Utopian Society is not for me.
...ncidences of hate crimes.(FBI, 2002) Hate crimes stem from a prejudice against people who are different from you in some way. You could go as far as to make the connection between Mead and the “geek” at your school when you were a child. The child who was a little smarter, worked harder academically, and generally was not as athletically inclined bore the brunt of childhood pranks and name-calling. According to Zipes, “There is an acute tension between the intellectual and the majority of people in America... Bradbury overlooked the interests of private corporations and complicitous network of intellectuals and book-lovers who have created greater instrumental control over the masses. Such an oversight short-circuits the utopian function of his book, and he remains blind to the intricacies of control in his own society.” (Zipes, 1983) Our society prides it’s self on the way that we embrace free thinkers, and individuals. However, if you look at the twenty- six episodes of school shootings since 1996, you will see that many of the perpetrators were students who were ostracized among their peer group for the crime of being different. Even in a society where everyone is the same, such as Lois Lowry’s The Giver, there would still be the person who does not quiet fit in. We already symbolically “release” the ones who do not fit the mold we cast for our society. This indicates to me that nonconformity as a crime is not as far- fetched as it sounds, we already unofficially try to weed out the eccentric and push them into their own corner of society hoping they will not be seen or heard. Since all the people in the fictional city are doing the same thing everyday, and they are tucked away in their homes, there are no reasons to have to ponder the difficult life decisions that you face. They really don’t matter, in the evening you are going to go home to your false reality and having images and ideas force-fed to you at a rate so swift that you can not possibly let your mind wander to bigger, more important things. Feelings will take on an entirely different dimension. In order to have a situation on television or in a movie profoundly affect you, it must apply to some personal life experience you have had. If you only go home and absorb the flickering lights of well planned television, your life experiences are going to diminish, and you will cease to relate to the fictional characters at all. According to Dura, the young people of Nepal are being subjected to juicy gossip about celebrities from the other side of the planet, while they don’t even know the names of the folk heroes of their culture. Dura goes on to say,” This is a single but very pathetic example which presents how our folk literature... [is being] undermined. Until and unless mass media pay attention to this tragedy, our folk literature and folk heroes share the same fate... these culturally rich properties are dying out. Hence, the mass media along with society have to bear responsibilities for it.” (Dura, 2002) Bradbury also wrote a novel, Fahrenheit 451, that deals much more directly with the dying out of literature. The novel is an expanded version of the short story “The Fireman,” which was originally published in Galaxy. The main character, Guy Montag is a fireman. His job is to burn down houses of citizens who are hiding contraband books. Johnson states, “the very improbability of Montag’s work allows Bradbury to maintain a certain detachment to the book, so that basic themes such as freedom of speech, the value of imagination, the authority of the state, individualism versus conformity, and so on, can be developed and explored without becoming too realistic or too allegorical.”( Johnson, 1980) The novel ends with Montag joining a group of rebels who are trying to each remember some work of literature to pass on to the next generation. The ending reminded me of the Jedi in Star Wars when they were hiding on the planet with all the Ewoks. The importance of history and passing on to the next generation so that perhaps they don’t have to make all the same mistakes that have been made in the past. According to Zipes, in the novel Bradbury clears the state and industry from responsibility for this change from an educated society to an ignorant one. “Machines and mass media were compelled to eliminate differences and originality. The mass strivings of all the different [ethnic] groups needed more and more regulation by the state. Thus, individualism, uniqueness and a critical spirit had to be phased out of the socialization process. Books had to be banned, and the mass media had to be employed to prevent human beings from critical deliberation and reflection.” (Zipes, 1983) One of the important themes in the story was the reliance of this new society on machines. This echoes the feelings evoked by The Pedestrian, except in this case, it is a “hound,” and medical equipment that is said to be seeing into your soul. Colmer theorized that the medical machines are “ an extrapolation from present psychiatric and medical practice to reinforce the notion that human beings have ceased to be regarded as individual personalities and have been reduced to the level of things or controllable processes.” (Colmer, 1978) The society as a whole have been enslaved to their viewing screens, and these ear bud type radios that constantly pump sound into their ears. Montag’s wife has even become an expert lip reader so that she never has to be away from her mind numbing entertainment. In the city that the story takes place, people have started doing mindless activities instead of thinking for themselves and enjoying the world around them. (Wood, 1992) In a review of Todd Gitlin’s book Media Unlimited, Monaco states, “for Gitlin... it is not that human beings suddenly begin to feel, but that, in recent centuries, they came to experience, and crave, particular kinds of feelings– disposable ones... we need the constant drama to provide the feelings that are temporary... is this not a good description of a drug?” (Monaco, 2003) Monaco goes on to talk about his release from the grasp of The New York Times, and the constant reminder of what movies and television shows he must watch. He described the freedom as blissful. Colmer stated later in his article that, “ It must be admitted that Bradbury is more successful in creating the horror of mechanized anti-culture than in evoking the positive and continuing power of literature and civilization.” (Colmer, 1978) I agree with Colmer to a point, at the end of the novel I was not so much wanting to immerse myself into a plethora of well written literary works, as I was contemplating building a fall-out shelter. It appears that Bradbury takes his sentimentalism about books to an extreme where reading another one might just make me as uncomfortable as this one. Another theme that is resounding through the novel is the unstable environment of the atomic age. The Manhattan Project succeeded in producing the atomic bomb, and there were lots of questions as to how it would work, seeing as how we would not know until we tried it out. According to Rhodes it is difficult to know how frightening the atomic bomb was to Americans and the world during the early part of the cold war era. (Rhodes, 1986) I grew up in an age where the United States was most certainly invincible, by the time I was old enough to understand that there was even an issue with the Soviet Union the wall had already come down. I learned about pop culture and the freedom to just have fun through the music that blared through the radio speakers in our car. Television seemed happy-go- lucky and controversial issues were never on before my bedtime. To try and imagine a life where you are constantly faced with a terror like dying in a nuclear explosion would have driven me insane.. In addressing the further conflicts within man during the cold war era, Hoskinson states, “The Cold War Man is a man antagonized by conflicting allegiances– one to government, the other to his personal sense of morals and values– who is forced by circumstance to make an ultimate choice between these impulses.” (Hoskinson, 1995) In an interview with UCLA Magazine, Bradbury describes the summer that he wrote the novel. “That was the summer when Joseph McCarthy was running rampant... with his threats to the libraries and his investigation of supposed communist backgrounds of screenwriters.” In the same article, Bradbury tells of his love of books and libraries, this passion would help to explain his horror at the thought of someone destroying the written word.(Bradbury,2002) According to Eller, Bradbury wrote the novel after World War II and during the resulting fears of communism taking over the world. “During World War II, Hitler and the Nazis had banned and burned hundreds of thousands of books. However, the Nazis went further... they...