Like I'm pretty sure the conclusion I had was "oh haha I see your point mr. Vonnegut, too much equality can indeed be a bad thing!"
And I definitely don't remember my teacher suggesting anything about it being viewable as satire of red scare paranoia either
Whatever his intentions, Vonnegut made a masterwork of anticommunist propaganda.
Yeah like this story would be hilarious copypasta on this site but instead it's in the same vein of "1984 wasn't supposed to be an instruction manual!!11!11!!"
Anything can be made into anticommunist propaganda if that's the intention of the one receiving it.
I was literally thinking about this earlier today, it’s the epitome of “if you treat everyone equally, everything will suck” propaganda. Could just as easily been an episode of South Park.
The south park comparison is totally apt, I'm surprised they haven't tried to riff on this yet.
I remember someone on reddit talking about how interesting and important of a movie it was, so I watched it. I thought it was one of the dumbest things I'd ever seen. People are dumb so they need other people to think for them wow what a cool concept bud definetly never heard that before. I took it as incredibly self indulgent libertarian nonsense
where in the hell did you go to high school where they were obsessed with existentialism?
the furthest my high school ever got into philosophy was "The enlightenment happened and there was some science stuff. Also America is the greatest nation ever to exist ever."
this is one of the more surreal things I've ever heard and I can't express how envious I am
I also took AP English but we read stuff like George W. Bush speeches, evangelical propaganda, and all the puritan lit (Nathaniel Hawthorne, the Crucible, etc) but it was always framed in a way where Puritans were rational and good and cool
The Crucible was written in 1953 as a criticism of McCarthyism. It is definitely not about Puritans being cool and good. My source is covering it in AP English. I played Ann Putnam. It sounds like you had a really shitty class.
I've heard from several people that US schools teach The Crucible with all references to McCarthyism removed, so that it's ONLY about the Salem trials.
Reading it without context, you may not really know that it's allegorical.
without context
What I meant was, as the wiki article mentions, that some versions of the play remove the narrator at the beginning of acts 1 and 2 that explicitly compare the witch trials to fears of Communism.
Yeah, it's using an analogy to criticize red scare paranoia by comparing it to witchcraft hysteria. Although our teacher told us it was an example of how efficient Puritan courts were and also how close and strong their community bonds were
The teacher explained it as an exploration into Puritan community standards and their legal system. She would praise how close knit the community was and would make a point every time a character knew intimate details about another, essentially saying Puritans had a superior social structure, since they were all familiar with one another. She also would praise how the court system called so many witnesses. Half of the people in my hometown become klansmen by the way
Religious fundamentalists are everywhere in my hometown. One time as a kid my yugioh cards were confiscated and they tried to pressure me into admitting they were tarot cards, since they wanted a record of me practicing Satanism. We were also never quite taught evolution either. The teachers danced around the subject completely.
My sophomore year history teacher told us there were good and bad people on both sides of the American slavery debate if that gives you a clearer idea
My lit class taught it, and I went to a public school in [dox]. I figured it was kinda standard.
Yeah, I'm more and more realizing how fanatically weird and brainwash-y my hometown is.
Had that. Also had a good amount of communists on the class, they were also super rich kids so at the time I didn't like them because being sixteen.
I had a college class examine Harrison Bergeron and I was the only one who mentioned Vonnegut was a socialist. I love the guy but it's a dog shit story and a terrible satire. Unless you have the context of Vonnegut's personal beliefs it will be taken literally.
either that or beating ben Garrison at his own game before he even had any
Like I could easily see a benny g comic branching off of this or just unwittingly flowering on it's own. The use of government mandated handicaps (e.g. restraints) can definitely be portrayed with a garrisonian horniness. All you need is a caricature of pelosi or AOC/twitter as a Domme and it's basically a slam dunk
full disclosure I am definitely projecting the fact I was mildly turned on when I read some of the...predicaments the characters were in
i have vague recollection of reading it, but i don't remember what the "moral" was, as told by my teachers. I definitely remember Animal Farm and Anthem philosophies being drilled a little bit more heavily.
You just read through it and the teacher went “Wow would that be fucked up or what?
I'm dying, you're so right 😂
I read this in high school, I didn’t really get the anti-communism element of it that others here have. the story presents a “dystopian” world in the sense that this society has devolved into a self-defeating police state due to the state’s demand that the citizenry conform to its destructive ideology. The “ideal” of the society is, at first appearance, a good and proper ethic to design a social order to. But, much like the idealist trappings of western liberalism, the state’s declared ideology of lifting up all to a level of complete equality is itself a farce, a casus belli to justify whatever actions the state wants to take maintain its control over people.
And the state uses every resource it can to reinforce this ideology; mandatory headsets that literally prevent any kind of coherent thought for those who wear it, physical weights to create an immense burden on a daily basis, obscene masks to hide a persons visage, maybe the most basic element of social identification. It uses technology & legalism to give itself a constant justified presence in people’s homes and existences, and it uses the media to propagandize, and ultimately it is prepared to use violence to control the rabble when all else fails. The result of this is a society where people can barely exist; no practical ability to exercise free thought, completely disoriented & atomized, and constantly burdened and weakened for no reason but for the sake of it.
