I don’t know how many of you have read George Orwell’s “1984,” but no one at a major university should be allowed to graduate until they have sifted through every page at least twice.

Orwell was an amazingly insightful man with a powerful BS detector. He read the world for what it was and knew people to be the sanctimonious, wicked crap factories they are 98 percent of the time.

Not an overwhelmingly optimistic gent, Mr. Orwell, but he was good at taking what he saw at the end of W.W. II and predicting where the world would end up.

He knew that evil would win out eventually. He created a world which was controlled, paranoid and, except for the literary flourishes, right on the money, Bob Barker.

In the actual year of our Lord, 1984, the media had a heyday comparing Orwell’s book to life in the mid-’80s. “Big Brother is watching” seemed to be the phrase everyone wanted to focus on.

News specials focused on video cameras and computer surveillance because fear sells faster than a Mexican ’57 Chevy. Technology was the bugaboo everyone droned on about in spite of the fact that Orwell’s future was not a particularly advanced one.

Two-way TVs were the only major advance, and that was just a literary device to show no one was afforded privacy.

I think many people overlooked the more subtle elements of societal control which Orwell presented us with.

The media can’t get as much mileage out of vague concepts of social control as they can footage of disgruntled employees pissing in coffee pots and bad-tempered nannies smacking kids with “Tickle me” Elmos and swearing like sailors with Tourette’s.

Orwell’s world was very bleak, and that has made it difficult for many to see the connections between “1984” and 1999.

I find it hard to understand how anyone could live through the Cold War and not see how that dark period of world history was virtually identical to the state of perpetual war Orwell predicted would be necessary for economic and social stability.

America needs an enemy. We need enemies to keep our military industrial complex rolling, and we need an enemy to feel like the good guys because, let’s face it, we have always had a wicked inferiority complex. The only thing getting us by most times is our innate sense of moral superiority.

We need to be the good guys all the time because our nationalistic self-esteem depends on it.

We accuse our countrymen of being unpatriotic if they don’t buy into this “cowboy in white” image wholesale. We needed the Evil Empire so we could see ourselves as Tom Mix or Hopalong Cassidy riding to the rescue of the world, fighting the good fight and kicking ass in the name of freedom and democracy.

Unfortunately, it was almost 100 percent crap. Not that the Soviets didn’t suck. They did. But so do most governments.

Not many countries come into being without wading hip-deep in somebody’s blood. God knows the U.S. has killed enough people to keep heaven packed with fresh souls for years to come.

There was always something neurotic and co-dependent about the Cold War because we needed the Soviets to be evil so we could shine all the more brightly.

But all good things come to an end, and eventually we played our role a little too well and managed to actually bring the Russian bear to its knees.

Our perpetual state of Cold War came to an end, and people started to relax and, as George Orwell would happily point out if he were still with us, a relaxed populace is a lazy, unproductive populace capable of doubleplusungood thought crimes.

Almost as soon as the Cold War ended we found another enemy in Saddam Hussein. And what a bad dude he is too. Personally, I think we should have made South Africa our enemy.

I could actually have gotten into hating the purveyors of apartheid. The think-tankers must have seen that apartheid was not going to last, and the brides of America needed their diamonds too badly to take a firm stand against the main supplier of shiny rocks.

While we were all busy boycotting Reebok, I don’t remember anyone boycotting South African diamonds en masse.

Besides, there are plenty of third world dictators perpetrating evil on their populations, and they are easier to kick the hell out of, too.

Now the missiles are raining on Yugoslavia, well not Yugoslavia but on the military forces that are preventing peace in that region. Something Clinton said struck a chord. “We act to prevent a wider war,” Clinton said. “By acting now, we are upholding our values, protecting our interests and advancing the cause of peace.”

Advancing the cause of peace. Peace through massive explosions. Peace through violence. Peace through death. Does anyone else get a Ministry of Truth feeling from this statement? Or are we all too firmly entrenched in the American patriotic zeitgeist to smell the stench of newspeak on this one?

Now, I will be the first to admit that Yugoslav President Slobodon Milosevic needs his ass kicked, but maybe we could find a more constructive way to do that.

But aggression never satisfactorily ends aggression. All we will end up with is a dispirited and vengeful Yugoslavian populace that hates the United States.

Maybe the Russians, unwilling to use overt force to stress their objections, will just slip them a nuke to waltz in from Canada.

I know that when you want to get something done, nothing seems handier than kicking someone’s ass.

I struggle with the urge to be more effective by laying waste to all obstacle in my way.

What’s been going on in Yugoslavia is a travesty which must end, but don’t we ultimately fail to achieve lasting peace by beating the hell out of everyone?

Lots of people “deserve” to be beaten mercilessly, but at some point in our history, we are going to have to learn to solve problems without firing computer guided missiles at them and bragging to everyone via CNN.

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Greg Jerrett is a graduate student in English from Council Bluffs. He is the opinion editor of the Daily.