Have you ever talked to a political person and have them cite Nineteen Eight-Four in an argument against the PATRIOT Act or about the terrorist surveillance program? What about someone quoting Brave New World while railing against the dangers of capitalism? Oh, how about having Fahrenheit 451 put together with hardcore Christians views on certain books? It happened. I used to do it in my younger days. Its quite simple, its very effective and its wholly dishonest in that it removes the context of the action from the universe the book is set in.

The Anti-Communist Socialist

Written by Eric Aurthur Blair (aka George Orwell) during the Second World War, Nineteen Eight-Four has become the icon of all political dystopia novels before and after it. Blair, a socialist, was a soldier in the Spanish Civil War, fighting for the leftist Republican faction against the monarchist-fascist Nationalist faction. It was there in the trenches with his comrades that he came face to face with the reality of what revolutionary communism and socialism has become. The Soviets had sent agents and arms to aid the leftists in the war. With the aid came Stalinist paranoia and purges. Blair's friends were gunned down by their own side because Stalin had deemed them too moderate or a threat to his rule of all communists worldwide. The author barely got out of Spain alive.

The book is about life in a futuristic Stalinist regime called Oceania that has taken over the Western Hemisphere and the English Isles. In this world, your only way to advance is to join the Party, otherwise you are relegated to the inhuman slums where the “proles” live. If you're in the Party, your life is regulated twenty-four hours by Big Brother, the ever watchful and ruthless face of the security apparatus. You are to believe whatever the state says, even if you know it to be wrong. If they say two plus two equals five, its five. Thought police kick down doors if you mutter anything against the Party or Big Brother. Children are recruited into the domestic intelligence agencies to spy on their parents. Even the much hated resistance leader and his band of ruffians are nothing more than a fiction created by the state to catch free thinkers so they can be tortured back into submission. The entire book is one big nightmare for any lover of liberty.

The left, most actively the student left, loves to point out how our interrogations are akin to the torture perpetrated in the book, but this is wrong on so many levels. First off, in the big picture, the United States is not a super-state Stalinist tyranny that enslaves the lower classes through ignorance, submits the middle class through brainwashing and has an upper class of Party members that are outside the law. The United States is a democratic republic with 50 unique states in a union held together by a federal government who leaders are elected every two, four and six years, depending on their position. Secondly, the interrogations of captured Islamist terrorists are not to break their ideological or religious beliefs, but to extract intelligence about their network, their associates and their plots to kill Americans. Our interrogations do not try to convince the terrorists two plus two is five or that Big Brother is their friend. All they need to do is give us actionable intelligence, and they have. Thousands of intelligence reports have been written based upon the vetted information given to us by these terrorists. Thirdly, the harsh interrogation were only used upon the high level terrorists in our custody. The harshest of methods, such as waterboarding, are not used on the foot soldiers. The Party, on the other hand, goes so far as to capture and torture loyal members who happen to mutter disloyal things in their sleep!

Blair was a democratic socialist. While he was disciple of Marxist economics, he wasn't for the tyrannical states that usually followed a socialist or communist coup. Blair would probably be quite content with the current status of most European nations, though the “neo-liberal” (corporatist) economics may have worried him. But, in no way, was Nineteen Eight-Four an allegory for all totalitarianism as some of the more ignorant like to profess. It was a fictionalized warning against Stalinist communism and its perversion of the ideals he held dear. There's a good reason Big Brother's face resembles Joseph's and not FDR's.

The Industrial Humanity

Aldous Huxley's Brave New World is a classic of dystopian literature. A reaction to the spreading mass industrial culture of the late 1920s and early 1930s, it sends us far into the future where mass industrialization, mass commercialization and societal collectivism have created the World State. Reproduction is no longer a individual choice, but the responsibility of the government. Most children, except for the Alphas and Betas the upper tiers of the State's caste system, are mass produced using the “Bokanovsky process” which allows an egg to create up to 96 different embryos. Through chemical manipulation, the lower castes are literally grown and then brainwashed into their jobs. There is no free will at all for those deemed to be Gammas, Deltas, and Epsilons. Individuality is considered an egregious violation of the fabric of society. All citizens must interact with other citizens or be constantly looked down upon and ridiculed. Since reproduction is a state responsibility, sex has become a social and religious experience, with drug taking and orgies taking the place of prayer and Bible study. Parenthood, family, love; all the things that we hold dear today are considered evil tomorrow.

