Not only is #112 on the List of 1,000 Books to Read Before You Die, “Fahrenheit 451” by Ray Bradbury, still pertinent because of all the bozos out there who are trying to ban books in 2024 (or, worse, treating the dystopian classic as a how-to guide), but also because there’s an undercurrent in America that seems hell bent on bringing the spirit of this nightmare to fruition.

A lot of people know that “Fahrenheit 451” is about burning books, but they think the novel stops there. “The bad guys don’t want anyone to read books so they go around burning every book they can find.” This is true, and I think the message has spread — people who physically burn books they don’t like are thought of as insane, they are ostracized, shunned. Which is fine; like I said, they’re bozos. But the pleasure of burning isn’t the actual problem.

The problem is that people find ways to get rid of books, to take them out of the hands of people who need them most. Why? Because ignorant people are easier to exploit.

To sprinkle a little Rage Against the Machine into the mix: “They don’t gotta burn the books, they just remove them.” Burn a book and you’re a fascist, but, for whatever reason, convince millions of people that books aren’t important and nobody bats an eye.

The real message of Fahrenheit isn’t that we need to coat books in asbestos — the threat in Bradbury’s work isn’t as much a flamethrower as it is the presence of an anti-intellectual movement that has been growing like a dumb weed in the ditches of middle America.

Books are representative of knowledge. They are the virus that causes the disease of not-being-a-moron, they give rise to questions and oblige us to right the wrongs of the past. Anti-intellectuals, though, call that “unrest,” and they’ve convinced so many people to find pride in never having cracked a book.

Who are these anti-intellectuals? The U.S. is rife with them and they’re often in the news:

They are people who, when confronted with a worldwide pandemic, get mad at doctors who tell them to get vaccinated and/or wear a mask.

People who, after seeing the disastrous effects of climate change, send death threats to meteorologists.

People who, after wave upon wave of school shooting, don’t listen to any politician who says that maybe we all shouldn’t have access to goddamned assault rifles. (“But then how will we shoot cans of beer in protest of trans people?!?”)

“Fahrenheit 451” is about a man, Guy Montag, who goes woke. Or, as Elon Musk would put it, he gets infected by the “woke mind virus.” (If any of that just made you vomit in your mouth, just know that you aren’t alone, and be sure to take the time to brush and floss. If you don’t know I’m talking about: Here’s two idiots chatting about it. Note how the oligarch currently trying to buy votes in Pennsylvania talks about how “moderate” he is.)

A fireman by trade (a person who does the book-burning in this context), Montag meets a free-thinking youngster when he’s walking home one night and commits the egregious sin of becoming curious, which, a few people might recognize, is the first step down the slippery slope of learning. Montag begins to wonder why they burn books — what’s in them that’s so terrible? Does anyone know?

After he watches a woman get burned alive with her book collection, things start to spiral. He takes a few books home, he flaunts them in front of his wife and her friends. He starts questioning things. A robot dog sniffs around his door — a sure sign of trouble! Montag feels like he needs to do something.

But Montag doesn’t really know what he’s supposed to do. Once you realize that your whole society is based on a series of fallacies, what can one man do to fight it? Print more books? Run away? Actually fight back by planting books in the houses of firemen and then reporting them so they get arrested?

Montag doesn’t have the answers; nobody does, not in the novel, nor in our actual world of “Fahrenheit 74” (which is so named for the temperature at which assholes turn on their air conditioners).

Montag makes a series of rather bumbling mistakes (but they’re the “right” mistakes) and ends up getting found out (his wife turns him in) and running for his life before he encounters a bunch of other intellectuals who are on the run from Project 2025 … er, I mean, this nameless dystopian government that bears no resemblance to any current trends in American politics.

These roving intellectuals have each memorized a book and essentially serve as a walking library, hoping only to survive long enough to ensure that the knowledge they keep can be passed on and, maybe, be of use to the future. Because certainly, certainly this government can’t last.

