We live in a corrupted system. The way to tackle corruption is to first acknowledge it exists. Only then is it possible to come up with ways of dealing with it, but don't make the mistake of believing the system can or will uncorrupt itself.

Life Imitates Art – Episode 1

8 June 2025

This is the first in a new series of short articles that will highlight the modern(ish) trend of events and occurrences that are in works of “fiction” coincidentally ending up happening in one form or another in real-life.

These are all definitely coincidences, and it would be completely mad to think for one second that there is any planning, motives or predictive programming behind anything to do with any of these totally fictional things ending up actually happening because as all good citizens know, that is just cray-zee Conspiracy Theory™ stuff, and we should not be thinking that way because it’s naughty, and we make Politicians sad when we do it.

Now we’ve got that out of the way, we’ll start this series with a particularly outstanding example.

Yes. It was decided on the 75th anniversary of Orwell’s book “1984” that it required a new introductory essay to warn us that the main character Winston Smith, a victim of a brutal, totalitarian State that punishes it’s citizens for wrongthink, is “problematic”.

The Telegraph reported on this on the 7th June 2025 (archive) with an article headlined “Orwell’s 1984 now comes with ‘trigger warning’“, where it explains how the “author has been convicted of ‘thought crimes’ he warned about in novel“.

Ms Perkins-Valdez, the writer of this unironically Orwellian preface took issue with how Winston Smith disliked “nearly all women, and especially the young and pretty ones”. A problem indeed for a character in a novel where citizens are brutally conditioned into conformity in a society where love, attraction and emotional connection were forbidden and breaching rules was punishable by the worst torture imaginable and death. It’s almost like she hasn’t actually grasped the idea of the story.

Apparently the novel also failed to live up to the expectations of Ms Perkins-Valdez with regard to “race”, because of course it does.

Walter Kirn is quoted in the Telegraph article as saying…

We’re getting somebody to actually convict George Orwell himself of thought crime in the introduction to his book about thought crime.

It’s all very “Current Year” of course, and this kind of thing shows no signs of abating. It’s all so ridiculous you just have to laugh. Stay tuned for more episodes in this new series, Life Imitates Art.