Read this: Fahrenheit 451

I’m reading Fahrenheit 451 with my seniors and I think Ray Bradbury might be some kind of wizard.  This is one of those books you very well may have been assigned in high school but didn’t bother reading.  If that’s you, you did exactly what Bradbury thought you would.  You are who he thought you were.

Fahrenheit takes place in a dystopian future where firemen burn books and the houses that hold them.  The story follows a fireman, Guy Montag, as he begins to wake up to the reality around him.  He realizes his profound dissatisfaction with life after he meets a girl so strange so goes on hikes and has conversations with her family. 

Bradbury wrote this book in the early 1950’s and he meant it not as a warning about government censorship (books are outlawed) but rather as a warning against technology and the impact he feared it would have on society.  Here are just a few of the things that are true of Bradbury’s world:

• The prefer being entertained to paying attention to what’s going on.
• They are fat and happy so they don’t care about the world around them.
• Their government gets involved in wars but the people pay more attention to their TV shows.
• People are constantly plugged in to technology – TV, music, movies – so they don’t engage in real relationships or talk to one another.
• Suicide attempts are commonplace.
• The society is incredibly violent – young people kill each other and people smash things for fun.
• School is about filling students with facts and true thinking is discouraged.
• People make stupid statements about politics when they don’t really know what they’re talking about.
• People mask their unhappiness and dissatisfaction with sex, drugs, and having “fun.”
• People don’t want to read because they’d rather watch TV or be entertained.
• People don’t understand the point of learning something if you don’t need it to do your job.
• Headlines and sound bytes are more important than thoughtful analysis.

I could list specifics along with all those bullet points from the book, and I could link to stories from today’s news alone that show how those very same things are true of us, but I don’t think I need to.  You’d think I was simply railing against the world in 2011, but I’m describing the world of Fahrenheit. 

Here’s one quote, where Beatty, the fire captain, explains society’s descent:

If you don’t want a man unhappy politically, don’t give him two sides to a question to worry him; give him one. Better yet, give him none. Let him forget there is such a thing as war. If the government is inefficient, topheavy, and tax-mad, beter it be all those than that people worry over it.  Peace, Montag.  Give the people contests that they win by remembering capitals or how much corn Iowa grew last year.  Cram them full of noncombustible data, chock them so damned full of ‘facts’ they feel stuffed, but absolutely ‘brilliant’ with information.  Then they’ll feel they’re thinking, they’ll get a sense of motion without moving.  And they’ll be happy, because facts of that sort don’t change. Don’t give them any slippery stuff like philosophy or sociology to tie things up with.  That way lies melancholy.  Any man who can take a TV wall apart and put it back together again, and most men can, nowadays, is happier than any man who tries to slide-rule, measure, and equate the universe, which just won’t be measured or equated without making man feel bestial and lonely.  I know, I’ve tried it; to hell with it.  So bring on your clubs and parties, your acrobats and magicians, your daredevils, jet cars, motorcycle helicopters, your sex and heroin, more of everything to do with automatic reflex.  If the drama is bad, if the film says nothing, if the play is hollow, sting me with theremin, loudly. I’ll think I’m responding to the play, when it’s only a tactile reaction to vibration.  But I don’t care.  I just like solid entertainment.

I seriously just want to quote the whole book.  It’s fantastic.  You should read it.  And you should wonder, like me, if Ray Bradbury is some kind of magical wizard, because he seriously called it.