The story is set in the not so distant future. [It was written in 1953.] The premise of the story is that the government has banned all books. The reference of the title is that paper begins to burn at 451 degrees. The book tells the story of one of the firemen responsible for hunting out and destroying books and the personal struggle he goes through. It's quite a prophetic tale.
One of my earliest posts on this website was entitled flickers of 1930's germany... on 10 May 2005. It dealt with Oklahoma lawmakers trying to ban books with gay themes or references. It made reference to the Nazi book burnings as the most infamous of bookburning's history.
Well, we haven't come very far since either Nazi Germany or Oklahoma in 2005. Here is a story that is not just ironic but sad. Your jaw will drop when you see the irony in this video of a local news broadcast. It is 100% legit.
I could go in a very sardonic* direction with this story, but I am really very, very sad over it. The man and his daughter are... are... idiots! I have a very specific definition of an idiot, one that a class of 4th grade students I taught came up with. I may have mentioned it before in a post.
ignorant is okay. It only means you don't know something but you can find it out.
stupid is knowing better but doing something anyway.
idiocy is being too stupid to know that you are ignorant.
It's very sad that these people do not realize just how ironic what they are doing is.
It is things like this that test my belief in hope. It is things like this that in the past made me think that maybe a nuclear war would have been a good thing. We would have been forced to start all over. The problem with this idea is in the upper left-hand corner of the website - Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it.
*sardonic - grimly mocking or cynical.
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