To Kill To Kill a Mockingbird 2: The New Censorship Requires no Flame

To Kill To Kill a Mockingbird 2: The New Censorship Requires no Flame

I have decided to make a second entry in this To Kill To Kill a Mockingbird. And this time, I am going to discuss Ray Bradbury’s misunderstood masterpiece, Fahrenheit 451. Perhaps no book has been so misinterpreted as this one. It is not, as is so often proclaimed, a warning about censorship. Bradbury was not, as the more politically obsessed in Society claim, writing about the dangers of McCarthyism. Instead, he was discussing what could easily be considered the seed to the above social ills.

He was warning about the growing American obsession with television. He wrote an allegory about the dangerous alliance between Hollywood and Madison Avenue. This is not some story about the destruction of information; this is evidenced by the relative technological advancement of the society in the book and the fact that those states which actively distort and destroy information preside over crumbling nations stunted in both economic and cultural growth. Fahrenheit 451 was intended as a warning about the dangerous marriage between information and entertainment.

But before I can discuss this topic, I will tell you a story about a Death Metal band.

Morbid Angel in the Cave

In 1994, the Death Metal band Morbid Angel stood on the verge of the mainstream. This was a time when Nirvana’s grunge music and gangster rap were dominating the music scene. In more modern terms, the American music industry was leading the way in Blue Pilling the public at large. Morbid Angel has never been a band to adapt to the demands of the industry, philosophically or musically. And they were about to prove it.

In 1994 they released the album Domination, filled with riffs that sounded like a marriage between Chuck Schuldiner’s Death and Jefferson Airplaine. The lyrics were edgy, even by today’s standards. Hyperviolent, narcissistic themes pervaded the overarching theme in frontman David Vincent’s poems which were put to the thunder of Morbid Angel. And, if some listened, there appeared to be some concept, some storyline, uniting these songs.

At the beginning of the tour, David Vincent met with one of the decade’s MTV hosts to discuss the album. At one point, he was asked what the philosophy of the album was, to explain the message he hoped to get across. Instead of some of the banal bullshit peddled by the likes of Kurt Cobain or Jim Morrison (like get along, love each other, and other feel-good messages), David Vincent offered a somewhat cryptic response. He said the purpose of Domination was to teach people to think for themselves.

He stated that every subculture and counterculture icon wanted their acolytes to adopt a persona. He said that one should carefully consider what that persona meant. And one should decide if that is truly correct, and to consider the message apart from the medium. Was Jim Morrison anything but a product of the Hippie movement? Was Nirvana anything more than the angsty Progressivism so typical of Generation X? And more importantly, were these movements something each listener should adopt, or should they be discarded, and taken only as music? To prove this, David Vincent targeted not these fans outside of his subculture, but instead experimented on Morbid Angel’s own fans.

If one considers carefully the lyrics of Domination, one finds they are not the rejection of programmed Society that Morbid Angel was known for promoting in previous albums. They are a glorification of a Society whose leaders attempted to plan everything from the economy to the culture to even the demographics. By itself, Domination is a glorification of the Third Reich (with the sole exception being the song Inquisition – Burn With Me, a song about being on the margins of Society as so many are in Societies run by central planners hyperfocused on their own posterity).

Towards the end of this tour, David Vincent announced this was the concept of Domination. The nonconformist crowd that composed Morbid Angel’s fanbase were infuriated. They grew angrier as he said that not only had they been cheering for the Holocaust (many of these people would be the kind who would today call themselves Antifa), the Aryan Race, and the very enemy that their fathers and grandfathers had defeated decades before, but they had done so only because a long-haired guy on stage who growled into a microphone while wearing all black told them to. He rubbed their faces in their own rush to conform. They resented him for it.

Plato wrote his Cave Allegory many centuries before this. In that, he said those one intends to rescue from the cave will detest them for it. And so the fans of Morbid Angel turned on the Death Metal titan. The label dropped them. Their mainstream aspirations (or supposed aspirations) were snuffed out like a candle in a hurricane. And David Vincent was forced from the band.

