Recently, President Trump ordered the Smithsonian Institution — the primary repository of our national history — to remove all references to his two impeachments.
To anyone who’s read George Orwell’s dystopian novel, “Nineteen Eighty-Four,” this act should sound familiar. In the opening chapter, Orwell describes the “Ministry of Truth,” in particular the Records Department, where the novel’s protagonist, Winston, works as a clerk. His job is to rewrite history so that it casts a favorable light on Big Brother, the nation’s dictator (whose image, by the way, is constantly on every TV screen in the country). As the narrator says, “This fragment of the past should be preserved, that one falsified, and the other rubbed out of existence.”
It is sometimes said, “Life imitates art.” That is certainly true in this case.
Tom Huckin, Salt Lake City
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