Seventy-two years ago, Ray Bradbury brought us Guy Montag, a fireman whose job was to keep people happy by burning all their books. Ignorance, presumably, was bliss. The fireman’s argument was that books allowed diversity, and social happiness required a completely homogeneous population. Books encouraged dissent. Dissent made the government – oops – the people unhappy.
The evils of diversity are visible today. Clearly, including (inclusion!) people who are obviously different — in appearance, culture, language, religion, mores, taste — into the body politic makes everyone unhappy. It has become obvious that reading books, especially in colleges and universities, does exactly what the fireman told us; it makes us all unhappy. Universities, especially exclusive universities (note the exciting antonym of inclusion) produce dissidents almost exclusively (that word again!). It is no longer enough to burn people’s books; we must burn down the universities.
Eventually, we will have to remove reading from K-12 curricula. If no one can read, they will not be troubled by confusing books. Fortunately, we will soon have robots – AI – to do the hard stuff. Some may say that Bible study would suffer. Hey, the Church did fine for 1,200 years with an illiterate flock.
Another writer at about the same time — five years earlier — wrote about a dictatorship that tried to control its population by systematically shrinking that population’s vocabulary — newspeak. Big Brother used televisions to spy on its people. We, today, carry government spy devices with us everywhere, in our pockets. The Ministry of Truth pounded out endless disinformation. We have…well, you all know what we have: The Ministry of Truth Social.
The bottom line is that all those diverse, dissident, disruptive folks must be removed from the body politic. Then WE can be happy again. (Who cares if THEY are not?)
The fireman flaked out on us. He allowed the misery, personal and public, he saw around him to destroy his faith. Bradbury does not say, but he may have become a Democrat.
Bill Gillmore
Columbus
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