WANNA BURN A BOOK?
“Book burning is antithetical to American ideals”. – Sarah Palin, via her Facebook page.
Named for the temperature at which paper ignites, Fahrenheit 451 depicts – with shocking depth and foresight - a near-future society in which firemen don’t put out fires, they burn books, and the state suppresses learning. The complacent and unfeeling populace, numbed by nonstop television (television is “family,” a mind-numbing repetitious sitcom of bland characters), happily embrace enforced ignorance. Ray Bradbury predicted a time when humans would be so dumbed down by media and mind-fucked by their totalitarian government, that the only way to keep books alive was to memorize them, to learn them by heart. The half brain-dead citizenry rots in a media-saturated coma of indifference. Readers are shipped to asylums for the criminally insane. The story’s most crushing revelation comes when we learn that censorship is not at the hands of the oppressors at all, but merely the exploitation of the whim of an unfeeling people. Government didn’t impose book burning, it simply institutionalized the people’s will. Ray Bradbury was giving voice to his own fears, that an unrelenting onslaught of mindless media would replace recreational free thinking, and warns of the dire implications of lack of free free thought, predicting a “burgeoning empire of leisure”. This was 43 years before the launch of the Fox News Network.
“A book is a loaded gun in the house next door. Burn it. Take the shot from the weapon. Breach man’s mind. Who knows who might be the target of the well-read man? Me? I won’t stomach them for a minute.…Take your fight outside. Better yet, into the incinerator”.
