't mean that you still won't become a pancake.

Not all points of view should be tolerated. You wouldn't listen to a Nazi. You wouldn't listen to a Dictator. I won't listen to a cynic either. All of them represent terrible parts of what humanity can become. The belief that humanity, either part of it, or all of it, is flawed and evil.

No offense, but...screw you. Now, if you don't mind...I'm off to go return this dumb copy of 1984 before I end up burning it in my trash can.