From Newsgroup: alt.buddha.short.fat.guy

It is not the road to serfdom that awaitsrCobut the steep downward slope
to the status of a peasant in ancient Egypt.


"He wanted above all . . . to shove a marshmallow on a stick in the
furnace, while the flapping pigeon-winged books died on the porch and
lawn of the house. While the books went up in sparkling whirls and blew
away on a wind turned dark with burning.rCY rCoRay Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

ItrCOs hard not to be impressed by Ray BradburyrCOs prescience.

In his best-known novel, the dystopian classic Fahrenheit 451 (1953), he combined the memory of Nazi book burnings with the experience of Joseph McCarthyrCOs rCLRed ScarerCY to imagine a future America where firemen are employed not to put out fires, but to start them in any home where
illicit book reading is detected.

Bradbury naturally assumed that any society where books were generally prohibited would be a totalitarian one. The unnamed city he imagines is
in many respects an American version of George OrwellrCOs London in 1984.
What makes it distinctively American is that the authoritarian regime is combined with a hedonistic consumer society very different from the
austerity of OrwellrCOs dystopia.

Guy Montag, the fireman central character of Fahrenheit 451, is married
to mindless Millie, who flees serious thought or conversation with the assistance of sleeping pills, giant flat-screen televisions, and what we
would now call earbuds...

https://www.thefp.com/p/niall-ferguson-without-books-we-will-be-barbarians

--- Synchronet 3.21a-Linux NewsLink 1.2