Like Pilate said to Jesus: ‘We can’t go on together with suspicious minds!’
You’ve heard the expression, The fact that you are paranoid doesn’t mean no-one is out to get you.
You’ve also heard of George Orwell’s book 1984 – and if you haven’t, you will still, at least, know the phrase (or the TV-show) ‘Big Brother.’
Now, when Orwell was still alive even his friends thought that the writer had been as paranoid as the book that made him and the idea of state surveillance famous.
Well, maybe Orwell was indeed paranoid – but maybe not…:
According to some of his friends, George Orwell was paranoid. In the mid-30s he thought Catholics were spying on him; during the Spanish Civil War he thought communists were shadowing him. In Nineteen Eighty-Four, Winston Smith, relentlessly scrutinised by Big Brother, embodies that sense of persecution.
But Orwell’s paranoia, it seems, was justified. The Soviet secret police were watching him in Barcelona in 1937, and now, thanks to documents just released, we know he was also under surveillance by Special Branch and MI5 as early as 1929, while living “down and out” in Paris.
There is, of course, another saying that is even more popular than the one about paranoia. It is, in fact, its kissing cousin and it goes, Truth can be stranger than fiction.
No doubt it can be – but sometimes there is no obvious winner and then truth and fiction just have to settle for a tie:
A Polish pulp fiction writer was sentenced to 25 years in jail yesterday for his role in a grisly case of abduction, torture and murder, a crime that he then used for the plot of a bestselling thriller.
In the novel, the villain gets away with kidnapping, mutilating and murdering a young woman.
In real life, however, Bala got his comeuppance, even though it was seven years after the disappearance of the advertising executive whose murder confounded detectives until they read the book.
There are also occasions whereupon fiction – or any fantasy – can become reality. Sometimes, this can have somewhat unfortunate consequences:
Widower Donald Warren had organized a fake wake for his 80th birthday. He had even hired a coffin to lie propped up in to watch “mourners”.
But the wake had to be cancelled … because he died for real the day before, from a heart attack.
Sometimes though, it seems that nothing we think we know, is based on actual fact. For every Holy Book and every elegant Big Bang theory we see glimpses of something that’s so grotesque that we can’t help but wonder if planet Earth can be anything else than a tasteless amusement park, built by Gods or aliens with a strange sense of humour and a quite demented taste for old-fashioned Rock ‘n’ ‘Roll’:
Sir,
I have just returned from New York where, as usual, the two most enduring icons of that great country are Elvis and the Statue of Liberty.
However, a photograph of Liberty’s face during construction in 1885 indicates that she and “the King” must be related and are possibly one and the same.
Have we misunderestimated the impact of cloning? Shall we tell the President?
(Or, as the man himself would have said: We can’t go on forever with suspicious minds. So, that statue? Well, Return to sender!)
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