Cool Zone Media.
Hello, and welcome to Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff, your weekly podcast about cool people who did the cool stuff. One of the people who did cool stuff is doctor kavejda House of pod. Some of the cool stuff you've done in clothes, saving people's lives with medicine and entertaining people with podcasts.
Yeah. Yeah. I like to think that I'm saving people with my podcasts, saving them from boring medical podcasts. That's what I feel like I'm saving them from.
But I have a question, because like I have to kind of gas myself up to think that what I do is meaningful and impactful. How does it feel to be both like, Oh, I do this thing that's a little bit more direct, and then I do this other thing that's a little bit more ephemeral.
Uh. I'll tell you that's a really good question. First of all, do not downplay what you do, Margaret. I feel like your sphere of influence is bigger than even you, you know, And so I think that your show is really great. And I'm not just saying that because I'm
on it now. Although it helps, but there are a lot of times in medicine where when you're doing things to help somebody, it's not so obvious, like sometimes it's really obvious, like if someone is having an emergency and I fix it for them, that's great, it's super satisfying. A lot of what you do is stuff where if you're doing it right, the patient doesn't even notice it doesn't and doesn't even like you don't get that immediate satisfaction.
That's a lot of what you do, and so you kind of it's almost like you know, when you're talking into this microphone and you know that you're doing you're reaching people, but you can't see them. So it's a little bit of a different feeling. It's kind of like that in medicine a lot too. Or it's like I know a lot of what I'm doing is very important in helping somebody, but it won't show for many years or maybe they'll never notice it all. That's how I
know I did a good job. So it's actually kind of similar, I guess, is what I'm saying.
No, that actually that actually makes a lot of sense to me. Yeah, today we're going to talk about someone who both directly and indirectly, like did both things right, and in this case, it was fighting fascism and totalitarianism.
I can't wait.
I can't wait, Cave, have you ever heard of books?
But I've seen them. I've seen them. I had a couple when I was younger. I experimented a little bit, if I'm being honest, in college.
Okay, yeah, and well.
Now I don't have so many of them because it's all in the interwebs. But yeah, I'm familiar with the concept.
Okay, Kave is wearing a book shirt right now, just to H.
Powell's City of Books.
Yeah, just amazing bookstore.
Ah my peoples.
Yeah, today, you guys, we're going to talk about a guy who made some books, some of which readers have probably readers listeners have probably read.
Yeah, there's probably people reading this podcast, so I'm sure that there's people just doing the conscriptions.
Yeah, that's true. A couple months ago, I talked about one of the people who is the most commonly misquoted, constantly misunderstood writer with way better politics than anyone realized. His name was Oscar Wilde. Oh, and this week we're going to talk about another constantly misquoted, constantly misunderstood writer who had way better politics than anyone realized. This guy was a big fan of Oscar Wilde. Wild was a
major political influence on him. His name you might have heard of before is George Orwell.
Oh wow, oh yeah, I've heard I've heard of George orwell, yeah, that's how you know he's big.
Yeah. I feel like most people who h read in English have heard of George Orwell. That is my hypothesis here.
That's a fair.
That's fair, And I'm going to make a bunch of claims about him. One of is that some people hate him, and they usually hate him for the wrong reasons. There are reasons to hate him, but I don't, and we'll talk about that.
I can't wait. I have to admit I don't know a ton. I know like nineteen eighty four in Animal Form, and when I was very very young the nineteen eighty four movie came out. I think it came out like I was too young to watch it, but I remember seeing it on like HBO once when I was like way too young, and it traumatized me in a deep, deep way.
So I just rat on his face or whatever.
He's a broke I remember him just being totally broken at the end of it, and so that affected me deeply, deeply, So I Yes, I'm very excited to learn more about him.
Yeah, he's an emotionally effective writer, which is interesting because he's not an emotionally expressive person. And we'll talk about that. Some of his biggest sort of some of the misunderstandings or correct understandings of him are around the fact that
he did not express much emotion. George Orrell was a man who went from privileged son of the empire to colonial cop to anti fascist fighter who took a bullet to the neck fighting Franco in Spain, to going on to write some of the best English language commentary on totalitarianism and being a major anti imperialist writer at the time. This was a man whose sole guiding principle was he
believed in what he called common decency. And while he's often painted as an anti socialist because his works are critical of the USSR, he was very explicitly a democratic socialist to the end of his days. He was absolutely on the left, and he put all of his money towards making the world a better place, and he lived really modestly, and he also put a lot of money towards his son. So that's like what he did with his money. So far liking it, unliking where this is headed.
He's a complicated figure. His homophobia and unaddressed misogyny are woven throughout his writings. However, I'm going to complicate especially his misogyny, in a minute. His actions did not always live up to his lofty ideals, especially when he was younger. He is my problematic fave. He's just problematic for different reasons than some of the listeners who are already mad at me for talking about him. Assume, huh, so.
It's people that are mad about this already.
Yeah, authoritarian communists hate him. Everyone else wants to claim him. The right wing wants to claim him, the center left, the anarchists, everyone is like, he's our guy, right except the authoritarian left, who are like, we hate this man with the burning heat of a thousand sons.
Okay, all right, Can I ask a question. Yeah, I hear the term tanky used a lot.
So yes, tankies hate him. Okay, I'm using the term correctly. Yes, minitarian socialists specifically who are like totally fine with the worst excesses of the USSR.
