The character complains that he's relentlessly pestered with calls
from friends and employers, salesmen and pollsters, people calling
simply because they can. Mr. Bradbury's vision of "tired commuters
with their wrist radios, talking to their wives, saying, 'Now I'm at
Forty-third, now I'm at Forty-fourth, here I am at Forty-ninth, now
turning at Sixty-first" has gone from science-fiction satire to dreary realism.
"It was all so enchanting at first," muses our protagonist. "They
were almost toys, to be played with, but the people got too involved,
went too far, and got wrapped up in a pattern of social behavior and
couldn't get out, couldn't admit they were in, even."
Most of all, Mr. Bradbury knew how the future would feel: louder,
faster, stupider, meaner, increasingly inane and violent. Collective
cultural amnesia, anhedonia, isolation. The hysterical censoriousness
of political correctness. Teenagers killing one another for kicks.
Grown-ups reading comic books. A postliterate populace. "I remember
the newspapers dying like huge moths," says the fire captain in
"Fahrenheit," written in 1953. "No one wanted them back. No one
missed them." Civilization drowned out and obliterated by electronic
chatter. The book's protagonist, Guy Montag, secretly trying to
memorize the Book of Ecclesiastes on a train, finally leaps up
screaming, maddened by an incessant jingle for "Denham's Dentifrice."
A man is arrested for walking on a residential street. Everyone
locked indoors at night, immersed in the social lives of imaginary
friends and families on TV, while the government bombs someone on the
other side of the planet. Does any of this sound familiar?
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/08/opinion/uncle-rays-dystopia.html?_r=1&src=un&feedurl=http%3A%2F%2Fjson8.nytimes.com%2Fpages%2Fopinion%2Findex.jsonp&pagewanted=all
http://snipurl.com/23vj8zh
_______________________________________________
http://box535.bluehost.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l_mccmedia.com
