By Gary Earl Ross
Buffalo, NY – Greetings, NPR. It's time once again for the Orwell Awards. Every spring the golden piglets are given to individuals who best exemplify the messages of George Orwell's Animal Farm and 1984. The unifying thread this year is ignorance. Since the glittering little porkers are suitable for use as doorstops, it is only fitting that they go to people who are dumber than doorstops.
Boxer was Animal Farm's dim-witted work horse, and this year his award is a tie, going to a different kind of animal and an outlaw. Most wealthy men seek affairs with socialites, presidential widows, and genuine movie stars. Not Tiger Woods, who limited his mistresses to cocktail waitresses and porn stars, people who'd never try to climb to a higher link in the food chain by hanging onto the tassels of his golf shoes. And motorcycle maven Jesse James, having married up, to an actual movie star, could not get past his biker's fixation with tattoos, personified by the ridiculously named Bombshell McGee.
Snowball the pig was blindly idealistic before he was forced to flee Animal Farm. The Snowball's Chance Award goes to Rielle Hunter, who posed nearly bottomless for GQ but thought they would show only her face, who fell so in love with presidential aspirant John Edwards the first night they met, the first night they slept together, that she is sure the love is forever. A word of advice: please go away before, ten years hence, you are arrested for boiling the bunny of a yet unborn Edwards grandchild.
The Newspeak Doublethink Award from 1984 goes to former Senator John Edwards himself, who cheated on a wife dying of cancer, had sex with his mistress on camera, sired a child out of wedlock, and still thought he could run for president.
The Thoughtcrime Award is given wholeheartedly to the Republican party, who thought they could just say no, offer no compromises, and not even condemn political violence done at the suggestions of their Limbaughs and Becks. It doesn't take brains or guts to say some behaviors are wrong in a democracy. It just takes character.
The Moses the Raven Sugarcandy Mountain Award is awarded to religious fundamentalists everywhere who feel it is their duty to blow up buildings, shoot doctors, disrupt funerals, fly planes into skyscrapers, and don suicide vests all in the name of God. Their single-minded lack of charity is a cancer on civilization itself and an insult to the very idea of a just and loving Supreme Being.
Winner of this year's Big Brother Award is Dr. Conrad Murray, personal physician to the late Michael Jackson. Despite having pumped the King of Pop full of an industrial grade anesthetic, his insistence that Jackson killed himself causes even Jack Kevorkian to choke on laughter.
The Napoleon is awarded to Sarah Palin, who's turned her vice presidential run and gubernatorial resignation into a new career as the Paris Hilton of politics empty-headed, insubstantial, and known for what's on her hand.
Finally, the Grand Orwellian goes to the Tea Party Movement, whose resistance to health care reform is characterized by misinformation, the worst grammar of any protest sign makers in living memory, and outright racism. If your spelling is any indication, you're a group duped into protesting against your own best interests again. Go ahead and argue for the status quo, but a widening gap between rich and poor reminds me more of a historical shindig called the French Revolution than the Boston Tea Party.
Gary Earl Ross is a professor at the UB Educational Opportunity Center and co-editor of "The Empty Chair: Love and Loss in the Wake of Flight 3407." Gary notes the nominations for the Orwell Awards were closed before gubernatorial candidate Carl Paladino's recent email gaffe.
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