The duck blind leading the duck blind

In a nation whose pledge of allegiance contains the words, "under God" and whose national identity as 'America' presumes itself Christian, it is difficult if not impossible to understand how 'socialism' has become such a dirty word, especially to those who profess to actually be Christian.

Place this among the things I don't understand, things which now far outnumber the things I do understand.

I've retreated to George Orwell and his Homage to Catalonia (1936), to a time when a confounding political situation could be explained clearly by a writer who wrote by hand and smoked hand-rolled cigarettes. 

Homage to Catalonia is one of the great 'war' books of all-time. Orwell on the front lines, attached to an army--The Workers' Party of Marxist Unity fighting against the Fascists--composed of men with no ranks, no titles, and often no weapons. Rifles jam, hand grenades and small bombs fizzle, sandbags leak, illiterate 15-year old Spainards fight alongside English & German gentlemen of rank. The cold, the filth, the bean stew eaten and the dirty water drunk, all in the cause of common decency. Trench warfare in extremis, the worst kind according to those who know, including EHemingway whose book of The Spanish Civil War, For Whom The Bell Tolls, I was required to read as a senior in high school. (I can still see my Lit teacher Mr. Hare holding up Hemingway's book and talking about "man's inhumanity to man", or was he holding up Billy Budd, another novel we were required to read and saying the same thing of it?)

Homage to Catalonia is the kind of book I wonder why I'm reading while I'm reading it, the best kind of book. It's man's inhumanity to man made human, personal and politicial. Funny to the outer limits of humor, grim as truth in wartime--the time we're in now--it's as much a tribute to the men he fought with as it is memoir. It's not political theory, instead it's pure experience. "It is difficult to be certain about anything except what you have seen with your own eyes," Orwell writes.

There's no writer now to lead us know through this time, at least none that I can find, no leader as Orwell was a leader, willing to go the the front line and fight, for there is no front line. Rather there are many front lines, too many to man, so that the only place a writer can now go is inward, down into the duck blind to flush out a thought or two to see if any one of them can fly, and then disappear again to await the waddling fowl, all looking and sounding pretty much alike.

'Under God'...what does that mean? Or 'freedom', or 'rule of law'? Or any of those other words we've learned to live by? 'Pursuit of happiness'? 'Liberty and justice for all'? 

Orwell: reportorial staff of one, collecting information on a trip through the USA, marching to Washington D.C. for the true meaning of the being words used to control the people. Is there any writer out there who wil join him, a writer not afraid to approach real life?