Ursula K. Le Guin, in her fantasy world of Earthsea, comes up with a brilliant system of magic, one predicated on, essentially, words.

The dynamics of magic in this world, just like the dynamics of human nature in this world, is based on the gradient between what-is, and what-is-not-but-could-be. The power of the word makes what-is and what-is-not-but-could-be congruent.

In a way, it’s not really all that different in our world. While we can’t (quite yet) conjure up balls of flame out of nowhere or summon dragons, we are able to very powerfully alter the nature of our environment. If you have any doubts, just think about the billions of dollars churning through advertising and marketing. Think about how financial empires rise and fall just on the rumor of change.

And think of how the American media has successfully co-opted the truth and spun it into a mythical yarn about “the new American century.” On the basis of words alone, our very own tin-pot dictator has managed to remain esconced on his throne, despite the very real and ominous grumbling that gathers over the land like a storm cloud. (And at times like this, I can’t help but think of John Titor and his prophesy of a new American Civil War.) If he lived in Earthsea, Rupert Murdoch and his ilk would be magi non pareil.

But the interesting thing is that the Rebel Alliance pretty much exists mostly in the form of words. In the immediate aftermath of September 11, it was hard to find people who were still willing to defend freedom. Neocons say what they will about their opponents, but some of us refuse to be surrender-monkeys. It is absolutely no accident that (despite their outright racism and elitism) the Founding Fathers decried the idea of surrendering freedom in the name of security. Every sane person knows that total security is impossible in this world, and living under martial law is not an acceptable sacrifice. But as the sheer terror of an attack on American soil waned, sanity actually held sway. People seemed to regain their senses pretty quickly, and despite the rapid run-up to the nonsensical war on Iraq, and the rabid, insane cheerleading by the so-called liberal media, the blogs ran bright with photons, but more importantly, the defense of the Republic seemed to exist at least in words, thousands upon thousands spewed upon the wondrous creation known as the Internet. (Is Al Gore our savior or what?)

It is fitting that today’s battles revolve around the flow of information and who gets to control what story gets told, as this government begins its crackdown on leaks (that they don’t sanction, at least. Can anyone say Valerie Plame?) As you start connecting the dots, it becomes clear why the NSA and this corrupt, morally bankrupt administration wants to eavesdrop on every single call. I really think they want to control every single bit of this narrative. And if they can whittle away at our lines of communication, literally one bit at a time, if they can somehow manage to keep us who still faithfully defend this Republic and its Constitution from staying in touch with one another, then we are just that one step closer to the new Dark Ages.

I can’t help but think that these nefarious plans have been a long time in the offing. Perhaps it is merely a continuation of the evil machinations of Richard Nixon, which were oh-so inconveniently interrupted by—surprise, surprise—the Truth™. But Reagan, Bush the Elder, and Bush the Younger have readily carried out this hell-bent mission, and we are on the verge of becoming the very Evil Empire that we had claimed we were out to vanquish.

We have glimmerings of their perfidy in the jungles of South and Central America, and I know what sort of poison they sowed in the homeland of my ancestors (and still somehow, for at least that brief moment, the People managed to triumph), and it becomes all too clear what these people are all about when you look at Abu-Ghraib, when you hear about the secret torture camps in Europe, and the prisoner abuses at Guantanamo.

But I am going off on my screed here. What I wanted to mention was this powerful, moving keynote address given by Rebecca Solnit, a writer and activist who gave this address to U.C. Berkeley’s Department of English Commencement this year (first sighted off of Parallax) In it she mentions very strikingly the starkness of Orwell’s vision of 1984, alluding painfully to the Doublespeak-infected world we now currently live in. Somehow it turns out that Orwell got everything right except for the economic and political system. Instead of communism and socialism, the enemies of most people in this world are the unfettered malice of global capitalism and so-called “American style” democracy (of which, I suppose, George W Bush is the prototype, although I’m also familiar with the CIA-backed Ferdinand Marcos and likely many people from South and Central America will also recognize similar counterparts, not to mention Saddam Hussein himself.)

And 1984 is pretty much a story bereft of hope, except that Orwell probably knew that certain things about history are inevitable, and one of them is decay. The Cold War really was supposed to be the perfect, unwinnable, unendable war, the perpetual motion machine of the war industry, but it takes two to make a fight.

Which brings me back (rather randomly) to my main point: human beings of all animals are probably the only ones who can see the world not as how it is, but as how we want it to be. This is probably the immediate cause of why we became such facile tool users.

And while some of us are for some reason enamored with death and destruction and the weapons of war, others of us are interested in life, and dreaming up of those impossible things that no one has ever heard of.

These days are the point of some kind of fulcrum, and I guess it isn’t just me that has this sense that the future, even the immediate future, is completely unpredictable.