While the boons of capitalism have led to some very unhealthy things such as celebrity cults, mass advertising at children, and other things that have come to define our free market culture, Brave New World is not attacking capitalism and consumerism alone. Huxley's intention was to parody both the consumerism of America with the cold industrial fetish of the socialists and communists. Along with that, much of the future society of the World State is anti-traditional, anti-religion and anti-individualism; things hardly associated with conservatism and conservative values. The mass production of human beings is exactly what the conservative argument about cloning and embryonic stem-cell research is about. Despite the liberal myth, President Bush invested federal funds in stem-cell research, but refused to allow human embryos to be grown simply to be destroyed. The brainwashing of children isn't exactly what conservative presidents and Congresses do, especially not straight out of the womb (or the tube). But, it is a staple of communist and fascist governments to reform society from the infant up, creating fanatics by the time they've mastered riding a bike.

Huxley was an early hippie. Not the ones you see today who are one with nature, but also one with Marxist theory. Huxley was a believer in the mind and he took countless amounts of psychotropic drugs to prove it. He hated any kind to totalitarianism, either real like the USSR's anti-democratic governance or spiritual like American consumerism and American reliance on neurological medication. To use the book as a example of runaway capitalism, or of any other conservative cause, as many student revolutionaries do, just proves our education system needs revamping in the literary departments.

Books Are Hard

When some devout Christians questioned the Harry Potter books and some went so far as to burn it, constant allusions to the Ray Bradbury novel Fahrenheit 451 were made by social liberals, the media and other critics of these passionate religious folk. While I think its silly to believe that the Harry Potter series may incite children to take up the more dangerous and violent parts of witchcraft, I also think these people have every right to do what they want with the books. As for the citation of the classic novel about anti-intellectualism, those who use it use it wrong.

The world of Fahrenheit 451 is not one of theocracy or religious fervor, or of hyper-nationalism like the Nazis, but a pleasure-loving society who has deemed that learning is too hard, that any kind of lawful governance or cultural discipline is just not right. Teens drive into people and no one cares. People kill animals just to enjoy the gory death. The main character is a fireman: someone who burns the books found by the government. After a chance interaction with a free-thinking neighbor, he's set on a path of resistance to this destructive society. He's told years before his time, the people of this dytopian America decided rather than deal with minor backlashes from offended minorities, political correctness would flourish through the destruction of all books. Better for everyone to be equally unoffended by no literature than some people be offended by some literature.

Now where exactly in the book does it state that a cabal of Christian conservatives have deemed books to be blasphemous so they burn them all? Where exactly is the analogy (or allegory) to the zealotry of the faithful? Of course, it isn't there. Like the two previous examples, these famous novels of a world gone wrong are taken out of context so often its become common knowledge. Those who deem themselves political, liberal and well read, they would be aghast to know that the three books are, in fact, against what they believe. Usually, is hedonism associated with liberal or conservative ideology? How about the nanny state? How about genetic manipulation of embryos?

The classical dystopias of our literary cannon are not against a nation of free thinkers and humble faithful, nor are they against a separation of powers, a reasonable national defense, free markets or natural diversity. These horrors of our political imaginations are warnings against the very things we conservatives detest and the very thing many liberals, unwittingly, are for.

Not everyone knows history as in-depth as others. Some only get an inkling of our past and those some rely on what's termed “common knowledge” for conversation. Tidbits like the stock market crash created the Depression or that Hoover was a free marketer. When asked to explain how they know this, they defer to the higher ups who taught them or told them. The ever-dwindling knowledge of history leads to our current predicament: the passing of the “stimulus” package.

