Back in late January, the omnipresent Instapundit had a link to Bjørn Stærk's comments about the two types of people who quote George Orwell:

those who quote his fiction, and those who quote his non-fiction. When fiction-quoters find themselves in a debate way over their heads, they drag out their handy little Orwell toolbox, and throw out some ominous buzzword (Orwellian! Big Brother! Doublethink!), and then leave, considering the debate won. To them, Orwell is an excuse not to think, because any complex issue can be reduced to some 1984 or Animal Farm analogy. To non-fiction quoters, Orwell is a painful reminder never to stop thinking. You can read 1984 and emerge as much a blathering fool as you ever were, but read his essay on language, and it'll haunt you, forever poking at your self-importance and lazyness, as it has mine.

1984 is a brilliant book, and I'm sad to find yet another example that confirms my theory: It is always quoted foolishly.

I think the difference between Orwell's fiction and non-fiction quoters is a terrific observation, one that Jonah Goldberg runs with today. Goldberg quotes a couple of reporters who have recently used the phrase "Big Brother is back" or variants of it to describe cameras in schools or around monuments.

I could go on for pages. Variations on the phrase come up all of the time, in congressional testimony, editorials, news reports, press releases, political debates. But nobody sees the irony. Not only was Big Brother never here in the first place, but the knee-jerk belief that he was here reflects precisely the sort of ideological brainwashing 1984 was supposed to be warning us against. It is a popular myth, a bit of self-reinforcing hysteria that civil libertarians and the simply unthinking buy into without even knowing it. To ask "Is this return of Big Brother?" is only slightly more reasonable than to ask "Are we looking at the rebirth of Narnia?" or "Is the Bush administration concerned that when Superman returns, he might handle Saddam Hussein without consulting the White House?"

The roots of this Big Brother mythology are deep and intricate, but surely it arises in part because of the general liberal conviction that the past is bad and Big Brother is bad, thus — since we don't have Big Brother now — he must have existed in the past. I'm sure there are kids in Ivy League English classes right now who think that Big Brother existed in 1984 (the year) because that was the name of the book.

As much as I hate the idea of cameras at intersections (and they seemed to be all over the roads in London when I was there in 2000), I have to agree with Jonah when he says:

If the slippery slope is the rule, why have civil liberties become more secure since the internment of the Japanese or the isolated abuses of the 1960s — or the suspension of habeas corpus by Abraham Lincoln, for that matter? If we are going to use slippery-slope arguments, let us at least use the real-life examples Edmund Burke spoke of rather than invoke the fictitious apparition of a past that never was.