Are U.S. Soldiers Dying From Survivable Wounds?
The voice from the telescreen was still pouring forth its tale of prisoners and booty and slaughter, but the shouting outside had died down a little. The waiters were turning back to their work. One of them approached with the gin bottle. Winston, sitting in a blissful dream, paid no attention as his glass was filled up. He was not running or cheering any longer. He was back in the Ministry of Love, with everything forgiven, his soul white as snow. He was in the public dock, confessing everything, implicating everybody. He was walking down the white-tiled corridor, with the feeling of walking in sunlight, and an armed guard at his back. The long-hoped-for bullet was entering his brain.
In an unassuming building in suburban Washington, a team of military medical specialists spent six months poring over autopsies of 4,016 men and women who had died on the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan.
He gazed up at the enormous face. Forty years it had taken him to learn what kind of smile was hidden beneath the dark moustache. O cruel, needless misunderstanding! O stubborn, self-willed exile from the loving breast! Two gin-scented tears trickled down the sides of his nose. But it was all right, everything was all right, the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother.
They read reports from the morgue at Dover Air Force Base, where bodies arrived in flag-draped coffins. They examined toxicology reports. They winced at gruesome photos of bullet wounds and shredded limbs. In each case, the doctors pieced together the evidence to determine the exact cause of death.
THE END
I've debated putting something of myself in here (maybe I have with typos or additions or omissions), but since I've no paragraphs left in 1984 to type, I thought I'd should end it with something a little different.
I would have added the Appendix (The Principles of Newspeak), but I believe that everyone should *still* read this book and if you'd like to know that last little bit, go pick yourself a copy and see why. The illustrations were discontinued at some point in the first year because I started scribing Ulysses and other projects left me little time to add an illustration. Plus I'm not getting paid to do this: my project, my construct. I'd also have pauses in dates for the same reasons. When this occurred and life got too busy, I'd continue when I did have time.
Writing this book out along with paragraphs from the headline story of The Wall Street Journal was exciting at the beginning. The stories would get boring sometimes, but George Orwell keeps making sense. As I went through paragraphs, the news stories would either eerily synchronize with the book or they'd be complete opposites. Sometimes the stories would gel in odd ways that they highlighted each other in interesting ways. When I was still illustrating it there would be times the book would correlate with the picture as well.
I can't say that I'm surprised by the relevance of Orwell's 1984 right now. Its germaneness is partly why I started this project. It was also a provocation because I try not to pay attention to the news. Since the Gulf War broke out when I was a teenager, I was struck by how much the media does and doesn't tell us. It started with a new war breaking out in a time I thought war would never happen again. However, as I got older and could look back at history with the eyes of an adult, I realized that war never stops, empires continue, repressive states still flourish, and governments continue to do things behind a wall of glorious spectacle and dark fear.
The Wall Street Journal focuses its journalism with the news' effect on the financial markets. Money makes the world go round or stop and take different directions. Leaders might make speeches about peace or a call to arms, but it's really the effect of their actions on those that keep them in power that is of great importance. The stock market quotes beside each corporate mention are not by chance, they're necessary for the reader of this journal. To some of us they might just be numbers and percentage points, but subliminally we're exposed to a powerful language we know very little about. Power, fame, and control are very much a part of the chaotic flow of human nature and it's interesting to observe it by writing it out.
Scribing it electronically I'd detach most of the time and not realize what I was writing. It's like when you're reading a page in a book and after realizing that you were just automatically reading words, you weren't actually digesting the words. So you go back to read the paragraphs again. That's kind of what scribing this project was like. I'd zone out, save, and forget about it. There was a bit of meditation in it, but not very much. I'd like to say I was changed by it, but I wasn't. The best part was re-reading 1984. George Orwell was a great storyteller, not heady with the words, but rather, heady with the story. I love that. Franz Kafka is like that as well.
This Is Room 101 was featured in The State: http://www.thestate.ae/live-blogging-dystopia/
Some time in the near future, I will like to publish this project as a book. Not sure yet how to go about it.
One secondary project came out of This Is Room 101. It was my chapbook Wall Street, which you can find here: http://jacquelinevalencia.files.wordpress.com/2014/05/wall-street-by-jacqueline-valencia.pdf
I'm still hand scribing Joyce's Ulysses over at http://gettinginsidejamesjoyceshead.blogspot.ca/.
- Jacqueline Valencia
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