Uncle Ray’s Dystopia

Ronn! Blankenship <[email protected]> Sat, 09 Jun 2012 18:17:10 -0500
Newsgroups gmane.culture.sf.killerbs
Message-ID <[email protected]>
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