(It can’t. Shortly after Montag goes on the run, his whole city is blown up in one of the wars that seem to start every day.)

It’s a bleak ending, but looking at the world today, one can’t help but feel that bleakness is the zeitgeist.

Because all those people who would have been burning books if they were fictional characters have realized that it’s much easier to convince people that they don’t want to or shouldn’t read books. It is astounding to me the number of students (and adults) who proudly proclaim that they don’t read, that they haven’t read a book since sixth grade. They say it as if they’ve cracked a code, or pulled the wool over someone’s eyes.

“Those wily teachers tried to fool me, but I got around them — I just had ChatGPT summarize the whole book for me while I watched YouTube shorts. Checkmate, atheists!”

One thing that I don’t believe was true when Fahrenheit came out (1953) but is certainly true today is that reading is considered work. The news I keep hearing from university professors is that more and more students are coming to English departments across the country unable to read books.

When I studied English, ages ago in the early 2000’s, I took any number of literature classes that would assign one book a week. Now, though, that amount of reading is impossible for many incoming university students. Is it an attention span issue? Are public schools failing us? Are parents and their “just give ’em an iPad” mentalities to blame?

A little of all of them, I’m sure. One thing is for certain: A whole wealth of knowledge, tremendous variety of perspective, and just general fun is being placed out of students’ reach — and all without the use of kerosene or matches!

Similar to Guy Montag at the end of “Fahrenheit 451,” I sometimes feel that we English teachers are wandering through the wastes of tomorrow, carrying information and skills that we hope will someday be valuable again.

Last week, I took an informal poll of my approximately 220 students, asking how many of them had heard of Mark Twain. You know, the author. All told, about 15 of them knew who I was talking about.

“Wait, really?” I asked. “You don’t know Huckleberry Finn? Tom Sawyer?”

I was met with a sea of blank faces.

And in the distance, thunder.

There is a long and detailed history of books about war that stretches back just about as far as the written word; name a big war in the past 3,000 years and it’s likely you can find a book that someone wrote about it. Sure, books like “The Iliad” or “The Histories” or “The Art of War” aren’t novels, but they do show that readers have always had an absolute fascination with fighting and death.

It’s hard to say what effect “The Things They Carried” by Tim O’Brien has on readers today. The Vietnam war was looked at differently 30 years ago when the book was published, and people my age — children, then — would have grown up hearing stories about it from relatives, making it fresher than it seems now. (Most of my students today wouldn’t be able to find Vietnam on a map, let alone discuss its psychological impact.)

Does “The Things They Carried” transport you to the jungles of Vietnam; does it let you feel the mosquito bites, the dampness in your socks, or the burn of chlamydia? Maybe not. But there are some absolute gut punches in here that are revealed as if in slow motion, showing Tim O’Brien’s understanding of how the literary conversation was evolving at the time.

*“Hello? Jungle? I heard there would be fun and games.”*

You Can’t Ever Really Know Anything, Man

And of course the book doesn’t transport you there. One of the themes is that memory is fallible; we can’t trust what we put down on paper. It’s technically “fiction,” after all. Even if there are real people in it doing real things, it still carries that label — Tim O’Brien chooses to call it a work of fiction rather than a memoir. (Hearkening after Norman MacLean, maybe?)

In a postmodern sense, you can’t understand anything at all by reading a book.

Want to know what war is like? Join the army. Want to experience Vietnam? Buy a plane ticket. The only thing we’ll possibly be able to understand by reading “The Things They Carried” is what Tim O’Brien felt like when he was sitting at his typewriter, and we’ll only get a partial understanding of that.

You might disagree with it, but I bet Tim O’Brien agrees with me.

*Just as he’ll agree this portrait is 100% accurate.*

Don’t Drink The Milk

There are a few books that I’m not worried about “spoiling,” and “The Things They Carried” is one of them. It’s non-linear and only a breath away from being a short story collection, so telling you what’s happening on the last few pages won’t ruin anyone’s experience.