Harrison himself is definitely a reactionary character, but I guess maybe a more honest presentation of a reactionary. He’s literally a victim of state violence as a child, taken away from his family & thrown in jail. Facing a life of total repression by the state, he is effectively forced into a position of extremism which, in this very disassociated & atomized society, leads him to a self-aggrandizing ideology due a complete lack of any kind of functional social scape. With no discernible way forward, he looks back to old constructs to try to enable the life he wants to make for himself & others who identify with him. My point being, there are very definite material reasons that lead Harrison to this extreme position, even if he is ultimately wrong; he’s analogous id say to an Islamic insurgent than to something pseudo-fascist.
Idk, maybe this is a generous reading of it, but I feel like more substance is there than some of the other comments on here. And to be fair, you all read this when you were high school; not exactly the age range of analytical mastery.
But the state ideology isn't presented as having any merit at all at any point. What "equality" might mean or how a society might have reached this point are never really explored, nor is it made clear how the existing order benefits anyone, including the state. All the reader gets is a story about the most special boy in history born into an absurd world of pointless, arbitrary tortures.
It’s a short story, and an exceptionally short one at that; you’re doing more with less, and it’s necessary to attempt to unpack it with some good faith, especially considering that’s it Vonnegut. As for the pointless, arbitrary torture that upholds an order that isn’t really “beneficial” to the state beyond holding its power; well, idk how you can’t see the very apparent parallels between that and, well, modern nation states. The characterization of Harrison as “the most special boy in the world” is extremely dismissive & doesn’t consider what the character actually is in the context of the story, and dismisses the piece without analyzing it on its own terms. I reread the story last night; I really don’t see the anti-communism or anti-socialism element of it, it seems much more about power & ideology, and Vonnegut’s own attitudes reflect this. Thinking it’s not a very good short story? Fair enough, I’d agree to a considerable extent, personally I still like it.
to be clear, I think Vonnegut wrote the whole thing as a joke. I think it is a good short story, in that it's funny, and told in so blunt a manner that a critical reader can't take it at face value.
It's cool to read an analysis like this now, thanks for sharing. This kind of stuff is not my strong suit so it's cool to see from other people.
I remember reading it in school and just thinking it was really dumb. A decent amount of assigned stuff was anti-communism so it just blurred in. Vonnegut has done way better
Vonnegut has done way better
“The what?” The Money River, where the wealth of the nation flows. We were born on the banks of it. We can slurp from that mighty river to our hearts’ content. And we even take slurping lessons, so we can slurp more efficiently. “Slurping lessons?” From lawyers! From tax consultants! We’re born close enough to the river to drown ourselves and the next ten generations in wealth, simply using dippers and buckets. But we still hire the experts to teach us the use of aqueducts, dams, reservoirs, siphons, bucket brigades, and the Archimedes’ screw. And our teachers in turn become rich, and their children become buyers of lessons in slurping. “It’s still possible for an American to make a fortune on his own.” Sure — provided somebody tells him when he’s young enough that there is a Money River, that there’s nothing fair about it, that he had damn well better forget about hard work and the merit system and honesty and all that crap, and get to where the river is. ‘Go where the rich and powerful are,’ I’d tell him, ‘and learn their ways. They can be flattered and they can be scared. Please them enormously or scare them enormously, and one moonless night they will put their fingers to their lips, warning you not to make a sound. And they will lead you through the dark to the widest, deepest river of wealth ever known to man. You’ll be shown your place on the riverbank, and handed a bucket all your own. Slurp as much as you want, but try to keep the racket of your slurping down. A poor man might hear.’
I read it back in middle school and I had no idea what any of it meant. The description of all the handicap devices just seemed so outlandish to my middle school brain that none of it made sense.
Yeah I think they described the earbuds as seashells or something like that? Took me a while as a kid to figure out it wasn't literal seashells
"I have a. Idea, has anyone here read Flowers for Algernon?"
"You mean that story with the kid who's all covered in chains and in the end the kill him with a shotgun?"
"That's Harrison Bergeron."
"It's Hollywood Squares!"
"That's TOM Bergeron!"
"Brother of Menelaus!"
"THATS AGAMEMNON!"
What an incredibly stupid plot and unimaginably transparent propaganda. Do people fall for this?
that was the point of the story. it's a parody of Randian fiction about commie equalist dystopias.
the humor is a lot more obvious in the actual story than in the wikipedia summary
Oh my god I've only read the first paragraph and I could see a chud writer doing this bit unironically.
Who? Man in my day all we read was Mice and Men and Fault in our stars with random shitty short stories from the state text book peppered in between, what private schools y'all go to?
Yep, we came in one day to find a dozen boxes stacked against the wall, teacher was really into it, I thought it was corny and boring
I was very anti John Green in high school, but mostly just because I was going through a very obnoxious "not like other girls" phase. I thought I was so cool for reading thought provoking Ayn Rand instead of that fluffy tumblr romance shit :cringe:
DUDE I was just thinking about reading this story in like 9th grade today
