Recently I was researching Arrested Development only to find it's now known as Borderline Personality Disorder.
In a moment of brilliance I realized that we have somehow entered the Brave New World of New Speak.
Mental disorder (formerly known as stupidity) is subdivided into a number of sub classes.
Attention Deficit Syndrome (not listening stupid)
Compulsive Verbal Disorder (talking too much)
Verbally Challenged Disorder (expletives deleted)
Emotionally Challenged (formerly known as immature)
Conceptually Challenged (formerly known as moron)
Compulsive Authority Aversion (formerly known as teenager)
Ideological Fixation Disorder (communists)
Obsessive Consumption Dysfunction (formerly known as greed)
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11 comments:
I like how the old VDs became STD and then STI.
Can't have the promiscuous feeling guilty for having sex without love or carry the stigma of being diseased.
There are drugs for all those "illnesses...."
They seem to come up with more of these euphemisms each year.
Lexcen,
Huxley was a better prophet than Orwell.
Now take your Prozac soma and scream at the neoconservative on the television for two minutes.
;)
I'm just old-fashioned bitchy.
Huxley vs Orwell? I've always thought of them as two of a kind.
Huxley vs. Orwell
"And it seems to me perfectly in the cards that there will be within the next generation or so a pharmacological method of making people love their servitude, and producing ... a kind of painless concentration camp for entire societies, so that people will in fact have their liberties taken away from them but will rather enjoy it, because they will be distracted from any desire to rebel by propaganda, brainwashing, or brainwashing enhanced by pharmacological methods" - Aldous Huxley, in a letter to Orwell after reading 1984
Of course, throw in some Bradbury and their two differing dystopian views aren't exactly incompatible.
beamish, thanks for the link. I can see why you think Huxley is the better visionary. On the other hand, consider the current system of video surveillance of public spaces (especially in the UK for example) you might feel that the Orwellian vision is coming true.
Lexcen,
True. But I'm sure they've got a pill to fight the fear of being watched. And the fear of having computers generate official-looking surveillance video to incriminate you.
Tom Hanks shook JFK's hand in Forrest Gump you know.
Check out Equilibrium. It's not a bad flick, if you like the dystopian sci-fi genre.
It taps 1984, Brave New World, Fahrenheit 451, and a few other dark totalitarian future visions and weaves them together.
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