451 to Atlas

Song of the Day: Atlas Shrugged - Jeff Sipe

Quote of the Day: "The zipper displaces the button and a man lacks just that much time to think while dressing at dawn, a philosophical hour, and thus a melancholy hour." --Beatty, from Ray Bradbury's Farenheit 451

Thought of the Day: Just finished Ray Bradbury's Farenheit 451, what a wonderful book. The book that pumps you up about reading books. Set in the future, in a time and place where books are banned and government censorship rules. The firemen of the future, including main character Beatty, set fires instead of putting them out. Their most popular target: those curious thinking rebels who still keep books in their hidden home libraries contrary to the rule of the land. Solution: burn the books, the houses, and sometimes the book-readers themselves.

In this future dystopia, government censorship means no literature, no teachers, no creative individual thought. Its replacement is 'the family' which in actuality is more like mass entertainment. 'The family' is our current TV and youtube culture combined and on crack. The hapless populace assemble in their parlors, which are rooms with full-wall media screens where fast moving images of cartoons, soundbite sensationalist news, and cheap pulp fiction are offered like an all-you-can-eat buffet for convenient in-home standardized mass consumption.

The themes of the book, written over 50 years ago, still run quite true. How far are we from this picture today, where the population is more concerned with who will be the next American Idol than with the often destructive policies of our short-sighted politicians? The elected leaders love our pre-occupation with professional sports teams and mind-numbing reality television shows. No need for overt censorship in this age as the populace is content to ignore the goings on in Washington unless it is an election year and only if the complex news is filtered down to catchy slogans like 'Change' and 'Hope'.

After finishing 451 I immediately cracked open a new novel, Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged. In this sprawling work Rand details her own philosophy, dubbed Objectivism, and asks the question: "Who is John Galt?" The Song of the Day references the work it it's title. Not sure of the connection, but it's a pretty song. I'm already enjoying the book immensely and will likely post on it as I read more.

Cheers, Dr. Kowawa