One would not think it a moral fit to include the adjectives "joyful, cheerful," and "happy" to recount the instant murder of 70,000 plus souls by way of a genocidal weapon engineered to do its duty in a flash of light. Yet, such a sinister juxtaposition of "elation" and "death" spreads its silver wings for public view just 25 miles from the Whitehouse, where a former occupant sanctioned its homicidal mission. In an absurd - and freshly immoral - twist of fate eighty years later, the abode's current occupant, President Trump, has recently taken offence to the display of this deadly relic at the Smithsonian's Air and Space Museum in Chantilly Virginia. The President is not grieving the B29's role causing mass casualties by way of conflagration, but rather, in the recent words of Pope Francis, he is lamenting its association with "faggotry." You see, pilot Paul Tibbets named his flying Vishnu after his beloved mother, Enola Gay.
The whisking of the frontal lobe necessary to conflate the name of this murderous plane with the manufactured threat of American citizens practicing their human rights would be comical if it wasn't coupled with an existential threat to American democracy. What existential threat? One can do no better than examine George Orwell's prophetic novel 1984, penned just three years after the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Orwell's future concerned itself with:
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Totalitarian Regimes and Surveillance
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The Loss of Individual Freedom
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Manipulation of Truth and Language
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Psychological Control
5. The Futility of Rebellion
6. The Cycle of Oppression
And since we are swimming in an omelet of gray matter, let's crack open a reference to another George, George Langelaan who penned The Fly in 1957. Langelaan's work explored "the fragility of identity and how it can be easily disrupted by external forces." For those of us keeping the whisk of ignorance free of Orwellian yoke, we would do well to heed Gina Davis's warning in the The Fly's 1986 film adaptation: "Be afraid. Be very afraid!"
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