#the one thing i did mention was that it can't really be uncle tom's cabin

[fictionadventurer]

Jim Caviezel: We're hoping this movie will be the Uncle Tom's Cabin to end modern slavery.

Me: Did he say Uncle Tom's Cabin?

[History Trivia Mode Activating]

(I was very sane. I did not info-dump all the historical trivia about the build-up to the Civil War, and that one Rose Greenhow tantrum, on my poor unsuspecting brother. Doesn't mean I didn't want to.)

[yvesdot]

would love to hear more about ur anti-F451 ideals <3

wait depending on why ur opposed to it the heart may have been tonally inappropriate

(in response to this)

Nooo don’t worry! Funniest message/addition I’ve received in a while.

I personally don’t like Fahrenheit 451 in part because I’m an honest Bradbury fan and I think the plot structure is fundamentally disappointing. Perhaps I’d feel differently on a fourth read, but I find many of his short stories much better written.

However, the main issue I have with it is that it is taught by progressive people as if it is progressive. Let me tell you: it’s not. Bradbury was not responding to real, precedented book burning (usually of progressive and/or minority-authored texts—F451 was published ~20 years after the Nazi book burnings). What’s the book he’s most worried about? The Christian Bible, which is the central text that Montag seeks to protect, despite his inability to comprehend it. This is all we really need to know about Bradbury’s grip on reality.

Take a look at this speech by Beatty, the police chief villain of the novel, as to “how we got here.” Warning: even more racist than you expect.

Now let's take up the minorities in our civilization, shall we? Bigger the population, the more minorities. Don't step on the toes of the dog-lovers, the cat-lovers, doctors, lawyers, merchants, chiefs, Mormons, Baptists, Unitarians, second-generation Chinese, Swedes, Italians, Germans, Texans, Brooklynites, Irishmen, people from Oregon or Mexico. The people in this book, this play, this TV serial are not meant to represent any actual painters, cartographers, mechanics anywhere. The bigger your market, Montag, the less you handle controversy, remember that! All the minor minor minorities with their navels to be kept clean. Authors, full of evil thoughts, lock up your typewriters. They did...

...It didn’t come from the Government down. There was no dictum, no declaration, no censorship, to start with, no! Technology, mass exploitation, and minority pressure carried the trick, thank God. Today, thanks to them, you can stay happy all the time, you are allowed to read comics, the good old confessions, or trade journals.

...You must understand that our civilization is so vast that we can't have our minorities upset and stirred. Ask yourself, What do we want in this country, above all? People want to be happy, isn't that right?

Colored people don’t like Little Black Sambo. Burn it. White people don’t feel good about Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Burn it. Someone’s written a book on tobacco and cancer of the lungs? The cigarette people are weeping? Burn the book.

(bolding mine)

Quotes like this one reveal his true, misplaced anxieties: Bradbury perceives the Oversensitive Minorities as the book-burners. Bradbury himself was not always a shining star of progressivism even in his most progressive-leaning writing (see his portrayal of Black people in various pseudo-progressive short stories). Does this mean nobody should read him, or F451? Of course not; I’m a Bradbury completionist myself. The meme post is honestly hilarious, which is why I didn’t want to be one of those Um, Actually! people—it’s not really relevant, in my opinion, to the joke. Good post, OP! I mention this here to put Bradbury’s fears of offended minority readers in context.

From Faber, the mentor figure with the Bible:

It's not books you need, it's some of the things that once were in books. The same things could be in the 'parlor families' today. The same infinite detail and awareness could be projected through the radios, and televisors, but are not. No, no it's not books at all you're looking for! Take it where you can find it, in old phonograph records, old motion pictures, and in old friends; look for it in nature and look for it in yourself. Books were only one type or receptacle where we stored a lot of things we were afraid we might forget.

Bradbury’s real concern (outside of minority backlash) was television. While he was right that technology would progress and become more handheld (and often all-consuming), his fears seem to come largely from a view of television as “replacing” reading, which it has made no real signs of doing. This is actually the reason F451 is so popular: the majority agrees, and has always agreed, that books are irreplaceable and television is “low art.” This book has mass societal appeal... because it ultimately challenges nothing about society.

Every generation acts like new tech, new adults, new everything is terrible. (1) (2) (3) (4) This makes the book popular again and again as people insist that now technology has finally gone too far (as opposed to when he wrote it? he wrote it about your generation!), but it’s something a real visionary should have been able to see past. It’s classic, uncreative paranoia.

It’s honestly embarrassing for Bradbury to count television out of “infinite detail and awareness,” particularly because it’s only developed further in that direction since. Take Bojack Horseman, Squid Game, Mr. Robot, or any other critically acclaimed television show in the last decade: we’re seeing an explosion of real art here, using the unique elements of the medium to produce better writing. Bradbury was wrong, and he should have recognized it.

So, if it’s not well-written or insightful, what is F451 teaching? Why is it present in classrooms across the country? I read this book in high school myself, and I am shocked that progressive teachers continue to assign it as though it can tell us anything (other than, perhaps, how the group in power will always manipulate social causes to portray themselves as the victims). Bradbury wasn’t right about the future, outside of some predictable technological progression. Books aren’t being burned just because they’re books (or, God forbid, because they’re Christian. Good Lord.) The Evil Minoritees have failed to bring down the giants. Nobody is going to put up four screens in their living room, because the furniture would block the screens.

F451 is a lovely beach read. It elicits those big, easily-provoked emotions: what if I am the only smart one left alive! What if all books are disappearing! What if low art is prevailing!! I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that self-aware indulgence, the way people love books about strapping gentlemen and maidens who fail to exist in real life. We just have to be aware of that inaccurate manipulation of our emotions, and perhaps come to understand that this educational text isn’t as educational as we once thought.

P. S. Bradbury once wrote a New Year’s piece for Playboy, at the turn of the century, about what he expected to happen in the 2000s. He predicted the ultimate return to glory of...! cassette tapes. Let that be a lesson to other visionaries ^__^