As surveillance achieves new acmes in invisibility and intelligence, George Orwell's insights in Nineteen Eighty-Four continue to grow in I-told-you-so prescience (sorry Big Brother). Penguin has decided to reissue the author's dystopian classic, along with his other down-with-totalitarianism text,..
But lest we forget, tomorrow brings BBQs, firecrackers, and all sorts of red-white-and-blue revelry as we celebrate 232 years of independence. The Fourth has always been a symbolic date, and, throughout our everybody-for-themselves history, has always been a opportune day for declarations. Here are a few of the best:
1845: Henry David Thoreau decides to be society-free and self-reliant and begins his two-year experiment at mentor Ralph Waldo Emerson's cabin near Walden Pond. During this period, he writes the transcendentalist classic Walden.
1855: Walt Whitman publishes twelve of his poems, calling the collection Leaves of Grass. It begins with the famous lines (and a lovely life philosophy):
I celebrate myself, and sing myself, And what I assume you shall assume, For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.
1881: "The pride of the swift, growing south," the Tuskegee Institute opens, with Booker T. Washington as its first principal.
1939: Retiring because of the deadly disease that would bear his name, Lou Gehrig gives his beautiful, "luckiest man on the face of the earth" speech to the fans at Yankee Stadium.
1996: In an attempt to band the world together against a single cause, the film Independence Day invents man-annihilating aliens. Ironically, the world bands together in its intense dislike for the movie.
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