Mr. Mojo Risin'

I'm ashamed to admit it, but the first time that I read Brave New World, it was because I wanted to be Jim Morrison;  I was into The Doors, and I knew that they took their name from The Doors of Perception, also by Huxley.  I don't know why I didn't just read that book, but I'm glad I found BNW first. I no longer love The Doors; as a matter of fact, I really can't stand them anymore, but I do love Brave New World.  I dig the little things that Huxley does, like the characters' use of the name Ford in sacred context and the matter of fact presentation of the Alpha, Beta, and Epsilon caste system.  I think The Feelies got their name from this book; I never noticed that before.  

The typical dystopian realization of eugenics and population control is scary and riveting; however, as I get older, dystopian literature makes me sad where it used to make me anxious and angry at the world.  I love the science fiction that novels like The Handmaid's Tale, 1984, and BNW lead to; there can be no Logan's Run or The Matrix without Brave New World.  I also love the over-the-top criticism of oppressive and controlling social control that has become a staple of dystopian fiction. However, even though I believe that horrible atrocities evolve from misguided moral stances combined with the hunger for power, like in these novels, I think that it is even more evil that these things exist after atrocites.  In the real world, atrocities like the holocaust lead teachers like me to make statements like, "we must study this so that it never happens again," when in reality, genocide is happening all the time, and the brutal hatred and racism that causes millions of small scale horrors is just as strong as ever.  The pretense that we are being vigilant and avoiding large scale dystopia and horror, allows humanity to continue to perpetrate individual atrocities on one another in isolation, and to point to these novels and to past evils knowingly and with a sense of superior morality is folly.  

I'm reading all three of these novels in the next few weeks.  I will certainly have my share of the New World Order.