Last modified: Monday, February 4, 2008 6:39 PM EST HICKMAN: George Orwell more relevant than ever I have never sampled Jolt cola, but expect it must be the liquid counterpart to a book of galvanic essays I have just read, "What Orwell Didn't Know: Propaganda and the New Face of American Politics." A sip or a gulp from one of its 20 provocative essays by noted journalists, professors, reporters, authors and psychologists, and you won't slip easily into somnolence or apathy again. This timely anthology was sent to press when five revered schools of journalism joined forces recently "to do something about the current state of political discourse," a situation aggravated by the seeming impotence of the press "to bring political rhetoric in line with facts." As Americans prepare to vote in what may well be our most significant election of the century, I drank in the wisdom of this recently published anthology like a parched nomad. Expertly edited by Andras Szanto, a writer who grew up in a totalitarian state, the book is a vital resource to help readers and reporters alike "disenthrall public debate from bias, hyperbole, bombast and lies." The 60th anniversary of Orwell's much read classic essay, "Politics and the English Language," is not so much the focus, but the fulcrum from which the essayists pivot to consider the "complex topography of propaganda within the new landscape of American politics," i.e. - what Orwell did not know and could not have imagined. Nevertheless, Orwell's insight into how the debasement and misuse of language corrupts the thinking process (and vice versa) still grounds the arguments. The book is divided into three sections: Language and Politics; Symbols and Battlegrounds; and Media and Message. There are extensive riches to mine here, and I hope you will raid them if I can tantalize you with a few golden nuggets. In "Sloppiness and the English Language," author Francine Prose warns us to be on the lookout for the "easy seductions of propaganda" and the way in which terms like freedom, patriotism and liberty have been "freighted" with "false new meanings." She urges readers to "question everythingto scrutinize information and the way it is being framed." Journalism professor and writer Mark Danner, in "Words in a Time of War: On Rhetoric, Truth and Power," contends that though Orwell would be unsurprised by the "rhetorical creation of the War on Terror," he would be aghast at Karl Rove's strutting boast that, "We're an empire now, and where we act we create our own reality." Danner reflects on the tragic and ironic consequences of this "subservience of truth to power," especially in Iraq, where, using the principles of "asymmetrical warfare," al Qaeda has turned the Goliath-like military force of the U.S. against us to create a very different "reality." In Section II, cognitive scientist and linguistics guru George Lakoff alerts us to "What Orwell Didn't Know About the Brain, the Mind and Language." His essay meshes nicely with the next - political psychologist Drew Westin's "The New Frontier: The Instruments of Emotion." The concept that "emotion drives electoral behavior" would have been new to Orwell, but today's politicians and media spinners gleefully exploit it. Given our willing suspension of disbelief, they find it frighteningly easy to manipulate our emotions and impact our "thinking" process by using words, images, sounds and analogies to create specific "networks of association" in our brains. According to Westin, the only way to combat this 21st century "newspeak" is to understand it. As a writer, I was eager to dig into the essays in Part III: Media and Message. Martin Kaplan's "Welcome to the Infotainment Freak Show" instantly recalled a theme of "Fahrenheit 451" - the dangerous possibility of amusing ourselves into oblivion. In place of reason, discourse, and the journalistic search for "accuracy, objectivity and fairness," the "imperative" of grabbing and holding the attention of audiences, according to Kaplan, has "redefined the public interest as what the public is interested in; the public sphere has become a theater, where citizenship is a performance." Kaplan contends that the media moguls who employ our news "analysts" are more interested in profits than news, more motivated by "fear and crisis" than "insight, context, depth, reflection, proportion, perspective, relevance, humility, information, analysis, NEWS." His chilling assessment: "In such a carnivalesque media ecology, people are patsies for propagandists." If none of this sounds new, an essay by Victor Navasky about the impact of media conglomerates on the U.S. postal system will knock your red-white-and-blue socks off. Navasky notes that Washington himself believed that "all newspapers (the equivalent of today's journals of opinion) should be delivered free of charge." But as Navasky tells it, the Postal Reorganization Act of 1970 and postal rate increase of 2007, imposed an Orwellian plan whereby "the smaller the magazine, the higher the postal rates." This, according to Navasky, means it will be increasingly difficult for small companies to publish independent magazinesso necessary to providing diversity of opinion and to ensuring the process of democracy. While Americans are more savvy today about the ways in which language can be manipulated and distorted for political ends, we do ourselves and democracy a dangerous disservice if we do not question rigorously the medium, the message, the messenger and the motives behind all we hear and read. "What Orwell Didn't Know" offers chilling and challenging evidence of our need for vigilance, alarm and action. One way or another, we will "create our own reality." BOOK COLUMNIST KATHY HICKMAN can be reached at news@thesunchronicle.com.