In 1984
Winston recalled the lyrics:
“Under the spreading chestnut tree
I sold you and you sold me.”
What could that ever mean?
What could the significance be?
Is this really how it’s made to be?
You created a world
of an
Inner Party.
I believe History will be
unkind to you.
This I think
quietly to myself
as I speak into the receiver
and know you are listening
to all but then unsaid.
I imagine you breathing
taking down every number I call
every word I say
parsing it carefully. As though it mattered
as though you would do something with it
as though
History will be unkind to you.
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Photo credit: Flickr user Andrew, with edits.
Well done. And please, may history be unkind. Is this not a description of Facebook, our branding of our pleasant successful lives? Only if we wake up, consciously resist, and win the wars of consciousness, will history make any note of us at all. If we continue to text ceaselessly in corners, or while walking, avoiding eye contact; if we treat tweets, either sent or followed, as significant; or we think the aggregate monitoring of our electronic activity only affects others, certainly not ourselves – well then, history will not only not be kind; history will not be. History is the record of events related to the ever-renewed struggle between some kind of power and freedom; sometimes right, sometimes misguided, sincere, and wrong; always an inevitable struggle to restore some lost balance in the human experience, to violate the robotic consensus to reveal the present chains and prison walls.