Okay. I apologize to your listeners in advance because I asked some very stupid questions. No, very actively pro those kinds of questions being esca and Orwell would be very happy that you were asking these questions too, because one of Orwell's whole things was fuck jargon. He was like, if you are writing, I'm going to get to it later. We're gonna talk about rules of writing. He's like, only used jargon if it is the only word to describe what you're saying. Got it.
A million books have been written about George Orwell, and I haven't read them all. An awful lot of books were written by George Orwell, and I've read a lot of them, but I haven't read all of them. Some of the books I haven't read are the ones he says he wished he hadn't written, So I feel fine. He's not a fan of his early work. Yeah, I read read one of his books that he says he didn't wish he hadn't read, and that actually was a
kind of an interesting book. It's called Keith the Asperdistra Flying, and it's about a middle class guy who wants to be poor in this slumming it and ends up therefore just sort of taking advantage of his girlfriend because she has a middle class job, and he refuses to have a middle class job. And it was actually like probably useful to me for me to read as like a squatter who often stayed with partners, you know.
Anyway, Yeah, that's an interesting I'm sure there's an interesting insight into that, Like I could see also why people from the right try to claim him and anything they don't like that seems kind of like weirdly authoritarian. They'll like reference like nineteen eighty four. I've seen both sides reference. This is like nineteen eighty four. This is like thought police nineteen eighty four, you know, on both sides, the right in particular, I see using it.
Yeah, And he was Georgi Ro was incredibly critical of the left. He was critical of the authoritarian left, and he loved the democratic left and he loved the anarchist left and more the democratic left is how he fully aligned. But we're going to talk about later about how at the end of his life he was like everyone who's fighting for socialism, who isn't fighting for stalin, I'm I'm your.
Guy, bored with them, common decency, anti jargon. So far I'm on board with this guy.
Yeah, No, no, especially end of his life or will. I'm like, yeah, this man is more fave less problematic, and actually some of the ways he develops through is kind of okay, well, we'll get to it, Okay. So and I'm going to talk about his life and his adventures and especially how was thinking developed and how he always worked to improve himself and become less of an asshole.
And I'm going to focus more on the parts of his life that are interesting to me, because there's also I feel a bit dirty doing anything that presents it as like the biographical sketch of this man, because in his will, he was like, please don't write biographies about me.
He was I'm sure nobody listened.
Nobody listened. Actually, one of the sort of some of the books, some of the books that came out kind of right away after he died, were a little bit more like we're auctions on his life and writing that were a little bit like, hey, I knew the guy, and I swear this isn't a biography.
He'd be cool with this. He'd be cool with this.
Yeah. Yeah, Like and it's like or it's even kind of a like, hey, sorry, man, you know, like, don't worry, I'm not going to get into everything. I just want to talk You're important and we got to talk about you. I'm sorry.
Why Why didn't he want this? Because he didn't want people to focus on him and his story they want he want people to focus on his works, or because there's things in his past he didn't want people like so talking about.
I think it's a combo a little bit of those. He was deeply private, right, and so he really compartmentalized what he wrote about and like what he lived, which is interesting because a lot of his books, especially as early books, are autobiographical. He writes these books about like slumming, right.
That's like kind of how he makes his name is that he like literally dresses up as a tramp and goes around and like lives as a hobo and for a while when he's young and he's like from the middle class, right, but he like still compartmentalizes out certain parts of his life, especially like his intimate life, Like he doesn't talk about his wife where you talk about a bunch Like some people have been like, oh, because
he's a misogynist. I honestly, as best as I can tell, I think it's because they had an agreement where it was like, no, leave me out of your writing. Yeah, you know, and so he compartmentalized, like hell he also we'll talk about some of the there's two bad things he did too, like big.
Could he also be a guy with imposter syndrome?
Oh? Interesting?
That was my first thought.
I think. I think eventually he kind of came into being like I am who I am? But he actually I have read a bunch about how he he had sort of imposter syndrome in that he didn't under he like because he was so used to people kind of shitting on him that once he like kind of came into his power, he wasn't always totally aware of it. Oh that's interesting.
Is there two types of people that are like extreme like of Orwellian success, that are like either like yeah, that's me, or they have major imposter syndrome?
Yeah? No, that makes sense.
Yeah, yeah, something I'm very familiar with the medicine. It was literally just talking to a group of medical students just yesterday about this, and I prepared them and I said, listen, you're going to have imposter syndrome, and you're going to have it for probably the next thirty to forty years. It's never going to go away.
I get told, well, then you're going to turn into an assholeho thinks you know have better than all the people who actually have been to med school more recently, no more recent stuff.
Exactly, or you find a way to have both, which is what a lot of doctors do. Okay, to be assholes with imposter syndrome.
Okay, So for anyone who's unfamiliar with this man, which is totally fair. The short version is that there was an english Man who first wrote under and then lived under the name George Orwell, but that wasn't his birthname. He fought in the Spanish Civil War, where he was soured on authoritarian leftism because of what he saw there.
He almost was killed by He stayed committed to democratic socialism, but he wrote two of the most famous books ever written against totalitarianism, the book Animal Farm, about a bunch of farmyard animals that have a revolution, only to have one group of those animals decide that they are more deserving than the other animals, and the book nineteen eighty four, about a totalitarian society that tries to control how everyone
thinks and how much that sucks. And he is famously quoted by all kinds of people, including the kinds of people that he actually threw grenades at fascists, and so we're gonna talk about him. George Orwell was born Eric Arthur Blair on June twenty fifth, nineteen oh three. People often say George Orwell was a pen name, and you'll kind of run across people and like, ah, I know his real name. It's Eric Blair. It was a chosen name.
