A thoroughly modern fable

 With all the issues in the world and lack of trust in news media in view, I was having a conversation recently with my son and I told him a story. It went like this:

Once upon a time, there was a man. His name was Walter Cronkite and he was called 'the most trusted man in America' and it was true. He earned that name, people trusted him. He was the most trusted man in America and he was a journalist.

That was the punchline. My son thought I was being funny but it is a true story. There was a time when people trusted the news. Imagine that.

Thoughts While Sitting at Home Bored.

      In the early days of quarantine, I thought it might be fun to reread Camus' The Plague and compare the global pandemic to what they experienced. I reread the book but got sucked into a lethargic rut. Many of the emotions in the book and today's reality are similar with several distinctions. The first, covid-19 is not as deadly as pneumonic plague or as easily transmitted. Secondly, there was no point in trying to escape since there is no place to go to. Ah well, here's hoping there will be a return to some kind of sanity soon.

Fahrenheit 451

     I noticed Fahrenheit 451 had been made into a tv movie and, as I was cruising by, I watched it for a few minutes. The story did not resemble the book but it had been a long time since I have read it so it was time to take it off the shelf. A nuclear war breaks out at the end of the novel which fits in well with my recent apocalyptic theme. 
     Considering how crazy politics and the discussion have gotten lately, I am amazed to see that Ray Bradbury spotted this trend back in the early 1950's as he has Beatty tell the disillusioned fireman Montag,

     "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!

     Indeed. I think we are getting to the book burning stage. The younger generation is very comfortable with censorship.

     Having reread the book now. I can see that the HBO movie re-interprets the story in a very politically correct way. I will not compare the two since I did not watch the entire movie but there is an orthodoxy and it appears to be crime these days to disagree with all or part of the political narrative. A book on censorship was censored. 

     Somebody once suggested to me that Huxley's A Brave New World is the logical future of the society in the novel if that society was not obliterated by nuclear war.

The story opened with the glory and beauty of a large fire consuming a house and the books inside. Guy Montag was a happy fireman, or at least he thought he was happy until he met a teenage girl on his walk home from work and she made him realize that there is something missing in his life: human connection. He arrives home from his conversation with the teenaged sprite and finds his wife has committed suicide. After calling the emergency number, a non-medical crew shows up with a gadget that sucks the prescription pills out of suicides like Mildred since there are so many now. While the crew is working on Mildred, Montag could hear Clarisse and her family warmly talking on their porch and laughing. The emptiness of his life hits him even harder. 

