In Bed With George Orwell

For the past week I’ve been ill. Yet George has kept me company. I was with Eric Blair (George) in Burma Sahib, a novel that depicts Blair’s five years as a policeman in British Burma.

Next I traveled through 21st century Burma in Emma Larkin’s 2005 nonfiction work, Finding George Orwell in Burma. Author Larkin’s name is a pseudonym for a journalist, someone on a tourist visa in a country under military rule since 1962. She (or he) would not have been able to enter as an American journalist.

In the book, a reader will feel how controlled the country is and how fearful inhabitants are. No one is supposed to talk about 8-8-88, which is to say August 8th, 1988, when a nationwide strike was held that resulted in countless deaths and imprisonments. The numbers vary greatly (ten thousand downward) as to how many died that day and later in prisons.

In December 1989, I was in Rangoon (Yangon) with Mike and our daughters. We had been visiting Thailand, then gone to Burma to stay with the USAF attaché assigned there. From the time of our airport arrival and departure, we were followed wherever we went. During our visit we watched video footage taken from the U.S. Embassy on 8-8-88, and the military’s ruthless attack on protestors. At the time I had an image in my mind from Tiananmen Square in Beijing, of the tank and lone student protestor walking toward it. But until I saw the video in Rangoon, I had no images from the massive unrest in Burma.

This past week when I opened Emma Larkin’s book, I remembered that our friend Kent and wife Jan had read my copy and left notes in it. This was special because they lived in Burma when Kent was the Chargé d’Affaires from 1996 to 1999. This term is used for a Deputy Chief of Mission when a country has no ambassador. During Kent’s years at the U.S. Embassy in Yangoon he was in constant contact with Aung San Sun Kyi, who was under house arrest. The finest of diplomats, Kent was an expert on Asia and served as our country’s ambassador to Cambodia from 1999 to 2002. He died in September 2023, before our Orwellian times.

After reading Jan and Kent’s comments in Larkin’s book, I recalled a Latin proverb:  Verba volant/scripta manent: spoken words fly away/ written words remain.  

Kent M. Wiedemann

Yesterday I thought of Kent when I read the May Atlantic’s long article, “Everything We Once Believed In.” Author David Brooks writes, “Until January 20, 2025, I didn’t realize how much of my very identity was built on the trust in my country’s goodness….Earlier in the piece he had written, “All of my life…I have thought of America as a deeply flawed nation that is nevertheless a force for tremendous goodness in the world.”  I read those words and made a mental leap. I have not been sick since fall 2016, and now I am sickened.

Brooks starts his third paragraph with, “Orwell is a useful guide to what we’re witnessing.” In the same Atlantic, George Parker begins his short piece “The Hollow Men” by citing George Orwell’s 1984.

  Scripta volant, the Eton scholar Blair would say.

To be continued next week…

Reflecting on Integrity

I came across a quote this morning in something I wrote long ago. It was a collection of short stories called Ambages, with a quote from Michael Ventura on the cover page.  I gather quotes… the way some people collect Hummel figurines, earrings, baseball cards, or coasters from foreign bars. This timely quote said:

“The value of having an inner map of the world as it is (not as its broadcast) is this: it allows you to know that your task is larger than yourself. If you choose, just by virtue of being a decent person, you are entrusted with passing on something of value through a dark, crazy time—preserving your integrity, in your way, by your acts and your very breathing for those who will build again when the chaos exhausts itself. People who assume the burden of their own integrity are free—because integrity is freedom, and (as Nelson Mandela proved) its force can’t be quelled even when a person of integrity is jailed (or fired). The future lies in our individual, often lonely, and certainly unprofitable acts of integrity, or it doesn’t live at all.”

I thought of this today because I’m re-reading Burmese Days by George Orwell. Had Eric Blair not gone to Burma as a policeman for the British crown and spent five years there, and seen at first hand the dirty work of empire, as he called it, we might not have the fiction and non-fiction that George Orwell left to the world.  No writer I can think of is more relevant for our times.  Now. Right now.

And yes, I’m a fool who believes in fine literature as moral council, as letting us see how we both fail and triumph as human beings. I’m also a fool because I write a blog which very few read and which requires the time of a friend who has the computer skills I lack.  But I persist in doing this because it affirms, if only to myself and to a few others, that the value of good literature must be honored by those whose belief in integrity… is alive and well, in our dark times of imperial and corporate rule.

O Candidate for Light…Hast Thou Attuned Thyself to Humanity’s Great Pain?

What topics will AI offer to answer this question?  Last week for the blog, seven topics arose from DAM (divine automatic machine) with the seventh,  Reflecting on Insights from Percival Everett. Whose insights, I ask?  Not mine. And whose voice offers the insights?

The quote above… ended a power-point presentation last Friday in Mathews, when I spoke to the Chesapeake Bay branch of the National League of American Pen Woman about an experience from June 1988. Happenchance had led me to be with a U.S. Army Medical team in a cordoned area of Perak, a state in peninsular Malaysia. Nine days among the Semai, one of seventeen Orang Asli groups in Malaysia, all of which have different dialects. The OA are the original inhabitants of this part of the world: not the Malays, not the Chinese, not the Tamil East Indians.

The whole experience was good for me, good for my soul. In being with the Semai, I saw the effects of malaria and a diet of tapioca and corn. This could not be romanticized. But I also saw the Semai, beneath the spiritual umbrella of a fortified group soul.  

I saw men who cared for the children while women tended the fields, and women who were with the children while the men hunted wild boar or fished in rivers.  

I will not forget one child in a Semai village near a stream. The team of five in the four-month malarial study were in the batin (headman’s) house, one nestled among jungle, with rain falling outside. One small boy wore a donated shirt, one with a logo: “We Are Not Alone.”

The Semai welcomed medical help but wished to live as they always had: foraging and planting crops, teaching their children to live in harmony with the jungle. Yet made to convert to a religion that defies animism and dream journeys and lessens women? Would this be their destruction? What would modern, urbanized, industrialized, and computerized society offer them? But before my talk last Friday, I was gratified to find a February 2024, article: Squatters in Their Own Land, about the Semai, now in the state of Pahang.

Next week: How this experience led me to Eric Blair (George Orwell) in Burma