By the end of his life, the only people called him Eric were like bank managers and shit, like you saw Eric when he signed the checks, because he never changed the paperwork on his name. I'm a fan of choosing your owname. So I'm going to go with George throughout, not because it's like a dead name to call him Erica, but just you know, it's what I mean.
My only question is like, it's not I don't like why why?
Yeah, it's a horizontal move. It's like, yeah, this man name is this man named?
I mean, Eric Arthur Blair also sounds like a pretty cool author name, like why why not?
Okay, George is a more working class name. It's sort of like going by Joe in America, liking Joe the Plumber or whatever. You know.
Yeah, it's still like.
Every man name, and he wants an every man name because he's a middle class dude. Wo has imposter syndrome as a working class person, right, because he wants to be working classes. It's like his whole thing. It's in nineteen eighty four too.
I just think his entire like ethosis imposter syndrome. That's my Yeah, no's my theory going in.
I I actually and I want to see whether you readdress it at the end, but I think it's just going to get reinforced and orwell. Is the name of a river that he lived in?
That's nice?
Yeah, No, it's I think it's perfectly sweet. He was born in Motihari, India, into not money but like English fanciness and colonial evil.
He is his.
Great grandfather Charles Blair. His great great grandfather, Charles Blair was a rich and powerful slaver who made his money owning people in Jamaica and married the daughter of an earl. George's dad, Richard Blair, worked in the Opium Department and the British Colonial Project in India, overseeing the growth of opium and its sale to China.
So not good, Yeah, that this is This is a more interesting start than I expected. I was expecting something a lot more like, you know, uh, English downtrodden, like industrial revolutionary sort of vibe. Yeah, it's worldly. I'll give him that. It's worldly.
And what's interesting too is that his like the way he says middle class, I'm like, is different than what America thinks of his middle class, because middle class in America is like a working class thing on some level. England is fucking weird about class. Orwell described his upbringing as lower upper middle class, which meant that they had the prestige and thought well of themselves of the upper middle class, but they had no money, so they were
lower middle class. So they were a lower upper middle class.
Right, very showy, but didn't have a lot of maybe like house rich, but like not otherwise.
With yeah, and like position of power in evil colonial government rich right right when he was one, his mom, who was a feminist and a suffragette and an activist, we I don't know as much about us. I kind of wish I had. It's only there's so much written about this man. His mom packed him up and moved him back to England, whereupon he had a childhood that he relentlessly described as miserable, and all of his childhood friends are like that boy was happy, life was good.
He's just being dramatic. It's like consistent. There's like multiple times through this period where he's like, he writes these essays about what a fucking miserable life he had, and he's like kind of a poser about being miserable in some ways, although he is a he has a hard life. Don't get me wrong. He's gonna die at forty six. Oh wow, he survives getting shot through the neck. I already spoiled that part. Like he's a he's an interesting life. He did some British people shit, like he went off
to boarding school. He went to a place called Eton that is fancy as hell.
Oh fuck yeah, you ever heard of it?
Yeah? Yeah, it's what's called public school. And because British people have everything backwards, because it's a private school, I finally for this episode looked up what the fuck that means. I've known this for a long time that public school means private school if you're in England, and it means like fancy ass shit. Right, it's called public school. This's got its name because even though it's a private school.
As long as your parents could pay your tuition, you could go regardless of like where your parents lived or what they did for a living. But it's where the rulers of the empire and shit go right.
Very confusing.
England is a weird, complicated class night Maryland where there's an Eaten accent. I didn't know that, and so you'll be judged your entire life, like positively or negatively because you have an Eton accent.
It's like the Ivy League sort of accent.
Sort of Okay, Hugh Laurie played House MD. You want to eat in? And I just think that's fun to tell my friend doctor Phota.
Of the House of Pod.
True, we're not named after that, no, I must say, but I love to tell you that. Yeah, No, I went.
To eaton right, Yeah, of course we all went to eat in here.
Listen to me. You can hear it in my voice.
It's like a very popular school for politicians and like nepotism and miss actors. Yeah, it's yeah. Josh James stout what he thinks of Eden.
I will he George or what was a scholarship boy at Eton because his parents didn't have any money, and he had, like, did well enough at prep school to get scholar I.
Imposter syndrome with theory is just getting because they were they were so mean to him, were they they were horrible?
Well, he wrote that they were incredibly mean to him constantly for being a scholarship boy.
Yeah.
Everyone else from that time in that school is like, what are you talking about? He played sports with us, We liked him.
He might just be a sensitive guy.
He is super sensitive, but makes a good artist.
Yeah, I feel that.
Like, honestly, he's into sports. He grows up to be not a small person. More academic sources he's six foot two. More personal sources he's six foot four, So no one's arguing yet he is small.
Yeah.
He's also sickly his entire life. He has two intense spouts of pneumonia as a kid, and he never fully re covered. He finishes school. Everyone else is off to university. George wants to be different. He wants adventure. He wanted orientalism. He wanted to go become a cop in Burma. Oh well, what a choice. I know. The two worst things he did he did when he was eighteen years old. One of them was going to be a cop in Burma. He's a sensitive guy, and now I'm gonna talk about
the other worst thing he did. Sensive guy trying to fight it. He was trying to fight his sensitive nature. That's what's happening. That's how I'm putting this together in my home. I know, and I think he wants orientalism. He wants like adventure and shit. And he also doesn't
have a critique of the colonial project. Yet he's going to get one by becoming a colonial cop like he does the best case what all cops should do, which is quit, is what he does, and then spend the rest of his life writing against the system that he was a part of.
