Bradbury Speaks: Too Soon From the Cave, Too Far From the Stars by Ray Bradbury

Author:Ray Bradbury
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Non-Fiction, Essays
ISBN: 9780060585693
Publisher: Harper Perennial
Published: 2005-08-15T07:00:00+00:00

THE AFFLUENCE OF DESPAIR: AMERICA THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS (1998)

How come?

How come we’re one of the greatest nations in the world …

And yet this feeling of doom?

How come, while our president walks wounded, we ourselves jog along nicely, but …

Under a dark cloud that says something awful is about to happen?

How come, with five hundred thousand immigrants a year yammering to flood in …

We enjoy what I describe as the Affluence of Despair?

How come?

Who has not, as a child, rushed to the mirror to find one’s face, mouth, eyes, thinking, I must see myself in full flood? Quick, before the sorrow melts!

America today.

I wonder how I look this hour, what I feel this minute, what I’m imagining now.

So TV switch: ON!

We have met the enemy, and it is us.

We celebrate ourselves. Right, Walt Whitman?

We run in terror from … our shadows. Yes, Mr. Poe?

Orwell, listen up:

Not Big Brother above our kitchen sinks.

But big sister, mother, uncle, sibling, family vaudeville—

Us.

Not things but we are in the saddle and ride mankind. Both horse and rider, we win, place, and show at the mirror maze local TV news window. The soul that rakes the cash betting against ourselves is, once again—

I. Me. Myself.

We.

We contrive habits, fork over moola, inhale poisons, catch nicotine colds, cough out our lungs, pretend we are not responsible, and, outraged, sue …

Two hundred fifty million innocent people.

Us.

And pay out billions to second-smoke lawyers to drag us into court, pretending we are not guilty, it is those leaf growers over there. Yeah!

Them.

Help me rend my clothes, tear my hair, acid-rinse my X-rays. Meanwhile, how do I look in the housefly 80-million-lensed TV eye on lightning striking America the Beautiful? Did you catch me last night confessing what I caught and what caught me?

Recall Starbuck’s advice to mad Ahab?

Do not fear me, old man. Beware of thy self, my captain.

America, now hear this. Beware of thyself. The day of judgment will not arrive; it’s already here. We judge and doom ourselves. We the murderers and we the victims, we the funeral managers and ourselves boxed in the grave.

In Orwell’s urban prison, Big Brother glared from every ceiling.

Today we are everywhere loving to be watched. Not Big Brother the smiler with the wide-screen knife, but, my God, look, I am on channel 9!

The problem is not Stalin’s ghost, but we prevail, displayed in the biggest damn football, baseball, basketball game in history.

We do not suffer from totalitarian lunatics but from the astonishing proliferation of our images that weep in our potato-bin parlors and TV-sales storefronts, where we can view our own faces cloned ninety times on showroom screens.

We perform for us, not Big Brother. We have fallen in love with mirrors. Flash a camera and your merest broccoli-headed citizen morphs to Travolta or Madonna.

And all of it on local TV news, in fifteen-second disaster updates. Breaking bones, breaking news, at eleven. “Tell us, Mrs. Gutierrez, how’s it feel with your son shotgunned minutes ago?”

We do not go to the theater; we are the theater.

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