the bastards' last stand

@DrawingEggen I have been re-reading 1984 and it has admittedly taken longer than needed. It was an assigned text in high school to which I never felt the need to return. It's better reading than I remembered. I think that I sometimes forget that our cannon is made up of literature that's not just thematically important, but also masterfully written. That Orwell knew what he was doing. The reason it's taking so long is that I find it so chilling that I need to periodically stop. It generates more dread than actual horror stories might. It's not entirely clear if I missed this in the first reading because of my own relative youth and naiveté or the shrinking distance between this moment in time and the society in the book. The erosion of the wall between our reality and the fictional reality of 1984 begins with the way that language is constructed to maintain ideological commitment and social control. The totalitarian state,  Oceania, created and recreates the language o