     In the morning, Mildred wakes up and carries on as if nothing has happened. Most houses are equipped with large tv screens that take up the entire wall. There are no movies or dramas on those screens, just live action that seems to be quite a bit like reality tv. Viewers get to vote on things and can interact with characters on the screen. Mildred won the chance to speak a line on one of those programs by sending in boxtops. Except that the screens are so very large, one could be talking about social media, video games and the whole internet. 
     Montag returns to work but he is no longer the same man. The Hound, a cruel parody of the Dalmatian that fire halls used to keep as a mascot, 'senses' the change in him and begins to threaten him. Radio and television news occasionally break in with some statement about a looming war. For the next seven days, Clarisse would walk to the subway or to home with him, chattering away and then she was gone. 
     While Montage is processing the changes in himself, the firemen are sent to the house of  an old woman with a library full of books. Rather than run, she quotes Hugh Latimer, a Protestant martyr, executed in the time of Mary I. Latimer was an Oxford don who was executed for translating the Bible into English so that anyone could read it. The quote  recited by the old woman tells Latimer's co-conspirator to be of courage, that they would, with this burning (execution for heresy), light a candle that he hoped would never be put out. That candle would be knowledge. The statement is full of irony that the old lady's house and books and their knowledge are about to be extinguished by fire. Rather than go to the insane asylum, the old lady lights a match and sets herself on fire. With Montag's already fragile mental state, he is horror-struck and goes home and weeps. But he stole a book from the house and subsequent events show he has stolen books before. 
      The station captain came to visit Montag and talk to him about books and how the burning got started. It really was not necessary to burn the books, ordinary people, we, by complaining about being offended got rid of them ourselves. Considering the 'safe spaces', protests against professors who challenge the current narrative, politicians who deny scientific consensus on the basis of their feelings, one can hear Beatty say to Montag,  "the word intellectual became the dirty word it deserved to be".( A few months back there was a kerfuffle between Margaret Atwood and some Me Too activists. Atwood was pleading for due process and the rule of law while the activists accused her of being unorthodox. )
     Montag finds out that Clarisse was killed by a 'hit and run' and his rejection of social norms is cemented. He remembered an English professor he met once and goes to the man's house looking for help in exploring his new knowledge and processing it. Beatty has given him a deadline to get rid of the books. After the deadline passes and Montag screams in rage at his wife and her friends, he becomes a fugitive from the law. His house is burned, he burns Beatty and the Hound is set to track him down and kill him. He eludes capture but, because the hunt is broadcast live and the government must be seen as capable, the Hound is sent to kill a poor random man who is out taking a walk. 
      Montag escapes from the city and follows the railroad tracks to a transient community that tries to keep the books alive by memorizing their contents. While he is talking to those men, a nuclear strike hits the city and the decision is made to return to the city to help the survivors. 
      So how well did Bradbury foretell the future? Well, we are not burning books yet although some have been banned and offended minorities threaten Shakespeare and Mark Twain from time to time. Contests, diversions, people addicted to technology, a mental ill health epidemic are here now.  Bread and circuses to distract the mob from the war that is a constant backdrop. There are very few, if any years, where there has not been some war or other since 1900. As the bombers fly over Montag's house, he states there have been two atomic wars since 1990.  That has not happened but as more countries join the nuclear club, it is but a matter of time. 
      Montag also comments that they are so rich in the U.S. and the rest of the world is so poor and that may be why the world hates them. Partly true and good of him to admit not everyone loves 'America" the country. I have met many wonderful Americans but I would also say the American government's interference in the internal politics of so many sovereign nations is a bigger part of why they are hated.
         -Presidents are elected for their presence on tv, that has happened. Looks are not so important in U.S. politics but has played a part in Canadian elections, i.e. Robert Stanfield vs. Trudeau the elder. 
      - parents don't parent anymore, just shove their kids in front of a screen and leave them.
     -Bradbury did not foresee the growing income inequality. none of the science fiction writers did. Most imagined shorter work days with guaranteed income not longer days and insecure work or outsourcing. Not being greedy themselves, they underestimate the greed of others. 
    - the war began and ended in an instant. Thanks to intercontinental ballistic missiles, it is no longer necessary for jets to zoom overhead and drop the bombs. However, we will have the godawfulness of the warning to take cover while they are on their way. Once it turns nuclear, it would not last long. I do not think there would have been a third nuclear war like in the novel. 
     - the description of the blast is not realistic. There would be a light but those looking at it would likely be blinded. The city would be vaporized not lifted up in the air to crash back down. There would be a wind, a shock wave, knocking trees, buildings, men down, but it would come with heat and no one would want to walk back to the city to help survivors as there is not likely to be any and the radiation would kill the helpers. Montag and the other survivors are close enough to the city to be burned in the ensuing fires. 
     -The survivors would not need these men and their books. There will be famine and there will be disease, homelessness, cold and other manner of suffering. Novels will be of no use in such a world for a long time after. 
      -the reason for the war is never given. The public is kept in the dark as to what the government is doing, who they are at war with and why.   We are not so blind yet, but we could be. 
     -Bradbury does not try hard to imagine what life would be like after a nuclear war, the apocalypse is really the catastrophic event that it would take to change the current course of humanity. 
    

