ogilvy

Ogilvy is not just a fictional character; he's an imaginary fictional character created by the protagonist of "1984," Winston Smith.

Smith's job at the Ministry of Information was to correct and revise the official records of the state's history, so that history conformed with orthodoxy. He wrote Ogilvy's bio to replace a laudatory article about a former inner party member named Withers who had got into trouble with the authorities and been made an unperson. There was no way of knowing whether Withers had ever been a real person or was, like his successor, the product of someone's imagination. The distinction was irrelevant anyway, since in the world of 1984, reality and fiction serve the same purpose.

Winston Smith creates Ogilvy with specific purposes in mind, which are always the main purposes of the news organ he helps the state produce, propaganda and indoctrination. Ogilvy's crude appeal is designed to feed the brainwashed public's bloodlust and mindless hatred of the enemy. Orwell's synopsis of Winston Smith's news copy reads:

Comrade Ogilvy, Smith writes, led a patriotic and virtuous life. At the age of three, he refused all toys except for a drum, a toy submachine gun, and a model helicopter. At age six, he joined the "spies" (a government-run youth organisation that indoctrinated children to watch their parents and other adults for "unorthodoxy") a year ahead of schedule. At age eleven, he denounced his uncle to the Thought Police after overhearing a conversation. At age seventeen, he became a district organiser of the Junior Anti-Sex-League, and at age nineteen, designed a hand grenade that killed 31 Eurasian prisoners of war in its first trial. He took vow of celibacy and was a nonsmoker, with his only recreations being a daily hour in the gymnasium. His only subject of conversation was the principles of Ingsoc, and his only goals in life were the defeat of Eurasia, and the hunting down of enemy spies, saboteurs, thoughtcriminals, and traitors. At twenty-three, he was killed in action while flying a helicopter over the Indian Ocean. Pursued by Eurasian Jets, he weighted his body with the helicopter's machine gun, grabbed important despatches he was carrying, and jumped into the water from his helicopter to avoid capture, interrogation, and seizure of the despatches.

The picture of Ogilvy Winston Smith supplied with the bio was of a typically generic, replicatable military face belonging to anybody and nobody. Smith had no way of knowing whether his replacement story would ever be published, as he suspected with good reason that several other workers in his section had gotten the same assignment.

Winston Smith's celebration of Ogilvy, a deformity issuing from the inhuman needs of a malignant and insane state, reminds me of nothing so much as the heroic death of Pat Tillman, who died under fire while leading his unit in Afghanistan.