"Big Brother is described as “the guise in which the Party chooses to exhibit itself to the world. His function is to act as a focusing point for love, fear, and reverence, emotions which are felt more easily towards an individual than an organization.”...
Elite-Driven Cultural Crippling of Mass Political Consciousness: Orwell’s vision of using mass culture as a tool for crippling the population’s political consciousness has been realized in the efforts of the American ruling elite. He named the main mind-numbing diversions as the Lottery, and “rubbishy newspapers containing almost nothing except sport, crime, and astrology, sensational five-cent novelettes…films oozing with sex…(and) the lowest kind of pornography.” He overlooked such important categories as celebrity gossip and stock-market chatter, but was in principle squarely on the mark. A population that reads celebrity magazines and watches entertainment TV is far less prepared to understand the social forces responsible for its declining living standards, and thus less able to defend itself.
The Cult of the Leader: The novel is set in the drab London of the “future”—April 1984. Orwell’s protagonist, Winston Smith, lives in a crumbling apartment building that’s named “Victory Mansions” and smells of boiled cabbage. Prominently displayed on the building’s every landing is a large colored poster depicting “an enormous face…of a man about forty-five, with a heavy black moustache and ruggedly handsome features.” In 2010, one can hardly read of the ubiquitous Big Brother posters in a grim dilapidated London, without thinking of the “Barack Obama Hope” posters, visible throughout today’s decaying American cities."
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2010/ju...1984-j12.shtml
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