Knowledge is Power. And other trite truisms I'm going to repeat.

He liked to watch them burn. The crinkle and recoil and inflamed edge of paper when fire grasped it around the mouth.
He seared the ideas.
Scorched the information.
He lit the books and smiled into the ravenous flames with their fingers reflecting in his black pupils. Then Fire Chief Beatty returned to his station in Ray Bradbury’s classic, Fahrenheit 451, for a robust laugh and a round of cards with the other fire-lickin' boys.

I'm guessing here but he probably won every hand. Somehow.

In the classic, though starkly believable, world of Bradbury's control-heavy culture, information wasn’t power. Except, of course, to those who silenced it.

“You can’t build a house without nails and wood. If you don’t want a house built, hide the nails and wood. If you don’t want a man unhappy politically, don’t give him two sides to a question to worry him; give him one. Better yet, give him none. Let him forget there is such a thing as war. If the government is inefficient, top-heavy, and tax-mad, better it be all those than that people worry over it.”
That's Beatty at his finest.

Ignorance.
Chief Beatty believed in the bliss of it. The utter joy of knowledge nothingness. Too much information made people think. And thinking brought about empowered individuals who warred and struggled and took life on the chin.

Those kind of people decide for themselves. They contemplate. Deduce. Mull over and meditate on. Dare I say it, they might even study both sides of an issue. And then form an opinion, discover a truth, find a solution, create a cure, fill a gap, and open a previously closed door. They might create running water and racing wheels, garage doors and paper plates, shoe inserts and air-conditioning, railroads and raisin cereal and rain guards for your Mazda.

They might turn out to be revolutionaries. Without bloodshed. And healers. Without egos.

They might, eek!, turn out to be capitalists.

Quote Them: When Bradbury speaks, I listen

“I think our country is in need of a revolution. There is too much government today. We've got to remember the government should be by the people, of the people and for the people.”

Ray Bradbury,
outspoken visionary, creative genius, and one of my favorite authors


PS If you haven't read Fahrenheit 451 yet, get to it. Or if you haven't read it since high school, it deserves a repeat. There are political parallels there, just like in Atlas Shrugged, that will send shivers all the way up your free-thought lovin' spine.

In the Los Angelos Times article which featured Bradbury's push for more space exploration, not Obama's less, for more books and less Kindle, and for more individual freedom and less government, the writer Susan King described the legendary author as "one of America's great dreamers, but his imagination takes him to some dark places when it comes to contemporary politics."

Dark places. People having more control over their lives is dark? Yes, I suppose so. Especially when you have bastions of honesty like Charlie Rangel to make those tough, mind-blowing decisions on which light bulb to buy.

The "contemporary politics" bit sounded like a jab on the man's age. What happened to honoring our elders? Listening to their wisdom? Not anymore. He's old and thus his commentary on current politics is placed in the "don't touch" cataloging of "contemporary politics." In other words, keep your opinions to life in the 50s old timer.

If he'd been wearing an "I heart Obama" shirt and flipping through pages of O Magazine, King would have changed her "American dreamer" title to "American icon" and drooled praise on the man's eternal voice. But since he believes in individual freedom, Bradbury's just an old man with a good imagination.

Your objective media at work, folks.

Quote Them: the original firestarter

"We must all be alike. Not everyone born free and equal, as the Constitution says, but everyone made equal. Each man the image of every other; then all are happy, for there are no mountains to make them cower, to judge themselves against."

Fire Chief Beatty,
think Rachel Maddow but with a cigarette lighter

PS Spreading the wealth. Liberalism. Economic equality. None of it is new. This has been a sickness for generations. And in our antagonist Chief Beatty, the warped thought process took the shape of a book burner in 1951's "Fahrenheit 451" by the hand of Ray Bradbury.