Yeah.
But the other thing that he's going to spend the rest of his life regretting. If you read between the lines in one direction and then completely ignore that he did if you read between the lines and the other direction. Is the reason that I wrote off George Orwell for a long time, because I knew this, even though it only kind of came out more recently. Most overviews of
his life glide right past this. He tried to rape his best friend after she friend zoned him when he was eighteen, years old, and people who don't talk about it. To be fair, no one talked about it at all. Didn't No one learned this until he'd been dead for about fifty years. Historians like to quabble, quibble whatever about how to characterize it. Sometimes they call it assault or attempted rape. Wikipedia called it, calls it a botched seduction.
His friend that this happened to, by the end of her life is not mad about it and saw him as the one who got away and wished she'd married him. It is complicated. What he did is not complicated. The long term impact, the way that that move, other parts of it are complicated. When he was a kid, he became super close friends with the family, two sisters and
a brother. When he's like eleven or whatever. The sister is about two years older than him, and his name Jacyntha Buddhicum, and the story of how they met sounds like a twee British novel. This thirteen year old girl goes out into her family's garden and there's this eleven year old boy standing on his head. She says, what are you doing? And I've read two versions of this. He either says, quote you are noticed more if you stand on your head than if you're a right way up.
I've also read you notice more if you stand on your head then either way. Fucking twee novel. Shit, it's real cheshire Cat like Alice in Wonderland.
Have you ever stood on your head? Yeah?
I have?
Yeah, that's great. They become friends young George while he's Eric at this point. They become close friends and they hang out all the time, talking about poetry and books and how they're going to become great writers together and shit. And she becomes a poet and he becomes a famous writer. He thought they would be more than friends and she didn't. And it gets really kind of into in cul territory
before the assault. It's almost kind of funny. His first love poem probably was to her when he was about fifteen years old. It's called the Pagan because the Buddhicoms were agnostics and their school was like being weird them about it, like we might kick out your whole family because you don't believe in God or whatever you know. And the poem starts, and to be clear, he's fifteen when he writes this, So here are you? And here
am I? Where we may thank our gods to be above the earth, beneath the sky, naked souls, alive and free. And she writes back this critique, so she's like trying to cleverly just friendz him. She's like, hey, maybe change naked to unarmored. Oh yeah, that's a much better choice, I know. So he wrote back her another. He wrote
her another poem, Friendship and love are closely intertwined. My heart belongs to your befriending mind, but chilling sunlit fields, cloud shadows fall, my love can't reach your heedless heart at all.
Great, that's I mean, that is pure cringe low. Yeah, young teenager. I feel the discomfort in my stomach. I get the clamps. You think about something you did that was really embarrassing. That's what's happening to me hearing this.
She writes back. By light too bright, our dazzled eyes betrayed. It's best to rest content and tranquil shade.
So I'm not as literary as you, because you're an excellent writer, and I write basically progress notes on patients. But it sounds very much so that He's like, I'm so into you, And she is very deafly and artfully being like, I'm going to have a little fun with this game, but also make it clear that it's not going anywhere and that you need to chill.
Yeah, and what he should have done is chill out by listening to advertisements in the middle of an anti capitalist podcast.
Works for me.
And we're back. Yeah, no, exactly. It's a he's writing love poetry and she's writing just friends poetry, right, you know, just friend's poetry. Yeah, this genre, I know. They go on walks daily. Then one day, when he was eighteen, as recounted by a family friend quote, he had attempted to take things further and make serious love to Jacyntha.
He had held her down. By that time, he was six foot four and she was under still under five feet and though she struggled yelling at him to stop, he had torn her skirt and badly bruised a shoulder and her left hip. When Jacynthia yelled to stop, Eric let her go. Jacyntha ran home crying. They never saw each other again.
Oh, he's a best he's a piece of shit.
This is yeah, this is the like people are mad at orwell for the wrong reasons. This is an understanding. This is why I completely wrote off Orwell for years. Honestly, it's because I knew this part of the story, and to skip around in this timeline, the timeline of his life a little bit, just to finish out her story. Okay, So Orwell comes home from Burma five years later, and he had a ring ready to propose because he's still in love with her and whatever, this is an insult.
He stays at her aunt's house and Orwell called her in London, begging her to come visit, and she refused, and he never found out why. He assumed, and this would be a perfectly legitimate assumption that this was because she was mad about what he'd done. It actually wasn't. She refused to come visit because she had just had a kid with some random dude and who had then ditched her, and then she was trying to put the
kid up for adoption and she was busy. Decades later, as he's on his deathbed, they reconnected through letters, and he to her he was the one who got away. Decades later, in the nineteen seventies, she wrote a memoir called Eric and Me about their time together, and she did so after quote a lifetime of ghosts and regrets at turning away the only man who ever appealed on all levels. How I wish I had been ready for betrothal when Eric asked me to marry him on his
return from Burma. It took me literally years to realize that we are all imperfect creatures, but that Eric was less imperfect than anyone else I'd ever met. And this is so interesting to me, because fuck, what a bar The bar that the other men aren't passing is to be better than the man who assaulted her.
Yeah, did she address it in that book?
I don't know. I haven't read that book. I think I read about how the story of it came up, and like there's a lot of like it's all little bit third hand about what happened. Like literally, the quote that I read about what happened is the most direct retelling in print of what happened. And it was her sister's friend recounting it and none of this, like and the fact that she then is like, oh, he's the one who got away, none of that because she kind
of had a pretty sad life. I think this doesn't excuse what he did, But I I think that you end up with this thing that informs his writing where he sees men as monstrous because he sees himself as monstrous because of what he had done. And it's interesting, it's not I don't.
