No doubt, many of you are familiar with Ray Bradbury’s 1953 novel Fahrenheit 451. It was on the recommended reading list in one of my high school English classes, and I loved it.
For those not familiar with the book, the title references the autoignition temperature of paper, which is relevant because the novel is set in a future America where books are outlawed. Any that are discovered are taken and burned by the “firemen,” who also burn down the houses of those who possess books.
Bradbury’s tale is weirdly predictive: Everyone in “future” America spends their evenings watching insipid melodramas and sports on their “parlor walls,” i.e. home screens. No one reads because books have been deemed by the nation’s rulers as too dangerous for the people.
Cut to Mt. Juliet, Tennessee, last week, where an evangelical pastor and rabid Trump supporter named Greg Locke held a book-burning — a bonfire of the inanities, so to speak. The blaze targeted Harry Potter books and the Twilight series, but other books were also burned, including a copy of Fahrenheit 451. The irony was lost, obviously. Still, you can’t be too careful. Some sexy wizard vampire freedom stuff might leak out into young impressionable brains.
On the surface, such activity seems scary, but in 2022, burning books to stop someone from reading them is about as useful as trying to stop someone from listening to a particular musician by burning his CDs. Two hundred years ago, torching tomes might have kept the locals in a village from reading a particular book, but that horse is now out of the barn and on Pixar. In 2022, you can listen to anything, read anything, or see anything you want with a few keystrokes. Burning books or records is a purely performative exercise, Kabuki theater for the gullible rubes. Nobody can “ban” anything, least of all from tech-savvy young people.
Speaking of … Do you know what the No. 1 song on the Billboard 100 chart is right now? I’m gonna guess you probably don’t. It’s “We Don’t Talk About Bruno,” a Latin show-tune written by Lin-Manuel Miranda (of Hamilton fame) from the Disney film, Encanto. It’s sung by six different, mostly unknown, people and it’s been No. 1 for five weeks and counting.
How is it possible that this is the No. 1 song in America? Sure, it’s sort of catchy, in a classic Broadway musical sense, but according to those who track such things, that’s not why “We Don’t Talk About Bruno” has reached the top. Nope. “WDTAB” is No. 1 because it’s being streamed millions of times a week by elementary school-age kids, who love the film and the song and listen to it repeatedly. Stream counters don’t care who’s listening. Age doesn’t matter. Everyone’s just a number. You and I may not talk about Bruno, but American kids sure do.
Speaking of streaming … A lot of people smirked a couple weeks ago, when septuagenarian rocker Neil Young pulled his music from Spotify in protest of bro-magnon talker Joe Rogan’s podcast. It’s me or Rogan, said Young. Rogan is Spotify’s primary cash cow, so Spotify said, “see ya, Neil.”
Young’s protest was a meaningless, empty gesture, people said. Oops. Turns out Young’s protest spurred other content providers to pull their work from Spotify. Then, oops again, it was discovered that Rogan was not just an ivermectin-clogged dumbass spreading Covid misinformation, he was also a racist who casually used the “n-word” in more than 70 podcast episodes. Spotify quickly pulled the episodes in question, plus others of questionable taste and accuracy, and apologized to its users and to its employees.
Rogan’s supporters immediately began complaining about their hero being a victim of “cancel culture.” Which is different, somehow, from burning books or pulling them from school libraries, I guess.
Anyway, ol’ Neil got the last word. And we should recognize that none of this would have happened if one man hadn’t taken a conscientious stand on principle. Rogan’s racist crap would still be on Spotify. Now it’s not.
You might say that Joe Rogan got burned.
