Like a 75-year-old car, Bradbury’s most lauded novel feels a bit clunky compared to the sleek and smooth commodity fiction churned out by today’s industrial publishing conglomerates.  As with any mode of transportation though, where a book takes you is more important than the vehicle itself, and Fahrenheit 451 offers a ride through the very territory over which our nation is currently circling. Pretty amazing for a story first anthologized in 1950 and expanded into this short novel in 1953!

Minds colonized by omnipresent ‘entertainment’ media pretending to provide viewers with a ‘reality’ more acceptable than their own; lives lived in bubbles of class and clique; an authoritarian government ginning up perpetual wars as excuse to police every facet of its citizen’s lives; new technologies immediately harnessed to enforce all of the above – Bradbury’s fears for his characters’ ‘future’ are amazingly close to today’s realities. 

In an afterword and coda written later (1982 and 1979, respectively), Bradbury makes clear that he traces all those developments to his fictional culture’s rejection of the written word.  Books there are viewed as corrupting distractions.  Not content with discouraging or banning individual volumes on the basis of specific content, this regime fears all books because they record, preserve and encourage independent thought.  The very possession of any book has been declared a major criminal act and the once laudable community symbol of the Firefighter has been perverted into a new role as government book burner (and incidental executioner of bibliophiles).

So here we are seventy-five years later, with citizens pressuring their libraries and schools to dispose of any books hinting at truths those particular citizens don’t appreciate; a juvenile Secretary of ‘War’ decreeing which slanted versions of history, philosophy and the social sciences may be read or discussed in the military’s colleges and academies as the White House extorts even private universities to teach to the President’s personal prejudices.  Meanwhile, surveys confirm that fewer and fewer and fewer persons are reading any books by choice, preferring instead to have information spoon-fed into their brains via profit-tailored algorithms curating content for their profit-driven mass electronica. In spooky parallel to Bradbury’s Firemen cum Fire-setters, the current administration has given control of many federal agencies to fanatical minions who despise those agencies’ statutory functions, wishing instead to destroy or pervert them by flipping them from protecting the environment or civil rights, for example, to opening the former to plunder by political contributors and restricting the latter’s protections to only those who bow down to the MAGA movement in all its glory and gory ambition (while sporting an appearance that comports to Mr. Trump’s old-Hollywood vision of how true Americans are supposed to look).

Despite some age-appropriate road wear and rust in its wheel-wells, Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 is no junker, but a precious classic vehicle for waking up the masses, every bit as timely today as when its rubber first hit the road.  It deserves to be read or reread as widely as possible, so more citizens will see what is happening and do what they can to stop it.

P. S. – Along with Orwell’s 1984, and Animal Farm, Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five, Huxley’s Brave New World, Anthony Burgess’ A Clockwork Orange and others from the mid-Twentieth, this novel has helped to shape the fears and ideals of multiple generations.  Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven and Octavia E. Butler’s Parable of the Sower are notable among many other recent and creditable volumes with similar aspirations of enlightenment and warning.  Now more than ever, all such books deserve to be read and shared.

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