Coming Up For Air by George Orwell book review

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Coming Up For Air by George Orwell

NOW THAT ALL OF THE GREATEST GENERATION IS DEAD we can admit. The Nazis won WW1 and WW2. The harvest cull. Death rituals to the bug.

Are you a streamlined man? Setup for administrative functions at your beloved corporate institution? Do you have a mortgage, a car loan, and a credit card with appropriate limits and privileges? Are you covering your face in deference to corporate religion? Do you have the latest things and gadgets? Are you eating extremely flavorful foods and watching the best media?

Now, imagine the following: You are the same streamlined person but born in 1890-1900. Your birthday puts you dead center on target for ritual killings of World War One AND World War Two. Both wars now revealed to be a complete sham. A harvest cull.

Make way for George Bowling. A tragic first person description of a streamlined man. Enlisted for World War One only to survive and see news/propoganda AGAIN for World War Two. (even as i type this, Austria and Germany are AGAIN stamping passports and sending people to concentraion camps.)

George Bowling. The streamlined man. For a streamlined economy.

trademark TM<

Now we know. ALL of the Greatest Generation’s most valuable inputs can be NULL and VOIDED. The war(s) are LOST. Has the United States ever won a war?

Coming Up For Air by George Orwell

George Bowling. A nostalgia driven fat man attempting to recapture the innocence by returning to his old fishing pond that was drained and leveled for the streamlined economy.

Some of my highlights.

Complete Works of George Orwell by George Orwell

Book last read: 2021-12-14 03:23:11
Percentage read: 36%

Chapter 54: 2
Highlight
Chapter progress: 29.04%
Highlight: Fear! We swim in it. It’s our element. Everyone that isn’t scared stiff of losing his job is scared stiff of war, or Fascism, or Communism, or something.

Chapter 58: 1
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Chapter progress: 29.69%
Highlight: Before the war! How long shall we go on saying that, I wonder? How long before the answer will be ‘Which war?’ In my case the never-never land that people are thinking of when they say ‘before the war’ might almost be before the Boer War.

Chapter 59: 2
Highlight
Chapter progress: 29.94%
Highlight: Listing for a soldier, in their eyes, was the exact equivalent of a girl’s going on the streets.

Chapter 59: 2
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Chapter progress: 30.02%
Highlight: Little Englander or no, surely he couldn’t think it right for these here Boars to throw babies in the air and catch them on their bayonets, even if they WERE only nigger babies? But Uncle Ezekiel just laughed in his face. Father had got it all wrong! It wasn’t the Boars who threw babies in the air, it was the British soldiers!

Chapter 59: 2
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Chapter progress: 30.22%
Highlight: zenana.

Chapter 62: 5
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Chapter progress: 31.28%
Highlight: There’s time for everything except the things worth doing.

Chapter 62: 5
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Chapter progress: 31.36%
Highlight: Fishing is the opposite of war.

Chapter 64: 7
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Chapter progress: 31.72%
Highlight: Either you remember before the war and don’t need to be told about it, or you don’t remember, and it’s no use telling you.

Chapter 64: 7
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Chapter progress: 32.09%
Highlight: It was a race between death and bankruptcy, and, thank God, death got Father first, and Mother too. 1911,

Chapter 64: 7
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Chapter progress: 32.21%
Highlight: . I mean the feeling inside you, the feeling of not being in a hurry and not being frightened, the feeling you’ve either had and don’t need to be told about, or haven’t had and won’t ever have the chance to learn.

Chapter 64: 7
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Chapter progress: 32.33%
Highlight: To the end he believed that with thrift, hard work, and fair dealing a man can’t go wrong. There must have been plenty of small shopkeepers who carried that belief not merely on to bankrupt deathbeds but even into the workhouse.

Chapter 64: 7
Annotation
Chapter progress: 32.37%
Highlight: But at least they never lived to know that everything they’d believed in was just so much junk. They lived at the end of an epoch, when everything was dissolving into a sort of ghastly flux, and they didn’t know it. They thought it was eternity. You couldn’t blame them. That was what it felt like.
Notes: This is the end

Chapter 65: 8
Annotation
Chapter progress: 32.45%
Highlight: And — this is really the point — not feeling it in any way strange. Nothing seemed strange in those days.
Notes: Face mask religion of death

Chapter 65: 8
Annotation
Chapter progress: 32.49%
Highlight: But now the war and the feeling of not being one’s own master overshadowed everything.
Notes: Covid corporate religion