The reason I want to talk about the ending is this: O’Brien is right on the cutoff point for what I would consider to be a “current” author. I’m showing my age by saying so, but anything published before 1990 isn’t current — sorry “A Farewell to Arms” and “Catch-22,” you’ve been relegated to the realm of the “Classic.” “The Things They Carried,” though, is still quite sensible as a “modern” war novel (postmodern, really), and it has a particular effect upon modern readers.

A part of that is related to the ending, which flashes back to when the narrator was 9 and he had his first encounter with death — a girl he was “in love with” died of brain cancer, and the last chapter is an exploration of how dreams keep that little girl (and all his war buddies) alive in his mind. It’s an emotional twist of an ending considering the number of people who explode in the story.

Death and Dreams

As you get closer to the final pages, you expect there to be some sort of violent climax. It’s a war novel, after all. Certainly there could be an action-packed thrill ride of an ending. People get shot and step on landmines and have their legs blown off and there must be a bridge somewhere that needs exploding — but the actual climax is this subtle little story about a girl who wears a red hat to cover her bald head and how little Timmy O’Brien hears on the playground one day that his girlfriend “kicked the bucket.”

It’s like that “My Girl” movie or one of those other horrible tales that only exist to make children confront death before they really need to.

More than the stories of his buddies drowning in a shit river, that last chapter about the girl in the red hat clings to you, especially if you’ve experienced that kind of significant loss. We all have those dreams, and they stick around for years and years and years. Enough to make you wonder if they ever really go away.

I still have dreams in which my mother is alive. Instead of being dead and cremated and poured into a box buried on a hillside, she’s instead “retired” from life and now lives in a facility somewhere. Like a facility for “dead” people; a post-hospice hospice. The same way cops turn in their badge and gun and uniform when they retire, Ellen has turned in her friends, her home, and her family. Death isn’t the end of existence, just the end of that existence.

In my dream, that’s what happens to old people. Instead of dying, a bunch of guys in white coats come get them and take them somewhere else. A retirement village for the dead. She has her own little room with a single bed and a TV with 13 channels.

She doesn’t have what you’d call a “life,” this woman. She follows a schedule that’s “the best thing for her, really.” She’s a shell of her former self, and all of us survivors — the men in her life who are still clinging to all this absurd bullshit we bumble through every day — are supposed to just let her exist in some sort of half-life of field trips and cafeteria meals and plastic bowling balls being rolled down long, carpeted hallways.

Every now and then, we run into her in the wild, out on the street. Like we’ll see her getting off a bus and heading into a museum with the rest of the “retired from life” folks. The same way you might see a group of students getting off a big, yellow school bus. I stop whatever I’m doing, I run over, I grab her by the shoulders and say, “What are you doing here? Why would you rather do … this than be a part of our lives? You’re being led around like a geriatric elephant that gets to go see all the other zoo animals!”

And someone, an orderly, a tough guy, will pull me aside and say, “Leave her alone. That’s just the way it is man. People gotta retire. And you gotta let ‘em alone.”

She looks at me and she sees me and she knows me but it doesn’t matter anymore. She’s moved on to a new phase of existence. This is her life now, and all of us are no longer a part of it. The whole world stands on a sidewalk in the sunshine and shrugs.

*Hop aboard!* *We’re headed off to our impending doom.*

It’s odd for a war story to make you think about these things — dreams you have of dead people. People who didn’t blow up or get shot; people who disappeared in more common, even mundane ways. I don’t think even Hemingway would have had the balls to end a war novel like that. Joseph Heller might have, and Vonnegut probably thought Tim O’Brien was a-okay. But it hits you, that ending. All of it hits you, and even if it doesn’t really capture WAR, it captures something.

Me? I just wish I had different dreams. Better dreams.

Christ, I couldn’t dream her onto a beach or something? Texas, at least?