Time keeps on slipping into the future - Brazil

George Orwell and Aldous Huxley exchanged letters debating which of their futuristic dystopias would eventually become reality.

Orwell's 1984 was a typically bleak British vision written in the post-WWII age of European disillusionment. Huxley's Brave New World was written after Huxley moved to Los Angeles. It isn't bleak. It's rosy. No one is tortured and persecuted. Everyone is high on soma and completely contented.

Just before Orwell died, he wrote to Huxley and conceded that Brave New World was a more accurate look into the future.

Which brings me to this: I kind of regretted dissing Sotomayor the other day - cheap shot, shooting fish in a barrel etc. Same applies to Obamugabe. He and Soto are difficult to dis. They're both products of affirmative action; protected "minorities"; unassailable "victims". We'll soon have our first affirmative action SCOTUS judge appointed by out first affirmative action POTUS. Get used to it.

I know I see things differently because I was born in South Africa and saw first hand a glimpse of the future where Western civilization will be overwhelmed by the Third World; where Mugabe is the cultural and moral equivalent of Mozart and Madison. And we did this to ourselves through affirmative action and it's politically correct cousins, moral equivalency and multi-culturalism, because we're nice kind sweet Christians.

Yes, the future will be more like Brave New World than 1984. On the surface it will be "nice" and nobody will realize that we've turned ourselves into slaves to the "state."

But the real future will be a lot messier than Huxley's Lalaland version. There's an even more accurate fictional future dystopia: Tom Stoppard's Brazil which was made into a movie by Terry Gilliam, the American member of Monty Python.

In Stoppard's vision of the future, the world is ruled by bureaucrats. Sure there are still some rich people who have an illusion of personal freedom. They can afford face-lifts and fancy gourmet dinners. Trouble is: their society is totally dysfunctional. The bureaucrats are corrupt and incompetent - and so are the workers. Peoples' face-lifts go horribly awry and their noses fall off into their fancy gourmet dinners in shabbily elegant French restaurants. The state is bankrupt and can't affiord to fix the high-tech stuff that's supposed to keep things going. The world is falling apart because standards have been lowered and narcissism, apathy, corruption and incompetency rule the day.

Welcome to a world that resembles a Third World shit heap like the current Brazil or South Africa. That's our future thanks to affirmative action and it's politically correct cousins, moral equivalency and multi-culturalism.

But I'm an optimist and believe that it will be a transitional phase during which the savages of this world will all be civilized and most people will be better off than they were before. Well, anything is better for those who have to eat their grandmothers for breakfast because there isn't enough food.

And, at the end of this "transitional phase," (which will probably only last for a few hundred years) a new educated middle-class will rediscover Locke, Jefferson and Ronald Reagan and the American Revolution will once again become a living inspiration to those who value self-reliance, individual sovereignty and liberty.

PS Blame this post on the fact that I'm drunk-blogging after having a tooth pulled.

PPS I have lots of sympatico for Tom Stoppard who is a fellow exile:

Born Tomáš Straussler in Zlín, Czechoslovakia, Stoppard fled to Singapore with other Jews on 15 March 1939, the day that the Nazis invaded Czechoslovakia. In 1941, the family was evacuated to Darjeeling, India, to escape the Japanese invasion of Singapore. His father, Eugen Straussler, remained behind as a British army volunteer, and died in a Japanese prison camp after capture.

Stoppard quote:

Skill without imagination is craftsmanship and gives us many useful objects such as wickerwork picnic baskets. Imagination without skill gives us modern art.