Doubleplusungood

LITTLE ROCK — In an appearance at a Florida senior center, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi suggested a new name for the public option to ease the opposition. “You’ll hear everyone say, ‘There’s got to be a better name for this,’ ” Pelosi said. She suggested calling it “the consumer option.” Rep. Debbie Wasserman Shultz, D-Fla., appearing at Pelosi’s side, used the term, “competitive option.” - News item

So, with apologies to George Orwell: IT WAS a bright cold day in April and the clocks were striking thirteen. Winston Smith had yet another message when he sat down at his desk in the Ministry of Truth. He wondered if Comrade Tillotson across the partition had got the same message. Winston suspected they were often given the same task. Or maybe several doubleplusgood newspeakers were.Then later some higher-up in Minitrue would choose which version would become the official one. He knew he would have to be careful. Sometimes words fell out of favor and became oldspeak, and it was Winston’s job to express everything in plain newspeak. So he opened the compartment and found:

times 3.12.09 reporting doubleplusungood

refs unphrase public option

Winston knew this was urgent. It always was when doubleplusungood was used. Somebody was upset. He began by looking up the articles that had referenced the new unphrase-public option. He read the newspapers from earlier in the year, and indeed the Party had promised to give everyone in Oceania free health care. The word “free” made Winston smile. Somewhere in the back of his mind he remembered an unperson from many years back (P. J. O’Rourke?) who said none of us would believe how expensive health care would become once it’s free. Winston made an effort to forget all that. He worried that the Thought Police would catch him laughing on the inside.

The catch in the health-care debate had indeed been something called the public option. It was in all the papers. Or most of them. The Party had been concerned that having Big Brother offer the people health insurance at a cheap rate might push the remaining private employers to unload their workers or at least the poorer, sicker ones onto the public option. If such an option were available-the option to save money-of course the employers would do just that. It would be as natural as water flowing downhill.

But the phrase itself, public option, had not proven popular. No wonder, since so many public services were associated with a lesser quality of care and payment. Already doctors were starting to put up signs saying they didn’t accept Medicaid patients. When an idea is bad, change the name. So references to the public option had already started to disappear from the papers. Winston pulled the newspeak dictionary down from the shelf and began to work. More messages slid out of the pneumatic tube while he worked, but those could wait. This was a doubleplusungood message, and got first priority.

What phrase would be better? Consumer Option sounded like a likely candidate. Some members of the Inner Party had already started using it. Then again, others favored Competitive Option. Not that consumers would be helped by any name, and not that the option would inspire competition. But the actual effect of the new program didn’t matter. Winston just had to find a new name for it-and, most urgent, begin erasing all the refs to public option. Eventually the phrase would disappear. Even those who might remember it wouldn’t be sure they remembered it exactly. Had they just imagined it? And when they went to look for it, there it wouldn’t be. It would have become an unword.

WINSTON finally settled on Competitive Option, corrected all the current news articles that mentioned it, and began the long, thorough process of obliterating the phrase from the always malleable records of Oceania. Some of the articles he found said Competitive Option would be paid for with tax dollars, yet save money for the taxpayers. Too bald a contradiction. He suggested the Ministry say that providing free health care at government expense would drive down costs. He also added that any money spent by the government to provide free health care would be repaid. No need to say by whom. That was the beauty of it. He didn’t have to explain any contradiction. Any good Party member could hold more than one idea in his head at the same time, however contradictory. The accepted term for it in newspeak was doublethink.

No, Winston might not be able to bellyfeel the duckspeak he wrote, but he did know his Ingsoc, the official ideology of Oceania, which worried him. It was always the clever ones who got into trouble.

Still, it had been a good day’s work. He let his eyes stray to the framed Order of Merit Second Class he’d hung on his office wall next to the picture of Big Brother. He’d got it for coining estate tax in place of the oldspeak for it, death tax. It was his finest moment.

Then it was back to work. As soon as all the corrections were made, Winston took the original message, and the notes he’d made himself, and dropped them down the memory hole. It was as if none of it had ever existed. Public option? What’s that? He smiled the smile of the good craftsman. He knew Big Brother would have been proud of him.