While teaching Ray Bradbury's classic dystopian story to my seventh grade students, I came across several quotes in the novel that struck me as particularly relevant. After pointing them out, the kids and I had a provocative discussion about the things in life that really matter and the times when we all felt the happiest. Not surprisingly, most of those times involved family, nature, games, and lots of laughter and home cooked meals.
Bradbury magically captures the indiscriminate apathy, unmitigated materialism, and PROFOUND technological overload that has been creeping so insidiously into American society since he first wrote the book in 1951.
This afternoon I remembered that I posted those two quotes on FB under the title of this post and I thought I should stretch my long neglected post-baccalaureate writing muscles and do a little bit of literary application.
"You must understand that our civilization is so vast that we can't have our minorities upset and stirred. Ask yourself, What do we want in this country, above all? People want to be happy, isn't that right? Haven't you heard it all your life? I want to be happy, people say. Well, aren't they? Don't we keep them moving, don't we give them fun? That's all we live for, isn't it? For pleasure, for titillation? And you must admit our culture provides plenty of these..."
Titillation. Reminds me a lot of Snooky and the Situation. When a big-haired Jersey chick with a bad dye job and a Brobdingnagian mouth calling herself a "glam fairy" gets her own show because she knows how to slather on lipstick; when we'd rather watch Kate plus 8 plus Dancing with the Stars plus the surfeit of absolute havoc she leaves in her wake; when a man like Donald Trump decides to run for President just because he has enough money to buy any votes he needs?
I'd say we're living for titillation. I'd say "our culture provides plenty".
"You can't build a house without nails and wood. If you don't want a house built, hide the nails and wood. 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, better it be all those than that people worry over it. Peace... Give the people contests they win by remembering the words to more popular songs or the names of state 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 the 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."
Isn't that what we ALL "just like"? SOLID entertainment? Films about gigolos and Vince Vega? Music about "pussy poppin' on the gixter"? We play game shows against robots with mecha-brains. 3-D TV without the glasses is already being marketed in Japan. And I wonder how long it will be before all interactive technology becomes touchscreen/voice-activated.
We don't chat about the meaning of life. We question whether Ron and Sam are EVER going to break up. Instead of Sophocles, we talk of Spears. There are no philosophers in our schools; students have become identification numbers on an exam that measures nothing at all. Americans have plenty of opinions about Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya; but how many can actually identify those countries on a globe? Does anyone even OWN a globe anymore? What's the point, after all, when the touch of finger will literally get you anything you've never wanted until you stumbled across it on your iphone 10??
Bless you, Ray Bradbury. If only a few of us contained the fore-sight you showed sixty years ago, perhaps this sad, sad situation could have been avoided altogether. Perhaps God wouldn't be dead, and neither would John Lennon..
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