Chapter 65: 8
Annotation
Chapter progress: 32.62%
Highlight: There were labour battalions making roads across the desert that didn’t lead anywhere, there were chaps marooned on oceanic islands to look out for German cruisers which had been sunk years earlier, there were Ministries of this and that with armies of clerks and typists which went on existing years after their function had ended, by a kind of inertia. People were shoved into meaningless jobs and then forgotten
Notes: USA DOD corporate stimulus

Chapter 65: 8
Annotation
Chapter progress: 32.62%
Highlight: The war did extraordinary things to people. And what was more extraordinary than the way it killed people was the way it sometimes didn’t kill them.
Notes: Corporate terrorism. Face mask death ritual

Chapter 65: 8
Annotation
Chapter progress: 32.78%
Highlight: And what I read during the next year or so! Wells, Conrad, Kipling, Galsworthy, Barry Pain, W. W. Jacobs, Pett Ridge, Oliver Onions, Compton Mackenzie, H. Seton Merriman, Maurice Baring, Stephen McKenna, May Sinclair, Arnold Bennett, Anthony Hope, Elinor Glyn, O. Henry, Stephen Leacock, and even Silas Hocking and Jean Stratton Porter. How many of the names in that list are known to you,
Notes: Reference material

Chapter 65: 8
Highlight
Chapter progress: 32.82%
Highlight: But — I wonder if you can understand this — the thing that really changed me, really made an impression on me, wasn’t so much the books I read as the rotten meaninglessness of the life I was leading.

Chapter 65: 8
Annotation
Chapter progress: 32.86%
Highlight: After that unspeakable idiotic mess you couldn’t go on regarding society as something eternal and unquestionable, like a pyramid. You knew it was just a balls-up.

Notes: CdC corporate mandates

Chapter 65: 8
Annotation
Chapter progress: 32.86%
Highlight: The effect of all this, plus the books I was reading, was to leave me with a feeling of disbelief in everything.
Notes: Covid sphyop

Chapter 66: 9
Annotation
Chapter progress: 32.9%
Highlight: In a rather different form the sense of disbelieving in everything was stronger than ever.
Notes: War

Chapter 66: 9
Annotation
Chapter progress: 32.9%
Highlight: . It turned you into an imitation gentleman and gave you a fixed idea that there’d always be a bit of money coming from somewhere.
Notes: War

Chapter 66: 9
Annotation
Chapter progress: 32.94%
Highlight: I was discovering what three-quarters of the blokes who’d been officers were discovering — that from a financial point of view we’d been better off in the Army than we were ever likely to be again.
Notes: War

Chapter 66: 9
Annotation
Chapter progress: 33.02%
Highlight: And what are the realities of modern life? Well, the chief one is an everlasting, frantic struggle to sell things. With most people it takes the form of selling themselves — that’s to say, getting a job and keeping it.
Notes: War

Chapter 66: 9
Highlight
Chapter progress: 33.02%
Highlight: But is there anything particularly modern in that, you say? Has it anything to do with the war? Well, it feels as if it had. That feeling that you’ve got to be everlastingly fighting and hustling, that you’ll never get anything unless you grab it from somebody else, that there’s always somebody after your job, the next month or the month after they’ll be reducing staff and it’s you that’ll get the bird — THAT, I swear, didn’t exist in the old life before the war.

Chapter 67: 10
Highlight
Chapter progress: 33.23%
Highlight: And one thing I certainly didn’t grasp was that the girls in these penniless middle-class families will marry anything in trousers, just to get away from home.

Chapter 67: 10
Annotation
Chapter progress: 33.31%
Highlight: wondering about women. Why they’re like that, how they get like that, whether they’re doing it on purpose.
Notes: Lol

Chapter 67: 10
Annotation
Chapter progress: 33.31%
Highlight: To people of that kind, ‘business’, whether it’s marine insurance or selling peanuts, is just a dark mystery. All they know is that it’s something rather vulgar out of which you can make money.
Notes: Penniless middle-middle class

Chapter 67: 10
Annotation
Chapter progress: 33.55%
Highlight: One night you go to bed, still feeling more or less young, with an eye for the girls and so forth, and next morning you wake up in the full consciousness that you’re just a poor old fatty with nothing ahead of you this side the grave except sweating your guts out to buy boots for the kids.
Notes: On getting fat and old

Chapter 67: 10
Highlight
Chapter progress: 33.55%
Highlight: , I suppose she’s no worse than I am. Sometimes when we were first married I felt I’d like to strangle her, but later I got so that I didn’t care.

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