Party Leader O'Brien

Confidently explains GOP Strategy for Victory in the 2006 election…before the 2006 election.

From “1984” by George Orwell. Part 3, Chapter 3:

Winston: 'You could not create such a world as you have just described. It is a dream. It is impossible.'

O'Brien: 'Why?'

Winston: 'It is impossible to found a civilization on fear and hatred and cruelty. It would never endure.'

O'Brien: 'Why not?'

Winston: 'It would have no vitality. It would disintegrate. It would commit suicide.'

O'Brien: 'Nonsense. You are under the impression that hatred is more exhausting than love. Why should it be? And if it were, what difference would that make? Suppose that we choose to wear ourselves out faster. Suppose that we quicken the tempo of human life till men are senile at thirty. Still what difference would it make? Can you not understand that the death of the individual is not death? The party is immortal.'

As usual, the voice had battered Winston into helplessness. Moreover he was in dread that if he persisted in his disagreement O'Brien would twist the dial again. And yet he could not keep silent. Feebly, without arguments, with nothing to support him except his inarticulate horror of what O'Brien had said, he returned to the attack.

Winston: 'I don't know -- I don't care. Somehow you will fail. Something will defeat you. Life will defeat you.'

O'Brien: 'We control life, Winston, at all its levels. You are imagining that there is something called human nature which will be outraged by what we do and will turn against us. But we create human nature. Men are infinitely malleable. Or perhaps you have returned to your old idea that the proletarians or the slaves will arise and overthrow us. Put it out of your mind. They are helpless, like the animals. Humanity is the Party. The others are outside -- irrelevant.'

As long as they could ignore those Outside their Fundy/Neocon Bubble with impunity – as long as the media and 50.0001% of the voting public remained compliant and complicit -- this is where we were headed. A permanent, obedient, One Party majority ruling through “fear and hatred and cruelty” forever.

Which is why not wasting breath on trying to convert the hardcore, mouthbreathing Republican base, but using the naked insanity of the base as a fulcrum to move the "One out of Ten" to action, was so vitally important.

Winston is right. Such a system “…would have no vitality” because hatred and fear are exhausting. These elements were, in the end, all the GOP had to run their Party. They are terribly powerful, toxic fuels, burning very hot and very bright, but they quickly shred the engine and cripple the passengers.

And without opposition, such a system can endure for a very long time. Just ask a North Korean. Or Soviet communist. Or 16th Century Catholic. Or an 18th Century Virginia slaveholder. Or a 20th Century Mississippi segregationist. The State can putrefy from the inside year after year – or century after century -- until the breeze from the wings of a single dragonfly can bring it down...but only from the Outside.

This is why the GOP has spent billions and decades erecting an Alternate Reality where it was not just safe but actually considered virtuous and noble to tell the Outside world to fuck off. An Alternate Media, Alternate Politics, Alternate Economics, Alternate Religion…all built to create and nurture a pathologically inhumane “Fuck Everyone But Me” cult of unadulterated, life-hating Solipsism.

Fuck international obligations, norms and laws, even where we were the ones that established them. Fuck our own history. Fuck the air. Fuck the water. Fuck science. Fuck the planet. Fuck the poor. Fuck the weak. Fuck tolerance. Fuck the Constitution. Fuck Jesus.

And for everyone inside the Bubble, the line between "Good" and "Evil" could not be brighter or clearer.

Everyone inside the bubble who works obediently to keep Reality at bay is Righteous.

Everyone inside is “saved” by the Wingtard perversion of Ephesians 2:8,9:

“For by grace are ye saved through fealty to the Party; and that not of yourselves: it is the gift of the Dear Leader: Not of science or fact...”

And those outside the bubble might be evil, or stupid, or “elitist”, but all of them are ultimately “irrelevant”, because when the Party is Humanity and the entire fraud is held aloft by the collective and furious denial and rage of the morally blind and intellectually dead, then nothing that is not of the Party can be allowed to exist.

This is a genuine power in this (and that power is why so many people were freaking out about Diebold and Karl Rove’s supposed invincibility, both of which were and still are real threats) but only so long as all they can force all battles to be fought on their terms. Waged inside their Solipsist Event Horizon. Because only beneath the Fox/Hate Radio/Christopath/Neocon veil do their self-evident lies and braying idiocy have any currency.

Their dogmatic collective hallucinations, like Fairy Gold, turn to ash and dust when dragged out of the cave and into the sunlight, which is why the GOP is so hysterically focused on their mantra that the Outside must either be definitively dismissed or destroyed on every front.

Because when you live inside the Bubble, every dragonfly is a dagger at your throat.