Faking history for political gain is not a left-wing or right-wing trait. Politicians of all stripes, colors and animal symbolism tweak or outright massacre history to get their agenda made into law. In today's case, its been the Democrats and the left who have fudged history so badly that it is a complete one-eighty of reality. To get a $800 billion dollar “stimulus” package past a skeptical public, one has to make that public believe that government spending in a time of recession works and that free market solutions will only lead to more misery. The Dems and the left link today's problem with the Great Depression, a free market President Bush with free market President Hoover (in reality, both believed in harnessing the government for economic ends) and the prosperity of the late 1940s with the stimulus package's spending (the 1940s had war spending, the Dems want social spending). On their faces, these comparisons are false because the “common knowledge” history they are based on are false.

For example, today's credit crisis was a gradual downturn that began with the decline in the national housing market. That downturn was accentuated by the government mandated practice (Community Reinvestment Act) of lending to high-risk, minority borrowers looking to get a home. In turn, those high risk borrowers were given interest rates and/or mortgage plans in accordance with there bad/lack of credit. Adjustable rate mortgages and interest-only loans dominated the housing market and those mortgages were then turned into securities by the banks and traded (an idea, while free market in principle, is just stupid). When the high risk borrowers turned out to be exactly what their credit score said they were the market slumped. Those defaulted loans made those traded securities worthless, and the banks that hedged their books on those securities went down as well. For the most part, the Great Depression began as a unusually hard recession, but was amplified. Not by greed. Not by capitalism. In fact, it was government. The Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act leveed heavy costs on imports. In retaliation, the world did the same. World trade died, money dried up and the global economy shrunk. Not because of free flow of capital, but of government restriction of it.

Contrast this history with the “common knowledge” pontificated by our dear Congressional Democrats and the media. Speaker of the House Pelosi attacks Wall Street and invokes the myth capitalism broke America. Congressman Barney Frank, the man behind the financial regulation committee, calls Wall Street bonuses bribes when, as Congress's financial honcho, he should know that Wall Street firms pay their employees through a meritocracy, with yearly bonuses taking place of commissions. Even President Obama railed on the country's financial core for its immorality and blamed free markets at the same time his nominations for Health and Human Services and Treasury have major glitches in their tax payments. All this sounds a little bit populist and little less historic.

One can't be blamed for thinking the Democrats are trying to take advantage of our state-amplified downturn to light a populist fire. The “stimulus” package has more to do with expanding government, the biggest cause of our current position and a Democratic baby, than with economic growth. When there is more money going towards broken entitlement programs than small business tax cuts; when there is more money going to Washington renovation than to corporate tax cuts (our corporate taxes are one of the highest in the world), there is certainly something very rotten in Denmark.

There will come a time in American history when a radical shift is needed. During the Cold War, it came under the name of Ronald Reagan, confrontation and offensive liberty. With our concerns more focused on ourselves than our external Islamist enemy, we need to have a radical shift in perspective again. We can no longer hold ourselves up with a dollar losing its value due to our debt. We can no longer live on promises of paying back the future generations. We can no longer try to keep ourselves afloat on half-baked pseudo-economic theories (I'm looking at you, Keynesians!) that promise to keep us exactly where we are with little consequence.

To live through adversity, you must lose something.

To escape the fire, you must get burned.

To be able to prosper economically, you must first scrape the dead ideas and dead industry from your nation and then fuel growth with free-flowing capital. You can't do that by bailing out California's irresponsible legislature or rolling back every reasonable welfare reform made by Newt's Republicans.

The only way this “stimulus” and its base idea gain traction is by someone or something taking advantage of a lack of education and using it for their political ends. This is exactly what the Democrats have done with the public school system's failure to educate its wards in accurate history. I learned what I have from using my own to feet to take me to the local library or to the book store so I could buy books recommended by actual economists (check out Amy Shales) and actual historians, not by failed comedians-turned-mouthpieces. I used my common sense and an open mind to revise my world view. I did not cry like a baby when the “common knowledge” perceptions drilled into me by mothering teachers and politicians were challenged.

