Unbe-effing-lievable

I'm pretty sure George Orwell predicted something like this in 1984 which used to be standard reading list material for high school English. That didactic novel, along with "Politics and the English Language," used to be a standard offering in high school literature anthologies when I was in high school. "Politics' also was a standard item in freshman comp readers like the venerable LittleBrown Reader when I was a lowly M.A. teaching assistant a long, long time ago. The way I was taught both works, and subsequently taught the essay, was as a warning, as a sort of consumer reports for citizens. Back then the country was worried about the Commies. From the Soviet Union. Who might someday invade us through our Mexican back yard. And manipulate our newspapers and rewrite history. We teaching assistants were more worried about the Reagan administration, which seemed the ne plus ultra of the Orwellian, which just goes to show how limited our imaginations were.

That's what I assumed most people got from Orwell, back in the day. Turns out the guys currently in Washington were reading his stuff as a how-to manual, while the editors of America, who should have read it as a warning, must have skipped class that day.