Let’s say that someone, say a handsome young blogger, submits his Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) on February 9, 2010.

How long does it take for this application to be processed by his public university? Over six months. And then only after two e-mails and a phone call.

He finally gets the financial aid request processed and is awarded a respectful amount of money for his schooling. However, a large portion of the financial aid awards are now not being credited to his outstanding account balance.

Then, on August 24th, he purchases a parking pass at the expense of $170 for VCU’s parking garage on W. Broad Street. On August 26th, the first day of classes, he drops by the Monroe Park Parking Office to pick up the permit.

What is he told? That they won’t have the parking permit available until 3:00 p.m.

Uh, what now? This is the parking office, where do you usually keep the parking permits? Are they kept in a secret depository at Mount Weather or something?

This university needs a massive purging of its incompetent employees.

Instead of focusing on actually cutting government, and coming for plans on how to do that, they have decided to focus on a community center containing a mosque being built on private property in New York City in an attempt to violate a particular religious group’s First Amendment rights. In doing so, they have turned into Virgil Goode:

And people wonder why I will not voting for a Republican this year.

[...] Orwell, of course, was seldom happier than when he was attacking fraud and hypocrisy and hearing the squeals of the injured.

Despite his insistence on being “political” in his work, Orwell’s career suggests his politics were the sort that real politicians detest. Why, for example, was Orwell so determined to make the case against Soviet communism at precisely the moment all proper people preferred not to hear it? Devoted socialist he may have been, but he had none of the politician’s instinct for trimming sails to the wind when it is expedient to tell people what they want to hear. Worse, he insisted on telling people precisely what they did not want to hear.

He was that political figure all politicians fear: the moralist who cannot bear to let any wrong deed go undenounced. As a politician he had the fatal defect of the totally honest man: He insisted on the truth even when the truth was most inconvenient.

There is an aloneness about Orwell, an insistence on being his own man, on not playing along with the team as a loyal politician is so often expected to do, or else. This is brilliantly illustrated in his classic essay “Politics and the English Language,” showing how politicians twist the language to distort and deceive. This amounts to an act of treason within the political trade. The man is trying to make it harder for a politician to fool enough of the proper enough of the time to gain power.

Another interesting aspect is the following, after the Baker mentions how technology was often times portrayed as being the greatest tool of the tyrant in Orwell’s 1984 and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World:

What was unpredictable was the liberating effect of technology. The Soviet Union could surround itself with walls but could not block out revolutionary radio and electronic waves, which stirred up the supposedly whipped human herd with an irresistible appetite for rock ’n’ roll, blue jeans, and other such subverters of totalitarian rule.

[...]

None of this is to say that Orwell and his fellow pessimists of the 1940s ought not to be read with the greatest respect. They should be. They show us the edge of terror on which we lived fifty years ago and help us understand why that generation was willing to spend so much treasure and take such daring risks to keep totalitarianism at bay. And in Animal Farm Orwell left us a lesson about the human contribution to political terror that will always be as up-to-date as next year’s election.