It's funny how I hate Ray Bradbury a whole lot more than I hate George Orwell and FAHRENHEIT 451 is probably one one of the most poorly-written books I've ever had to read but as a whole, it's been a lot less harmful to political discourse than 1984, a book I actually enjoyed

Like what the fuck is 451 even about really? I don't know. I'm not even sure Bradbury knows. Supposedly it's about "book-burning" but like Bradbury has next to no actual literacy in groups whose voices typically get targeted by book-burning. He doesn't care about Helen Keller.

Also like. The book is probably one of the most misogynist things I ever had to read. Women are materialistic wretches without any interiorities beyond what they want to watch on television and men are sensible bookish people trying to elevate the conversation. okay.

It's not even like the book has really had any impact. Like back when Jack Thompson was the end-all, be-all censorship boogeyman of the gamer community, nobody self-importantly quoted Bradbury because the tone of that book is actually, Ray Bradbury fucking hates your vidya games.

Nobody is ever actually going to burn Ray Bradbury's books because they're just incompetently written and totally irrelevant, I don't really know what he was scared of, the guy didn't have a transgressive bone in his body

Like it's really kind of offensive when you think about it

I mean he writes about all these great Classical philosophers having their books burned and shit, while Classical and Enlightenment aesthetics are typically celebrated by actual fascists who want to burn books

Like the people who have avatars of Plato and Thomas Hobbes now are precisely the kinds of people who would have burned down the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft in the thirties, meanwhile I don't know any trans person who really wants to come after REPUBLIC or LEVIATHAN

Oh yeah!!! Ray Bradbury has a real normal one about C-sections in this book

I guess because suffering during childbirth builds character or something https://twitter.com/Pullingaclaudia/status/1292221398346338306

I mean I don't know how much I can say about it that @arthur_affect hasn't said much more eloquently, though I do, emphatically, co-sign everything he's said

I actually think the much more obscure HOUSE OF STAIRS, by William Sleator, is more interesting https://twitter.com/dhansenx/status/1292222970614685698

Though it's been so long since I read that that I'm not even sure its themes are even remotely comparable

I think my thing with Orwell is that he's just kind of a sad nerd, like I feel like rather than Rage Against the Machine quoting him in songs it should have been Linkin Park

There's that whole thing in THE L WORD where insufferable writer Jenny Schecter decides to name her freshman manuscript "Thus Spoke Sara Schuster" and then has to repeatedly fend off objections that that's real fuckin pretentious

George Orwell has a lot of that kind of energy

I mean it's ironic in some ways that Orwell had such a beef against CS Lewis because they equally relished in condescending paternalistic allegories

And while I'm no fan of JRR Tolkien, his own distaste for allegory has really kind of been vindicated by history in a big way

Like if I tried to write about my beef with somebody—truscum, let's say, since they're probably busy copulating with peat bog or something—in the form of a Brothers Grimm-esque parable about farm animals, you'd burst into laughter about how hopped up I was on my own flatulence

Allegory is actually pretty dangerous

HORTON HEARS A WHO! was Ted Geisel's way of expressing his newfound compassion for the Japanese during their period of postwar suffering

But now it gets quoted by people trying to annihilate abortion rights

Allegory has a short half-life

Like when you're reading ANIMAL FARM as a kid you have no fucking clue that Snowball is supposed to be Trotsky and moreover you have no clue who Trotsky was, you have no idea who the Mensheviks are and what they believed

And the boomers feeding it to you don't know either

When you think about the whole idea of a "canon of 20th century literature" at least as it's characterized by the American public school curriculum, it's really clear how much it's designed to elevate anti-communist sentiment

And it diminishes writers that are in favor of it

Like, you have to LEARN about Upton Sinclair and the reforms in the meatpacking industry, but you never have to actually read THE JUNGLE, because if you read it you might actually come away with some of the pro-labor, pro-communism ideas Sinclair was trying to get across

Same thing with Helen Keller, like the American curriculum defiled her corpse so badly it'd make Pope Stephen VI wince

She not only had her entire career obliterated but got twisted into an inspirational story about overcoming disability that ends the moment she learns to talk

So the fact that _this_ "canon" throws ANIMAL FARM and 1984 at children should raise some eyebrows

The fact that they became _such_ a beatstick against any pro-labor, leftist sentiment, the fact that they get used to elevate the speech of Nazis over those who criticize them

And you know what? I'm gonna go ahead and get one of my takes from the furnace

JENNIFER GOVERNMENT is a million times more relevant to the world as it currently is, and the needed discourse, than 1984 or THE HANDMAID'S TALE or 451 or BRAVE NEW WORLD

But they don't assign that

Like, how convenient it is, that they only talk to children about the dystopias _dead_ people worried about

Because anything that came out during our lifetimes surely isn't literature, it hasn't been "tested" by "history"

Okay but what about books that have been tested by history

Sure JOHNNY GOT HIS GUN is ableist and pro-suicide and that's a whole thing but it's not any worse than the things schools make you read

But I mean god forbid you get TOO anti-war, Lockheed Martin wouldn't like that

Like honestly? I could pick 1984 apart, page by page, and I don't think I could make a condemnation of it more withering than the fact that conservative school boards have emphatically greenlit it as a part of public school curriculums.

How do you top a drag that deep?

The people who like to do shit like rewrite textbooks to remove references to slavery and the civil rights movement, they want you to read 1984.

I mean that's checkmate right there. I couldn't hoist that petard any higher in a billion years.

The fact that Bradbury gets shoehorned into curricula and Le Guin really doesn't is such a goddamn crime.

I mean THE ONES WHO WALK AWAY FROM OMELAS is more thought-provoking in three thousand words than 1984 is in a hundred thousand https://twitter.com/perdricof/status/1292238943631613953

But I mean that's the thing, right

Conservatives don't want you to think about walking away from Omelas. They want you to warm your hands over a fire barrel and join them in gloating derisively about how bad they have it over there in Oceania

Oh yeah I forgot that my classmate in high school found parts of 1984 so boring that he genuinely and sincerely believed it was an ARG https://twitter.com/Nymphomachy/status/1226634566150037506