Know, Yeah, that's that's that is such a tough situation. I mean, clearly there's some real trauma there for both of them.
And and way more for her obviously.
Yeah, obviously way more for her. And it made it even worse by the fact that, like comparatively, she still holds him on a pedestal, you know. Yeah, that's it really just goes to show like how bad the interactions with these other men in her life must have been, including probably this guy that she had had the kid with who knows. Yeah, I mean sounds terrible on all lands.
No, I know, and it yeah, And so now I'm just going to get into all the stuff that the bad stuff about orwell that.
People talk about, just to do it. Let's get into it.
Before we talk more about his life. There's an awful lot of arguments about whether or not Orwell was a misogynist or a feminist or sort of neither. His writing is like the Bible, there's so much of it written at such different times that it's really easy to take quotes out of context and paint whatever picture you want. His male protagonists are almost universally misogynistic. The protagonist of
nineteen eighty four is violent fantasies. For example. The only female protagonist he ever wrote was in a book called A Clergyman's Daughter, which is one of these books that I haven't read, but he also wishes he hadn't published. In that the protagonist is by an older man, and then they become friends, and it is generally considered his worst book, including by him. He does not know how to write women well. He also hated this book and in his will asked for it to not be reprinted.
He told his friend it was the worst book he ever wrote, and he'd only published it because he'd been so hard up for money and then for fun. Counterexamples to his misogyny later in life. There's this story recounted by a different man who doesn't use the name of the woman involved. There's this like they're in this literary scene together, all these mostly men, and there's this young ha woman in the literary scene, and you know it's like written as like, oh, every head turned when she
walked by, et cetera. Later, that woman complains about all of the men in the literary circle on how they objectifire except or Well, the only person who didn't creep on her and didn't treat her as a woman, but as a person. I have read so many interpretations of Orwell and misogyny, like I wish this hadn't been such. I understand why I had to be such an large part of my research for this because of this that
he had done. You know, Yeah, there's a lot of convincing arguments from every position I leaned towards sort of that he portrayed more misogynist men, not out of unconscious misogyny, but out of attempting to draw attention to his own misogyny, at least later in life. I think his earlier writing is unaddressed misogyny.
I can I ask a question about that, And this is I guess, a bigger question on writing. Like the fact that his characters are misogynistic, it doesn't necessarily mean that he was embracing that, right. I mean, because I always felt like his characters were all flawed, and he wanted to show that they were all deeply flawed, and like the fact that they were misogynistic feels like him critiquing it. It feels like he did that on purpose, to be like, this is a bad trait.
Yeah, I think overall that's true, And yes, absolutely, we're actually currently in an era where people are having a little bit of a hard time separating a care character from the author. On the other hand, we're also in a time where people are getting better at not letting misogynist male writers get away with being like, no, it's just my character, because there are absolutely people who are just like, oh, it's just my characters who are all racist pieces of shit. I'm totally great, you know.
Yeah, And I.
Think that there are people who do a better job of it than or well of like making it clear, because he believed in very clear writing, right, and so I think this is an actual weak spot of his because I don't think he successfully always addressed this. But it is a little bit my impression because keep the aspertise for flying, for example, seems like a critique of the We call them googles in my scene, and this is like not a word that anyone else uses. Okay, googles,
I'm going to learn there's a word called Google. An oogle is a crusspunk who like lives out of a backpack and travels around and eats trash and lives in squats. I was an oogle for a very long time. It's a slightly pejorative word, but but it's a very reclaimed one and it only exists in this tiny, weird subculture. Okay, So from there we get other words, like a Google is a dog. Google, it's the dog that lives with the yougle Okay, right, a Google is a boo, that's
an oogle. So if you live on your if instead of living on someone's couch, which would be googling, you live in someone's bed and your partner pays rent and you don't, that's called googling googling.
Wow.
And I think he's critiquing that. It's possible he wasn't. It's possible he was just unconsciously so lost in his own character's head.
Right.
But when I read that when I was like twenty, I thought he was critiquing it, and I was not in a particularly good I was, so I that's my read. My read is that he is on some level trying to critique misogyny but not doing a particularly adepth job at it and sometimes falling into it.
Let me ask a super naive question, and I don't ask this to justify.
I don't know gennology of Google, right, No, no, no.
Sorry, I'm gonna google that later.
Oh it's not it doesn't exist. No one knows it. Oh anyway, Okay, Well, I have a friend who is like a master's degree who used to be a no Google, who tried to figure it out.
Probably continue on it. Okay, So I don't ask this question to join to justify in any way misogynistic writing. But were there writers of his time? I'm assuming there are that you felt did a better job of writing women's voices male writers, I mean, or were they all pretty terrible at this point? I mean, I don't know if they're better now, honestly, and I feel like I should read more, but like especially.
At the time, I am not certain, which is funny because this is the era I used to like read a lot, you know, when I was like a young, pretentious teenager, I read an awful lot of like Turn of the Century up to about nineteen fifty, like good literature. I liked all the literature. I don't have an immediate answer for you. I think that overall that that cadre of writers tended to be pretty bad at it. But I'm sure there's exceptions that I'm not thinking of right now.
And obviously there were women writing too, but they were generally not held up.
I'll wait for reddit.
