Michelle Rodriguez muddied more than just her own reputation at the Marc Jacobs fashion show in New York on Monday night (photograph: Evan Agostini/Getty). As a result of her second conviction for drink driving, the Lost star is obliged to wear a bulky black device on her ankle that monitors her blood alcohol level twenty-four hours a day. So as a little protest she has scrawled "1984" and "ORWELL" on it.
I don't know if Rodriguez has actually read Nineteen Eighty-Four. Perhaps she's under the impression that Winston Smith's struggle was mostly about helping reckless drivers to return to party-going with the minimum of inconvenience. But we can hardly blame her: George Orwell's name is brought out these days to justify even the vaguest anti-authoritarian sentiment, as if he would have Christ-like sympathy for every petty grudge. No doubt the lunatic who sent a letter-bomb to Capita believes he is fighting an Orwellian battle. In the Guardian alone, the phrase "Orwellian nightmare" - which we should have banned back in 1980 when Margaret Thatcher fatuously used it to warn of the dangers of socialism - is used several times a year.
All this is particularly sad because Orwell wrote so brilliantly about so many other subjects, from the use of language to war to the British class system. Indeed, even within Nineteen Eighty-Four, the material on surveillance is not nearly so interesting as the material on the falsification of history.
But you wouldn't know that from the way Orwell's name is invoked today. You can now buy bumper stickers that say simply "Orwell was right". (About what, exactly? That you should never use a long word where a short one will do?) Just as his name is being debased to the level of a Che Guevara poster on a student's wall, his entire corpus is being diminished to a single truism: that the closer a government edges towards totalitarianism, the more control it will demand over the lives of its citizens, by technological means if necessary.
We did not need Nineteen Eighty-Four to tell us this, and it is not a great novel merely because it does so. And Orwell would have had no patience for anyone who tried to disguise an appeal to authority as a real argument. That's why I will not be ending this article, as would normally be almost obligatory, with a pithy aphorism from the man himself. George Orwell's name must be reclaimed.
