I take second place to no one in my admiration for James Wood. But I'm looking forward to the day when we're deep enough into Barack Obama's Glorious Restoration of American Democracy^TM that I can read a fine Wood essay on George Orwell without encountering a passage like this:

If his novelistic imagining of totalitarian horror now looks a bit dated, it is partly because his fiction provided the dusty epitaph on a dusty tombstone that he himself helped to carved; and, anyway, his coinages, like "doublethink" and "Newspeak" and "Big Brother," now live an unexpectedly acute second life in the supposedly free West. (To see Fox News go after Jeremiah Wright or Bill Ayers for days on end during the last Presidential election was to think, simply, "Hate Week.")

And there I was, thinking Obama won the last Presidential election ...