Yeah, so I think he never really understood women, and he sometimes tried. That's how I feel. He was also casually homophobic his entire life, and this was never really addressed. People like to argue about this one. He absolutely used anti gay slers a bunch, and he tended to look down on homosexuality. He also and I haven't found the
source on this, I found someone talking about it. He wrote how there was a bunch of homosexuality and all boy boarding schools and how that was a positive thing overall. How So, he wasn't like I hate the gaze. He never wrote like I hate the gaze. He just like was casually like, oh that nancy over there.
You know?
Did he actually use that term?
Yeah? He used nancies and like fancy boys and stuff. I think a bunch or like he's nancy boys and pansies I think is what he used.
Kind of disappointed kind of feel like he as a literary guy, he could have come up with something better.
Yeah, that's a good point. Actually, one of his rules of writing is don't use the same cliches very jargony. Yeah, no, totally. He was also a huge admirer of Oscar Wilde, who was famously gay in prison for being gay, and Oscar Wilde was one of his first major political influences, and he was very supportive when his friend, the anarchist historian
George Woodcock wrote a history of wild One. Author Anna Funder connects misogyny and homophobia when she says that she writes about how one of Orwell's wives is like main wife. He has one wife that he married like two months before he died, but Eileen was his main wife for many years. She's generally erase from his history, and I hold by the that was a conscious choice, but I
could be wrong. She claims. This author claims that Orwell had no sexual interest in women and would have been happier in a time when homosexuality was more I don't buy this. I haven't seen all of our evidence, but I don't buy it. I have not seen any I would be the first to believe and want to believe that he was gay, right, like all super into claiming
as many of our heroes as queer as possible. Right, he spent a while fighting in Spain and the Revolution, where there was like a ton of out gay officers and soldiers, and he would have had every opportunity to be in gay relationships, and this and that. I don't know, so people like to argue all of these things. Then finally, of the of his big blind spots, there's this early anti semitism, And this one's the easiest. I can like this one, I have like I can tell you the
story of it. His earliest writings were explicitly and grossly anti semitic. He talked about Jews having brought on their own treatment on themselves. His characters were anti Semitic, But so was he right, and everyone kind of knew it. Throughout the nineteen thirties, this is really present in his writing. He has a ton of friends who are Jewish. This doesn't fix it until one day it does. One of his Jewish friends in about nineteen forty challenges him on
all of it, and Orwell changes his mind. He is presented with evidence, he changes his mind, he's always attached to common decency instead of ideology, right, and he believes that it's good to change your mind. He wrote, anti Semitism is simply not the doctrine of a grown up person. People who go in for that sort of thing must take the consequences, and he means social consequences. He's a very big free speech guy, but he's a very big
shame people for being fucked up. Yeah, and he went on to write an essay called Anti Semitism Britain, exploring this problem at great length to a very wide audience. But it's funny because I now run across essays that I claim he was anti Semitica's whole life, even during this period, and I was like, oh fuck, reading all these and reading it was like one that definitely says this, and one that kind of says it, and they're The main claim is because at the end of his life
he was like, I hate anti Semitism. I'm still anti Zionist. Zionism is nationalism and bad and colonialism is bad. And because he said that in the nineteen forties, this is why some Zionist people still find it it's anti Semitic.
He's man in some ways he's he's cutting edge, like he is. Yeah, this is he's winning me back a little bit. Now that's back.
Yeah, that's where I was. I was like, I don't know if I'm ever going to do an Orwell episode because I loved his books as a kid, right and I knew about the fighting in Spain thing, But I keep seeing right wing people posting about him. Yeah, and I'm like, if nothing else, he was a democratic socialist. He was just kind of shitty to women, you know, And so then I like, I was like, all, I'm gonna do an episode about him, and then he he kind of won me back while I was doing the episode.
Yeah, he's winning me. Now you're taking me on a journe on this one.
And he had his life was a journey. You know. It's like if there's a like, there's a reason we try as a society not to always hold people to the single worst thing that they did when they were eighteen years old, you know, and what they do about it later is what is the most impactful. Obviously his actions still had impact, and I'm not trying to deny that. But so the other worst thing he did is he went to Burma. Let's go back to that. Well, actually, first he went on to a journey into the land
of advertisement. Well, actually, eventually it's gonna come up war propagandas that's kind of the same, here's some ads. We're back so young George still Eric. At this point, he goes to Burma and he becomes a colonial cop. Burma at this part was part of British India. And one good thing that happened came out of this. When he went to India, he had had a mustache that was a style at the time. You might know it is the toothbrush mustache. You more likely know it as the hitler.
Yeah.
Fortunately, chaplain, Yeah, he had a chaplain. Fortunately, the style at the time for colonial officials over there was a pencil mustache. So he switched to a pencil mustache and then kept that the rest of his life and always the like kind of the slum in it, like I want to be with the locals.
Guy.
He gets sick hand tattoos in the local style on his fingers. Nice and he realizes really quickly that a lot of the Burmese people don't like him at all, And soon he realizes that the Empire is fucking evil. He got sick there while he was there, because he did that a lot, and that was one of his past times, was getting sick and.
Yeah, getting sick.
