Ayers’s chunky gold earrings …

Maybe these are Ayers’ medals. Vestments never go out of style, they simply change form. Whether its a Keffiyeh or a Tin-tin haircut they still convey signals, like a cap badge or a company ID, or the key to the executive washroom. And that’s ok. The problem is to see the earrings yet not see the earrings; to listen to Ayers but not to hear him, except on his terms, like a Jedi mindtrick, where you tell a security patrol that ‘you really don’t want to notice me’ and patrol replies ‘I really don’t want to notice you’. Everybody’s happy.

But not everybody. Orwell was one of those who jumped outside the text, which didn’t make any sense at all and focused on the metatext, which made perfect sense in a malevolent sort of way. Chris Matthews was interviewing an anti-Obama protester who claimed Obama had registered as Muslim at an Indonesian school. And Matthews was saying, “do you realize you are on national TV?” If you were a visitor from the planet Mongo watching that scene it would make no sense unless you understood the import of the framework in which the words were being spoken.

I think it was Turing who claimed that you could get no more information out of a processing machine than was implied in the inputs and the information content of the machine itself. Orwell’s great insight was to understand that it was not enough to examine the inputs, it was also necessary to examine the machine. “Do you realize you are on national TV?” Thanks, Chris Matthews. One might almost have forgotten.