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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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"
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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
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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?
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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.
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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 thousandhttps://twitter.com/perdricof/status/1292238943631613953 …
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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
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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 ARGhttps://twitter.com/Nymphomachy/status/1226634566150037506 …
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