Yeah. And in nineteen twenty seven he goes back to England. He goes back a little bit early on, like sick leave, and he's like, man, fuck being a colonial cop. I am fucking done. I am never doing that again. And he never did it again. When he left for Burma, he had no politics. He came back first and foremost anti colonial. At this point he also became a socialist, starting off as an anarchist. Soon he's gonna end up
a democratic socialist with close friends who are anarchists. He wrote about it that he had developed quote an anarchistic theory that all government is evil, that the punishment always does more harm than the crime, and that people can be trusted to behave decently if only we let them alone. And this probably comes kind of almost word for word from Oscar wild because Wilde's essay the Soul of Man
under Socialism is basically what Orwell just said. So he's back from Burma and now he starts doing his like slum in it. He's like all right, well I can't. I shouldn't go explore exotic locales overseas. That was kind of fucked up. I'm going to do it at home. So he dresses up as a tramp. He starts wandering around and he puts together one of his first books
that people read. It's called Down and Out in Paris in London, and he gets sick of bunch doing that, and he starts writing a bunch and then he kind of like, if you pretend to be poor long enough, you kind of end up poor.
Dressed for the job you want.
Yeah, and uh, and somebody's like sick, he's staying in shitty hospitals and stuff, and it's like fox his health up.
You know.
He's like committed to the bit committed. Yeah, until eventually he's he realizes he's middle class and he moves back to his parents' house.
Yeah. I was gonna ask.
I was gonna ask when that part of the story arc happened. Yeah. Eventually he's like, all right, that's enough of that.
Is there an oogling term for someone that does that, that moves back in with their parents?
Well, okay, so it's kind of funny. Is that the word oogle used to mean a poser street kid, so like originally in like the early aughts, and Google was or well, right, like someone who's a fake Oogle who's going to move back with his parents. But those of us middle class dropouts fake Googles like me, we tended to call the oogle meant more of the like fighty shitty, like stabby guy right who's like drunk all the time
or whatever. So to some people the oogle thing is to be the middle class kid, and to other people the Google is like the more real anyway.
I'm so I feel I'm going to I can't wait to use this knowledge. I don't know how or when, but I am going to drop this at some point in the near future.
I have never found a word that is more completely suffused within a scene and completely opaque to people outside the scene. Yeah, Like, I have never used this word in like company that isn't punks, like especially street punks, and had anyone know what I'm talking about. But this is a word that is.
Like now and me. Now you can use it with me.
I'm cool exactly. Yeah, you can call me an Google or when I'm acting like an oogle. Okay, let's get the Jordan. But it's it's fine. So and then he moves back with his parents and he does stuff that totally matters, and I'm not as interested in this week's story. He writes a bunch of books, including the ones he
later rejected entirely in which he hadn't written. He took on the name George Orwell at this time, and it's also kind of partly a way to leave his childhood behind and make a clean break for who he wants to become. In nineteen thirty five, he meets his wife to be Eileen O'Shaughnessy, and before they get married, he goes off slumming again up north and he writes The Road to Wigan Peer, and he actually does really good
stuff with his slumming it. The Road to Wigan Peer is this like, look at the conditions that the working class and the north live in because people don't know it. And it's basically a call for a socialism that isn't caught up in like intellectual bullshit in jargon. He's like, if we can't talk about socialism in a way that matters to the miners, why are we doing it? This gets him put under state surveillance, where he remains until he dies.
Oh wow, it's real nineteen eighty I know.
But he's also part of the propaganda machine in the government. It's he's woven in. It's interesting he gets married nineteen thirty six. In nineteen thirty six, Franco staged a coup in I wrote into this script France, which would be a whole different story. He staged a coup in Spain, and the Blairs are like, what, we gotta go fucking
do something about that, don't we. And the short version of the Spanish Civil War you can get the long version from like half the episodes I've ever done, is that Spain finally managed to get itself into being a republic, but then Franco, a fascist, invaded his own country and tried, after he tried to stage a coup, and then it failed because republican troops and anarchist militias threw down to
stop it. Militias ran to the front to hold back fascism, while meanwhile, social revolution spread across the country and in Barcelona and Catalonia. More broadly, millions of people started living in an anti state, socialist life. People thought the Western powers like France, UK and the US would help them out because after all, they are committed to the democracy and the republic and blah blah blah. Right, Yeah, the
Western governments turned their back on Spain completely. They not only did they not show up, they blockaded aid into the country. Only Stalin showed up to help, but there were serious strings attached. Communists as in loyal to the USSR. Folks were a distinct minority like politically, they were a tiny fraction of the left in Spain at the time, but if you wanted Daddy Stalin's help, you gotta let
them be in charge. And that soon turned out very badly, with the communists going to literal war against the Republic and the anarchists, and it's messy and bad. But this hasn't happened yet. When the Blairs go down, well, the Orwell if she never changes her name to Orwell, Eileen goes with him. Yeah. A few months later, the Republic is in danger and the governments of the western countries aren't helping. But people from those countries and from other
countries around the world. Mexico shows up really hard. I can't remember all of the countries. An awful lot of leftists from around the world are like, we're going to go fight fascism. George and Eileen are among them. On December twenty third, nineteen thirty six, George Orwell sets off to Spain. At first, he's like, I'm going to go be a journalist, but as soon as he gets there, he sees the revolution and he's like, all right, sign
me up, let's go. He actually has a good quote that I didn't include in here for some reason, where he's like, look, I don't understand it all. There's like anarchist banners everywhere and hammers and sickles and shit, but everyone's like in charge of themselves and that's pretty cool and I don't need to and some of this scares me, but this seems like something worth defending. And that's my paraphrase of him. Yeah, but I will give his direct
quote quote. When I joined the militia, I had promised myself to kill one fascist. After all, if each of us killed one, they would soon be extinct.
It's beautiful and simple.
I know, I know that's lovely. Anyway, we're not sure if he killed anyone or not. Firefights and bomb fights are like that. He absolutely shot at fascists, and he also fought. He gotten like a bayonet fight with a fascist who ran away. No, that's pretty that counts for something. Come on, yeah, no, I give him credit more than I have ever done. Yeah, and how all that went, we'll talk about on Wednesday.
