1984: Big Brother Never Showed Up

I am re-reading "1984" for the Cold War class I am taking.  George Orwell's tale is so completely Evil Empire and so completely wrong.  In a bleak, battered London, Winston Smith toils rewriting history at his day job and trying to remember and write down the truth at night.

As a storyteller Orwell is brilliant and chilling.

As a prophet, he is a failure.  The world he imagined is nothing like what actually happened.  Orwell imagined a future with central control of information and nearly all history wiped out.  In this gray, impoverished world everyone is starving.

Closer to the future is Ray Bradbury's 1953 book "Fahrenheit 451."  You and I and everyone who read that book 30 years ago remember it as the book about burning books.  In this terrifying world in which Firemen start fires instead of putting them out.

But when I re-read the book several years ago, the thing that stood out was the video walls and the ear bugs.  The main character's wife had a room with three walls of video and wanted her husband to get promoted in the fire department so they could afford four walls of video.  With four walls, the video became interactive and she could be on game shows.  And everyone got music through bugs they fitted in their ears.  Bigger TVs, TVs that cover walls, music direct to your ears--that sounds like the near present and near future.

The guy who got the future right is Aldous Huxley in his 1931 book "Brave, New World."  Huxley imagines the future in which no one has to burn books because no one reads them.  In the Brave New World people are so glutted with entertainment and information that they are easy to manipulate.

Any prospect of the horrors of 1984 becoming reality died with the Soviet Union.  Communist China is becoming capitalist in a way that will eventually end the communist domination of the government.

But people who no longer read, who are obsessed with music and video, who are lazy and stupid--that world is here.  Prophetic Gold Medal to Huxley, Silver to Bradbury, no medal for Orwell.

Faith in the Military: Pumped About Prophecy on the East-West German Border

The year of America's bicentennial, I was a proud member of Brigade '76, a combat brigade sent to reinforce the East-West border at Fulda, West Germany:  right where the experts thought World War 3 would begin.  We flew to Germany from Fort Carson, Colorado, at the beginning of October.  Within two days we were in our tanks and on the border rolling past Soviet tanks on the other side of the fence.

While we drove past the fence, the Soviet tanks tracked us with their main guns.  We were not allowed to be provocative, so our guns were pointed away from the border.  Our mission was to hold the advancing 250,000 soldiers for 10 minutes to give tactical aircraft time to fly to our position and destroy the advancing enemy.  At one of the briefings when this was explained to us, a young soldier asked the Colonel on stage, "What do we do next?"  

The answer, "Nothin' son.  You'll be dead."

One the plane over to Germany I read Hal Lindsey's book "The Late Great Planet Earth."  I became one of those prophecy nuts.  I and many other believers in our unit were convinced World War 3 would happen before our three-year tour in Germany ended.  And in any case, the world was going to end by 1988.  In the field and in the barracks, many of us had long discussions about the significance of every sort of symbol in the books of Daniel and Revelation.  

It was very exciting to have this kind of inside knowledge about world events.  At that time, as now, the people who took Revelation literally also took Genesis literally.  If you thought the world was ending in 1988, you also thought it was created at about 4,000 B.C.

And it was this fact that eventually got me out of the swirling world of prophecy and back into fellowship with believers who were trying to live in faith in the present, not fixate on the future.  Over that first year in Germany, I came to see that those who took the ends of the Bible literally were not naive literalists, but very sophisticated in their literalism.  The same people preachers who push literal interpretations of Genesis and Revelation have very sophisticated reasons ready to hand about why the difficult teachings of Jesus need not be taken literally.  The same person who insists he takes the Bible literally will dodge in a nuanced way the story of the rich, young ruler in the Gospel of Luke, Ch. 18.

"That is for a specific person in a specific time," is the standard answer.  Really?  If literal is your claim, wouldn't it be better to do as Jesus says and risk suffering?  By diving in the deep end of the literal reading pool, I got to see just how incredibly selective literal reading was.  I never found anyone who would or could take the Bible completely literally.  And the rule turned out to be, the less the literal reading interfered with your life, the more literal you were likely to read that passage.    

The following year at annual tank gunnery, I read the Bible through in two weeks waiting for fog to clear on the tank gunnery range at Grafenwohr, West Germany.  This time I read the Living Bible.  The vast difference between the King James Bible and the Living Bible led me to ask about the original.  Where did the Bible come from.  I knew that the Old Testament was written in Hebrew and the New Testament was written in Greek.  But I did not know that the all of the New Testament except Luke and Acts were written by men who spoke Aramaic.  They spoke and wrote Greek as a second language.  

So the people who were so crazed about taking the Bible literally, were trying to be literal with words that were spoken in Aramaic and written in Greek by Aramaic speakers, then translated into English 1600 years later.  

It was at this point that Abel Lopez and I started talking Scripture rather than prophecy.  Abel was the commander of the tank next to mine.  We switched from literalism to the splits within the Church.  On post was both a Charismatic fellowship and a Bible Baptist fellowship.  The Baptists were sure the Charismatics were going to Hell.  The Charismatics just thought the Baptists were wrong.  Both sides wanted Abel and I to take sides.

We learned a lot over the next two years.