"This could not be more Orwellian," Hawley claimed. "Simon & Schuster is canceling my contract because I was representing my constituents, leading a debate on the Senate floor on voter integrity, which they have now decided to redefine as sedition."
www.businessinsider.com January 7, 2021.
Tommy Tuberville had not been in the Senate very long, but he knew where to find his colleague Josh Hawley – in his hideaway office deep under the Capitol, where he could pray, nap, or hide from mobs he had encouraged but that fell prey to an excess of enthusiasm.
Hawley was sitting in his easy chair under his framed pictures of Jesus Christ and Chiang-Kai-Shek when Tuberville knocked. “Come in, Senator,” he said.
“Thank you, Senator.”
“Let’s not stand on formality. Call me Josh.”
“Sure. And you can call me Ballcoach,” Tuberville replied. “Look, we gotta talk. I saw you said that company cancelling your book contract was Orwellian. Well, I don’t know much about this Orwell guy, so I got a book he wrote called 1984. I figured it must be some kind of history book, and that it must be pretty damn bad if your book deal getting canceled reminded you of him. But now that I’ve read it, heck Josh, you might have this Orwell thing all wrong.”
“Well, eh…Ballcoach, I’ve read it a few times –”
“Oh, I’m sure you have – you went to one of those top-drawer colleges, right? Missouri State?”
“I went to Yale.”
Ballcoach nodded. “Oh yeah, Calvin Hill. Look, I don’t read that many books – maybe if I did I’d know who we fought in World War Two or what the three branches of government were,” and here he blushed abashedly. “Golly, that was silly of me, saying they were the Executive, the Senate, and the House. Everybody knows it’s the Executive, the Legislative, and the Police. But put that aside. Frankly, this 1984 could be the best book I’ve read since Old Yeller that wasn’t all Xs and Os and arrows. Look right here on the cover. It says ‘A portrait of a totalitarian dystopia.’ Now, I don’t know what dystopia is, but if it’s like dysentery or dyslexia, I bet it’s pretty bad. But I expected an attack on totalitarianism, and it turns out there’s not a word in it about totalitarianism – nothing about Obamacare or any other socialist government medical care, they’re not overwhelmed with dreamers and other rapists and murderers crawling under The Wall, and frankly, from how the book describes it, there’s not much environmental regulation either. And there’s only one lady character in the book, and believe me, she’s not Hillary Clinton. So where’s all this totalitarianism?”
“Well, you see, Tommy –”
“Ballcoach.”
“Yeah, well, you see, Ballcoach, the people in that book didn’t have any rights – like the right to storm the Capitol, or the right to have their book published. This Big Brother guy tells them what they can think.”
“Well, hell, what’s the problem there? My job was to tell my players what to think. And Isn’t that our job right now? If you didn’t tell folks Biden got most of his votes from the cardboard cutouts in empty football stadiums, they would have walked around under the delusion he won by 7 million votes. Besides, this 1984 has a happy ending – this Winston Smith guy ended up loving Big Brother. So how bad an hombre could Big Brother be? And… here –” Ballcoach said as he riffled the pages looking for a particular spot but soon abandoned the attempt, “this Winston Smith guy has a job at the Ministry of Truth. Now that’s a pretty good thing to have a Ministry for, as I see it -- rewriting old newspapers so they say the right stuff! I mean, this Orwell guy didn’t just understand Fake News, he knew what to do about it! In fact, maybe we need a Ministry of Truth – we can’t ask Newsmaxx and OAN to carry the burden on their own.”
“No, no, Ballcoach. Here – give me your book,” Hawley said, somewhat irritated, and flipped through it. “You see here? it talks about thoughtcrime. How can putting people in jail for thinking something be a good thing? It’s just like thinking about cancelling a book deal with an odious author. And what about the people who persecute folks like me who believe there is not one square inch of all creation over which Jesus Christ is not Lord?”
“Hold your horses, Josh. You’re making my point. There are people who persecute you because you know Jesus Christ rules over Creation instead of Darwin or some other magical thinking. Sure, that’s thoughtcrime. But like I say to my defense on the sideline, let’s turn things around here. We know we let those coyote hat, zip-tie dudes into the Capitol so they could drop a deuce in the hallways and defend freedom and fair elections. Why won’t we condemn them? Because they were thinking something good. But when the Black Lives Come First hoodlums showed up, the Police told them if they stood still near the Capitol, they’d get the shit beaten out of them. Am I right?”
Hawley nodded agreement.
“Well, then Schumer and Pelosi and the rest of the Jews were crying about how there was a big difference between the two situations and something about race, but I’ll tell you the real difference – it was what they was thinking. The dudes at the Capitol were thinking about how they love their country and didn’t want Cesar Chavez’s voting machines to steal the election for his Chinese communist buddy Biden. But the Black Lives Matter But Yours Doesn't crowd were thinking how they wanted to burn buildings and assault our daughters – and that was just the women! There’s the difference right there. What they were thinking was a crime.”
“Well, I agree with you there, but still –”
“No, wait, I ain’t done. Then there’s this thing Orwell’s got called doublethink. Now, first, how can doublethink be bad? Is double coverage worse than single coverage? And what’s wrong with the double-wing offense? If I want my players to hustle on and off the field, do I tell them double time it or single time it? If I want to chew gum, do I want to chew Doublemint –”
“I get it, Ballcoach.”
“Then you see my point. Here, let me read what this Orwell guy wrote.
“Doublethink … (means using) conscious deception while retaining the firmness of purpose that goes with complete honesty. To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just so long as it is needed, to deny the existence of objective reality and all the while to take account of the reality which one denies—all this is indispensably necessary.
“Now, that’s a whole bag of words, but what I hear is this – you can lie your ass off but you have to do it with a straight face and remember you’re lying, except when you’re lying, when you have to believe it.” Tuberville took a deep breath. “I think I got it right. I know you’re sore about the book thing, but this Orwell guy is on your side when you get down to it. I mean, how can you make up all that stuff about Biden stealing the election without doublethinking it?
Hawley shifted uncomfortably in his seat. “Now hang on. I didn’t say there was vote fraud. I said people think there was vote fraud and we ought to investigate it.”
“Now you’re talking!” Tuberville replied. “That there is some first-class doublethinking. It’s not Pilate washing his hands, but it’s good. And then there’s this one last thing. While he’s getting tortured – just like you’d torture an Al-Qaeda guy, I figure – Winston Smith asks his torturer why the Party wants power. And the answer is – for its own sake. Boom! And then the guy says,
“We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means, it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship.
“Now that makes good sense. Because if we can overturn the election, then there’s nothing that the antifa socialists can do anymore to harm America. All we’re trying to do is to get rid of oppressive institutions that limit our rights and freedoms.”
Hawley nodded. “Well, I can agree with that. After all, why did we want to be Senators anyway? Wasn’t it to do exactly that?”
Tommy Tuberville smiled awkwardly. “I…I guess so. But I really wanted to be a Senator because I got fired at Auburn for paying players under the table. But if this Big Brother guy doesn’t want to win football games, then I miss my guess.”
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