Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury

[psyops]

Ray Bradbury declined to attend a Pulitzer ceremony last year and upset not just a few left-wing academics by announcing his magnum opus, Fahrenheit 451, had nothing to do with oppression of intellectuals and censorship against literature within some futuristic dictatorial dystopia, but rather was a polemic against the threat of television turning society into a bunch of non-reading brain-dead visceral saps (wasn't perpetually pajama-clad Julie Christie a lovely couch potato though?).

In fact, Bradbury walked out of a UCLA lecture because students booed him after he announced the tome had nothing to do government censorship and everything to do with a predominantly left-wing institution (TV), mulching our polity's grey matter into a porridge of mush.

At any rate, I had the chance to chat with the maestro in Ventura, California in 2003 for the 50th anniversary of Fahrenheit 451 (only because I bought the special reissue hardback for $50). I asked him to sign the fly-leaf not only with his signature, but also with my favorite line from the book: "Beware the tyranny of minorities." How prescient that 55 year-old admonition came to be.

[uod_sa_libro]

Oh I've just recently finished that book. It's amazing. So it's more about television-addiction then? I thought the censorship issue seemed more dominant in the book. Well, it's still great. I mean, imagine a world without books, a world where differing opinions were suppressed, and people just agreed with one another. It's a freaky world, where teenagers didn't go to school.

Hope that never happens! Ray Bradbury is so poetic and very perceptive.

"I don't talk things, sir. I talk the meaning of things."
- Faber, Fahrenheit 451

[hmchappy]

I'm disappointed to read that [i]Fahrenheit 451[/i] is about the evils of TV and not actually about censorship and the growing dependancy on the media like I always though it was. It's been one of my favorite books for years; I actually had the thought that I might try and memorize it, ala Granger and his wandering group.