Oh, that'll wait until I don't know.
You totally have to wait till Wednesday. Five minutes breaks a week on all go to the bathroom before we record.
Okay, I'm a pick and be right back.
Okay, yeah, no, So, so how's orwell, how how are you feeling about this man?
You kind of laid out the grand work perfectly, like I understood there's gonna be some deeply problematic parts. It was a little bit of a dip from me emotionally. I'm on my way back up. I think he's I think it's very interesting. I'm a little disappointed I didn't work in a Dexy's Midnight Runners reference with Eileen oh Bo. But maybe I'll get to it in the second episode.
And I'm really I'm loving it. This is great, Like, this is an amazing interesting character, and he's so I mean, I don't know if he's misunderstood just because I don't know enough about him, but I you're what you said is exactly right. He is just so woven into pop culture and references from everything from like stuff we watched when I was growing up to like the Boys now on TV. Everything is woven in this just Orwellian these Orwellian ideas. So to learn more about him, I think
is really important. So, yeah, no, it's great.
I more and more as I was like reading all this stuff, I was like, Oh, this man fundamentally changed the world, and we don't know what the world would be like without him. And there are some ways in which, because of how grossly misused he has been, there's some ways in which it got worse right in other ways, And I think overall, I think in broad strokes, I think he did maybe more to combat the spread of totalitarian ideology through his writing than anyone in the English language.
Yeah.
Huge, Yeah, And and we'll talk more about that on Wednesday, But first we'll talk about your podcast and anything else you want to talk about.
I have a podcast is called The House of Pod. It is a humor adjacent medical podcast. We will look at the intersections of public health and pop culture and social inequities and cover some pretty fun topics with great guests, a lot of people that you'll already know from listening to this podcast. And it's a ton of fun. And I know you might not think that it would be because you're like, I don't want to It sounds a little bit medically and nerdy and sciencey, and it's not
that much. It's because we are kind of anti jargon. So you will like it. I think if you don't, you know, we'll send you a nicol.
It took me like three times to finally figure out because House of Pod makes so much sense obviously as a play on House of God. Ah, it took me so long to figure that out.
Well, I mean, you're not the target audience for that book. I mean, I mean I'm glad. Did you read it?
No?
No?
Wait wait wait does a book or House of God?
No? I don't know how god. So the House of God is a book that was ranked one of the best satires of all time. It's a medical book that was one of the first books about like medicine that showed medicine in a realistic light. It came out like forty five years ago or something. I have the author on the show Actually it's a problematic book and some very serious ways in this depiction of minorities in particular
and misogyny. But it was the first book to really kind of show the world of medicine in a realistic way, and it is like a satire and it's actually, you know, pretty brilliantly written overall by this guy who was a doctor, and it's that's kind of what we're trying to do with the show is kind of peel back the curtain on the world of medicine and show you like, this
is kind of what it's really like. This is what doctors are actually like when they're talking to them each other, and you know, they're not trying to put up a fake front. And I hope through the whole process that we kind of, you know, break down people's anxiety about medicine or make medicine more approachable to people.
That's kind of the overall goal of it. So but yeah, it's based on a book called The House of God. Okay, that makes so much sense. Yeah, I knew that House of God was sometimes a word that people use for like hospitals and stuff, but I don't thah totally. And so that was like Oh, I get it, and I felt so clever, But now I get it actually, and uh, totally glad I learned it on air or whatever. I guess my whole thing with my podcast is I make guests come on and talk about things they don't know.
Oh, but I'm so good. Listen again, I have to apologize to your listeners. I'm so sorry you have. You're all listening right now and being like what These are the most basic questions. Why isn't he asking?
No?
And I'm sorry, I hear you, I hear you. I know I understand listeners. I'm sorry.
Sorry, some of those listeners have those questions. I love. One of the favorite tricks I've ever learned to get over imposter syndrome actually in some ways is when I'm in a crowd and someone's like, especially if I'm kind of in like if I am like at like a like a political thing, right. I have enough cred at this point that if I'm in a political space or whatever, like enough people kind of know who I am or whatever,
because I've been doing this for twenty years. So if someone uses jargon, I sometimes I'm like, hey, what does that mean? Because no one thinks I don't know what it means, right, and so I'm like, I'm safe to ask ask the question, you know, but someone needs to someone needs to say like because like unless it's a closed space, like people need to be able to understand what's happening, you know, agreed, I agreed. But if you want to hear what's happening in Spain of eighty years ago,
then you got a way till Wednesday. Uh oh, I have a book. It's this God, it's like one of your last few days. You can kickstart it. What are you doing? Why haven't you kickstarted yet? Don't you want to sign? Copy The Sapling Cage, my young adult book.
I actually realized more than I when I'm going through this or what was actually a more important literary influence on me than I'd recognize because I was thinking about how a lot of like my actual the literary here is that I like read more recently and I care more about tend to write. I try to write plainly.
I try to write at a fairly like low reading level, because I think the lowest reading level that you can say the things that you need to say in as complicated and nuanced ways as you can or need to is the goal. I don't want things to be complicated
for the sake of complicated. And actually, upon looking back, I was like, oh, reading Orwell's stuff on writing was what I was doing when I first started writing, and I'm very excited to read the book, so clearly I'm writing the next nineteen eighty four is my book is nothing like It's a fantasy book about a witch who saves the world.
That's yeah, I can't wait.
Yeah, all right, Well, let's see you all Wednesday.
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