I, like any self-respecting independent human being, learned.

All it takes is the idea that politicians and pundits are wrong.

I don't think that's a concept that's hard to understand.

From WSJ:

Of the many parallels between Barack Obama and John F. Kennedy, one has eluded all coverage: Both attended Catholic school as children. In fact, while JFK may have been the Irish Catholic from Boston, he spent less time at the Canterbury School in Connecticut than did young Barry (as he was then called) at St. Francis of Assisi in Indonesia.

At a time when America's 6,165 Catholic elementary and 1,213 secondary schools are celebrating Catholic Schools Week, President Obama's first-hand experience here opens the door to a provocative opportunity. In his inaugural address, the president rightly scored a U.S. school system that "fail[s] too many" of our young people. How refreshing it would be if he followed up by giving voice to a corollary truth: For tens of thousands of inner-city families, the local parochial school is often the only lifeline of hope.

"When an inner-city public school does what most Catholic schools do every day, it makes the headlines," says Patrick J. McCloskey, author of a new book called "The Street Stops Here," about the year he spent at Rice High -- an Irish Christian Brothers school in Harlem. "President Obama has a chance to rise above the ideological divide simply by giving credit where credit is due, by focusing on results, and the reason for those results."

You could argue that Mr. Obama is halfway there. In "The Audacity of Hope," he states that disagreements over public funding often cloud all other judgments. "Our debate on education," he wrote, "seems stuck between those who want to dismantle the public school system and those who would defend an indefensible status quo, between those who say money makes no difference in education and those who want more money without any demonstration that it will be put to good use."

Put funding issues aside, however, and the results speak for themselves. A New York University study of the city's schools showed that Catholic school children do better on tests -- and the longer they spend in Catholic school, the more they out-achieve their public school counterparts. A more recent study in Los Angeles by Loyola Marymount's School of Education found that poor and marginalized students attending Catholic schools have remarkably higher retention and graduation rates than their peers in public schools.

Apologists for the "indefensible status quo" make all sorts of excuses for why this is so. But the most significant reason for the success of a school like Rice is also the most obvious. Teachers and principals at Catholic schools enforce high standards because they know the price of accepting excuses will be paid by the kids who walk through their classroom doors: lives lived on the margins of the American Dream.

Unfortunately, America's Catholic schools are in the midst of a crisis that has its roots in the loss of the nuns, priests and brothers who once supplied these schools with low-cost teachers. Catholic school enrollment today is less than half what it was at its peak of more than five million, back when JFK was president. Thus inner-city Catholic schools have almost the opposite problem of their public counterparts: Though doing a heroic job, they are closing their doors at an alarming rate.

Now, Catholic schools are not for everyone, and they are not the answer for all that plagues our cities. But they are an answer -- one answer that is real, less costly, and working for many families desperate for the opportunities these schools provide. With a little imagination, these schools could reach many more such children.

Here is where the president could provide a huge lift. The elephant in the room of education reform is this: No matter how much a white Republican leader may be committed to inner-city school reform, support from a black Democrat will always have more of an impact.

This doesn't mean that Mr. Obama must embrace vouchers. Given the dynamic of his party, that would be expecting too much. And a president can't institute vouchers anyway, except in limited ways. However, simply by acknowledging Catholic schools as a national treasure that should be preserved, Mr. Obama would give them a badly needed shot in the arm.

Bishops wondering about devoting so many of their scarce resources to people who are largely non-Catholic would be encouraged to work harder to keep their schools open. Business leaders who donate millions to support change in our public schools might devote at least some of these dollars to places that are already working. And good men and women who make it their mission to teach children others have given up on would be inspired to keep going.

Mr. McCloskey sums it up well. "The Catholic schools are supplying hope," he says. "They could use a little help with the audacity."