All of this because they showed their audience that each individual among them, with their black clothing, their tattoos, and their identical individual looks, has never dared to think for himself. They were ready to accept anything, so long as it was given in some form of entertainment. They adopted ideologies not as philosophies to guide their lives, but as distractions from their otherwise moribund collective existence.

The Censorship of Ray Bradbury

If David Vincent was undermined in is message by fans and bandmates, then Ray Bradbury was undermined in his by those who distributed his fiction focused on book burning – especially the schoolteachers. They were the ones to tell generations of Bradbury readers that this tome was a warning about censorship. The fictional book burnings were compared to the very real book burnings in the streets of Germany in the 30s. It was a warning about Fascism, and word that has been defined for decades as whatever political movement the speaker finds unpalatable. In this method, Bradbury was censored.

It is ironic that it was not the mass destruction of his book that hid his message, but the mass distribution of it. The mandatory reading in schools has made generations not of readers and thinkers, but of viewers and believers. The censorship that the schoolteachers feared happens not because of some list of banned books, but because virtually all of the books are ignored. They remain there, available upon request at stores and libraries. But they remain there, ignored. Instead, MTV, Fox, CNN, and other visual drugs are imbibed by nearly the entire populace. The mental passivity of TV watching (and video streaming through the internet should count as the same) makes it easy in comparison the concentration required to read a book. This makes any message easy to transfer.

Is it any wonder that the NPC meme exists? They speak not their own words, but the mantras taught to them by Ellen Degeneres, Don Lemon, and Glenn Beck. Does the Freedom of Expression really matter when all information is carefully curated by the 21st Century equivalent of the Medieval Catholic Church? And is legislation against speech necessary in an age when people are willing to render themselves docile.

Provide the people with propaganda that appeals to their emotions, and they’ll readily accept it. Give just one expert on disease television time and people will readily stop a thriving economy, regardless of the objections raised by countless more experts. Have a comedian on stream a Youtube channel telling people that the police are inherently racist, and they’ll riot in the streets regardless of the actual facts of any case. In Bradbury’s classic, the walls speak like televisions. Even Jesus makes special appearances to remind the Faithful of what products they need to have.

This is the dystopia that came true.

Our Dystopia

The Enlightenment is dead. Ideas are no longer discussed, much less researched or given careful consideration. Instead, an ideology is pumped from gatekeepers in the media (both old and new) into the eyeballs of passive consumers. From there it makes its way to the brain much in the same way a maggot chews through a corpse.

The education system, which was conceived of as a rigid uniform methodology for dispersing information, has only grown more so. The solution of politicians has been nothing except to throw money at this failing system. This increased funding has led to increased salaries, not increased education.

The high demand for teachers, combined with the low supply of teachers, has mandated that the salary for this position be much higher than it was in the Nineteenth and early Twentieth Centuries. This has attracted many to the field, and these many are composed mostly of those who cannot find employment elsewhere. They have not the talent to teach, and so, those who find it in their charge to distribute Fahrenheit 451 apply the same simple misinterpretation they were taught in schools.

This appears to be the same fate for every book. The most simple message, the most basic interpretation, is taught and the young readers know only it. Testing and assignments regarding this one interpretation ensure that the students consider no other possible alternative; worse yet, those deviating from the decidedly appropriate understanding are punished. And so generations of conscious individuals are rendered into simplistic thinkers. They are so totally incapable of doing as David Vincent recommended, they blindly accept whatever a talk show host, a rock star, or an athlete tells them to believe.

Just as David Vincent convinced a group of self-identified non-conformists to cheer for the hyperconformity of Nazism, so too does Trevor Noah convince an entire generation of the myth of White Privilege. Collin Kaepernick, a millionaire, convinces many to adopt Communist values. And though I feel most reading this are more towards the American Republican side of things, one must know that the Conservative movement is no better. Too much power has been bestowed onto pastors and media personalities alike in that political sphere, as well.