TIPping off Big Brother: if the Bush administration's citizen informant program "TIPS" is fully implemented, America may end up a nation of tattletales and civilian spies that would make Big Brother proud. (On the Home Front).

Of all the horrors depicted in George Orwell's Fictional dystopian classic 1984, none is more depressing than the fate of Parsons, the dull-witted, good-natured neighbor of the novel's protagonist, Winston Smith. Early in the story, Winston, who has already committed "thoughtcrime" against the totalitarian regime of the Party and Big Brother, comes face to face with Parsons' two fearsome children, who have been indoctrinated in the ways of the Party at a tender age:

"Up with your hands!" yelled a savage voice.

A handsome, tough-looking boy of nine had popped up from behind the table and was menacing him with a toy automatic pistol, while his small sister, about two years younger, made the same gesture with a fragment of wood. Both of them were dressed in the blue shorts, gray shirts, and red neckerchiefs which were the uniform of the Spies. Winston raised his hands above his head, but with an uneasy feeling, so vicious was the boy's demeanor, that it was not altogether a game.

"You're a traitor!" yelled the boy. "You're a thought-criminal! You're a Eurasian spy! I'll shoot you, I'll vaporize you, I'll send you to the salt mines!"

Suddenly they were both leaping around him, shouting "Traitor!" and "Thought-criminal!", the little girl imitating her brother in every movement.

Winston eventually leaves the terrified mother to deal with her ferocious, brainwashed children, reflecting that the wretched woman must lead a life of terror. Another year, two years, and they would be watching her night and day for symptoms of unorthodoxy. Nearly all children nowadays were horrible.... [H]ardly a week passed in which the Times did not carry a paragraph describing how some eavesdropping little sneak ... had over-heard some compromising remark and denounced his parents to the Thought Police."

Soon after Winston's unsettling encounter, Parsons proudly informs Winston over lunch that his little ones take their duties as citizen spies seriously, having recently turned in a suspicious-looking bystander to the Thought Police. In the end, though, Parsons' little daughter denounces her own father to the Thought Police, after overhearing Parsons utter "Down with Big Brother!" in his sleep. Mr. Parsons, brimming with servile pride at his daughter's vigilant "patriotism," is locked in the same cell as Winston Smith, deep within the Ministry of Love, to await the inevitable death sentence.