Ray Bradbury, perhaps America’s most popular and prolific
short-story writer, turns ninety on Sunday. As a twentysomething
wannabe writer in the 1940s, Bradbury cared too much about what
critics thought of him. As he approaches his tenth decade, Bradbury
clearly could not care any less.
“I think our country is in need of a revolution,” Bradbury
told the Los Angeles Times earlier this week. “There is
too much government today. We’ve got to remember the government
should be by the people, of the people and for the people.”
Bradbury’s short-story broadsides against modern gadgets, the
all-intrusive state, and political correctness foreshadowed his
current outlook. Calling Bill Clinton a “sh—head” and Michael
Moore an “a—hole” have been less subtle indications.
Cell phones, virtual reality, and the Walkman lived in
Bradbury’s science fiction before they became our science fact. But
where he has proven a true prophet is in his cautionary tales about
parenthood by proxy. In “Zero Hour” (1947), parents, happy to have
their kids out of their hair, reap what they sow when their
out-of-site-out-of-mind children aid and abet an alien invasion. In
“The Veldt” (1950), a couple farms out their parental duties to a
nursery that projects the imagination of the children onto
three-dimensional walls. When the parents seek to shut off the
hi-tech playroom, the children imagine their parents dead — a wish
their African Veldt fantasyland enthusiastically grants. The
“nothing’s too good for our children” refrain of the parents in
“The Veldt” foreshadowed the generational rebellion of the
following decade that witnessed spoiled kids turning on befuddled
parents.
As with the god technology, Bradbury plays apostate to the
omniscient state. The state criminalizes night strolls in “The
Pedestrian” (1951), erases the past in “To the Chicago Abyss”
(1963), conscripts for perpetual nuclear war in “To the Future”
(1950), and burns books in Fahrenheit 451 (1953).
Compounding Bradbury’s sins against state and science is his love
for small-town America, immortalized in the books Dandelion
Wine (1957) and Something Wicked This Way Comes
(1962). Nothing could appear more uncouth to the hipsters and urban
denizens reviewing his books than a writer wanting to return to,
rather than escape from, his hometown.
Before Bradbury’s political epiphany transformed the World
War II pacifist and Cold War anti-McCarthyite into a stalwart
Republican, Russell Kirk picked up on the storyteller’s abilities
to impart moral truths through parables. Arguing in the late 1960s
that Bradbury should wear the literati’s scorn as a mark of honor,
Kirk explained that critics “perceived that Bradbury is a moralist,
which they could not abide; that he has no truck with the obscene,
which omission they found unpardonable; that he is no complacent
liberal, because he knows the Spirit of the Age to be monstrous —
for which let him be anathema; that he is one of the last surviving
masters of eloquence and glowing description, which ought to be
prohibited; that, with Pascal, he understands how the Heart has
reasons which the Reason cannot know — so to the Logicalist
lamp-post with him.”
But the literati were not always dismissive of the man
Time magazine dubbed “the poet of the pulps.” When
Bradbury flattered their ideology, or allowed them to project their
politics upon his stories, they lavished praise upon him.
Bradbury’s only story accepted among what he claims were hundreds
submitted to the New Yorker is a certifiably substandard
effort about the deportation of an illegal alien. It is a glaring
peculiarity that of his four stories honored by inclusion in the
annual Best American Short Stories anthology, one
chronicles a black versus white baseball game in which sore loser
whites quit, another explores an African-American-populated Mars
faced with imposing Jim Crow laws on white settlers, and yet
another is the aforementioned tale of the deported Mexican. It was
as if the bard of tattooed carnies, Martian ghost towns, and
endless summer vacations merited recognition only for the tiny
fraction of his oeuvre addressing hot-button issues.
Bizarre.
One suspects that Bradbury knew of what he wrote when he
reflected in a coda to Fahrenheit 451, “For it is a mad
world and it will get madder if we allow the minorities, be they
dwarf or giant… pro-computerologist or Neo-Luddite, simpleton or
sage, to interfere with aesthetics.” The special interests
rewarding “art as a weapon,” and rejecting “art for art’s sake,”
pose a greater threat to freedom of thought than any mythical book
burner.
Though his writings occasionally carry political
overtones, Bradbury has never been a particularly political writer.
But the Coors-drinking, Fox News-watching nonagenarian has been a
politically outspoken citizen as of late. For critics whose
political prejudices pass for aesthetic tastes, his recent
outspokenness may have knocked him down a few rungs in their
jaundiced eyes — just as his few postwar racially-themed stories
may have once elevated him. But for readers in pursuit of a good
short story, Bradbury’s politics don’t impede them from finding
just that.
