Burning Books

Were we far from this science fiction window onto the future when Mao circulated his little red book or Ghadaffi published his version? I think the ideology behind the writing was mirrored in this story done years before those writings were circulated as though to say: “what I say is the truth, and anything else you read is in opposition to the ideal of the state, or your beliefs”. Here two cultures espoused how people should think according to their “elected” figure. Whatever else that was written was not to be tolerated.

Bradbury had a unique way of making his world although futuristic, seem real enough to occur. Today we have electronic robots and i believe the Japanese must have developed a sort of electronic dog that warns its owner of a coming stranger. We have had other sci-fi movies soin off from this story showing how man’s mind is surveryed and manipulated much the way it was in totalitarian times, when eastern European countries employed the use of informants at the workplace. All that was toi weed out insurrection and opposition.

Three elements leave a lasting impression from bradbury’s classic: the use of robotics to warn the system of traiters to the state, the firemen who were  bent on setting fires rather than fighting them, and the presence of a young girl who was the catalyst for a needed humanizing change that Montag was in conflict with. He was part of the system, in the employ of the firemen’s organization yet he had the need to discover what reading was about and what freedom, as represented by the girl, meant.