On The Beach

     Published in 1957, 'On the Beach' was one of the first novels to try to imagine and portray the aftermath of a global nuclear conflict. The bleakness of the future of the survivors near Melbourne, Australia as the deadly cloud of radioactive fallout makes its way from the Northern Hemisphere to eventually blanket the southern had such an emotional impact on readers that it gave rise to the  disarmament movement. Two years after it was published Stanley Kramer made a film of it and the message of the book reached a wider audience. Here is a great article in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists on the film version.
     The book opens with a line from T.S. Eliot's 'The Hollow Men' - "This is the way the world ends, not with a bang but a whimper". Eliot's poem has been written about many times and was hugely influential. The last lines of the poem have been connected to nuclear war thanks to Shute's book. The hollow men are dead, the people in Shute's novel are the walking dead, except unlike Rick Grimes' little tribe battling zombies in their own peculiar dystopia, Shute's characters don't get to live once they do what they have to do.
     There were a few things in the novel that bothered me, Commander Towers always addressed Moira Davidson by the term 'Honey' even though he was scrupulously faithful to his dead wife in the novel. It was just irritating and betrays an emotional detachment. Did he not remember her name most of the time? For two people sharing their last moments on earth together and presumably like each other very much, the banal conversation and pleasantries make, what should be an emotional and deeply involved relationship, into one of Austen's comedies of manners. The subtext was always deadly serious in Austen too, but here the epithet is annoying and patronizing.
     The novel also follows Peter and Mary Holmes , a young couple with an infant daughter. What are held to be some of the most emotional scenes from the book and film involve the fate of this child. Peter instructs his unwilling wife on how to inject their child with a government provided poison to end people's lives so they do not have to die of radiation sickness, if the cloud reaches them while he is away. At the end of the book the little girl, named Jennifer, is gravely ill and Peter gives her the injection after which he and his wife take the pills and end their lives. It irritates me a little that the little girl is referred to most of the time as "the baby" and "it". If Shute wanted to elicit an emotional response, he should have written her name more often and referred to her as the Holmes' daughter and make her a breathing human being rather than the doll that Mary Holmes fusses over continually to pass the time.
      Shute got the science wrong. Even in 1957, it was clear that radiation would begin to decay almost immediately and having it dispersed around the entire globe would reduce its power as well. Shute researched his subject and had the radiation grow and increase in intensity as it was being distributed around the globe by making the bombs 'dirty' or cobalt bombs. The science even then did not really back up that contention and accidents like Chernobyl have proved radiation decays faster than we thought and life is more resilient too.
     Shute's nuclear blasts destroyed life without destroying property. The last submarine roaming the world looked through its periscope at cities that were intact only the people were gone. He also claimed that certain mammals like cats and rabbits were more resilient than humans. Not likely and they will not inherit the earth, insects and grass were all that would remain wrote Jonathan Schell in the Fate of the Earth.
     I find the stoicism of the population unbelievable too. When there is no future, the old rules don't apply anymore. There are people in the novel who continued to go to work in cafes and stores right up to the end. Why would people not just leave the doors open and not bother to charge customers for purchases? There was a butler at the men's club who showed up to serve drinks even when the radiation reached Melbourne and the sickness was beginning to be felt. People don't freak out, there is no rash of murders or riots. Everyone accepts their fate, except those that continue to plan gardens and home improvements and talk about the next year as if there would be one. I agree with Kramer who had Dwight Tower consummate his relationship with Moira. His wife and children were dead after all and soon he would be too. Why would a man not take some comfort where he can?
     Shute took the lazy way out, he did not try to predict who would take the first shot or why. The Australians seem to be in the dark about how it happened. It was a mistake or some kind of misunderstanding. The novel's scientist Julian Osborne surmises the first bomb was launched by Albania against Italy. Then someone dropped a bomb on Tel Aviv. The Brits and Americans suspected the Egyptians and made military flights over Egyptian territory, without firing a shot. The Egyptians then sent out all the bombs they had six to Washington and seven to London. The bombers they used were Russian made so the Russians were bombed. With the leading statesmen of most countries dead, decision making devolved down to very junior military leaders and the Chinese released their ICBM to support Russia. The final verdict was that it was not the superpowers that started the nuclear conflict, it was the little ones, "the Irresponsibles".
     Albania was a communist state and officially atheist in 1957, although it was occupied by Italy during WWII there was no reason for there to be hostilities between Italy and Albania. An early strike on Tel Aviv is plausible enough, Israel has so many enemies, from there it gets more unlikely especially as neither Albania nor Egypt have nuclear capability. Shute did not anticipate North Korea's nuclear ambitions.
      It was an important book but it was a long and dull read as nothing happens. People go about their lives and pass the time with stiff upper lips until they have to die. And then they do.