Orwell’s essay is one that I found more interesting of the two. It made little mention of politics but I decided that was the interesting part. I personally disagree that is a bad thing to be vague in politics. After all, in the world of politics, no politician wants to be too specific. After all, he or she is attempting to get elected and if they were to voice their own opinions, it would revile their true intentions and potentially deter many votes.
The idea of being vague in the political/public sphere is to create ironically, less stress. Sure people want to know what candidates really believe and it would be nice not to hear the same old stuff but the ideas of change, and moving forward and the usual phrases we hear during elections and in the news in general are appealing and ideas that many people have their own images for. Thus, politicians don’t have to work hard explaining their ideals.
In essence, being vague is an extremely useful tool for a politician and while yes, it does dumb down the English language a bit, but how many people, how many voters, want to know the details of a candidate’s platform. That would require them to make decisions, pay attention and have some idea of what the hell they were doing and why they believe in one candidate over the other. Judging by the lack of political participation we have today, why should politicians waste their time? Why not judge a candidate for their looks instead? It’s easier.
It’s too much work to be specific. Sure, writing ‘bad’ is easy and obviously writing ‘well’ is hard but in our current society who has time to be specific. There are so many things to do that people don’t have time to be specific, or they unintentionally aren’t specific because they don’t have the time to as Orwell put it “create an image” for everything and then pick words to go along.
Obviously I thought Orwell’s essay was more interesting because I haven’t said anything about shitty first drafts. While Shitty first drafts were interesting and I think it was true (this is my third draft) it was less thought provoking than Orwell’s essay.
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I like the devil's advocate position. Hard to tell if you're being serious or not, but I just have to put this out there.
Americans are surprisingly involved in politics. Back in Peru, people rarely cared about the positions of the candidates and as a result made some really bad decisions. Just recently they re-elected a president, who less than 10 years ago succeeded in running the Peruvian economy into the ground. 7000% inflation, extreme poverty, not to mention increasing tensions with the terrorist group the Shining Path.
They voted for this guy because they knew who he was. And the Peruvians preferred someone they knew over a woman or a socialist radical. Sometimes it pays off to know your candidates.
Now I come here and people are surprisingly well informed about policies and candidate histories. It gets really annoying at times, especially how zealous some people are. Nevertheless, they care, and because they do, the truly best candidate will be elected.
Or you could just believe the conspiracy theories that the elections are rigged. Bush did win twice after all.
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