This is not a lament. It is an encouragement. You’ll see.
In my unpublished novel FUTURITY, the main character (a gamer and physics student) learns to time travel into the future. His desire is to eventually jump forward to witness the most technologically advanced time that humans on earth will ever experience. In that future, he experiences the fulfillment of much of what we see the seeds of today. Technological immersion. Everywhere-present messaging. A recyclable world so temporary and throw-away that nothing is permanent. There is no solid ground, no anchor, everything is unmoored. No one knows anything and everyone is certain. FUTURITY may never be published because, although it is still quite prescient, much of the technology I prophesied in the story over ten years ago has already begun to be implemented.
In my bestselling novel PENNSYLVANIA, this immersive messaging and technological baptism takes place inside one’s head via a chip implant. In order to make the meta/AI world seamless and inoffensive, everyone is perennially on a drug called Q that smooths the “uncanny valley” and permits this ubiquitous messaging to bypass our natural defenses. The average person spends most of his waking life staring into space, high and entertained but useless other than as a consumer.
We are now a functionally illiterate people. Or, should I say, we are a people who do not read anything other than manufactured fake news and gossip. Today, most of what anyone reads (including this piece) is produced within 48 hours of when it will be consumed. JIT (Just in Time) production has moved beyond the factory and the grocery store and now describes our information diet.
Any facts in this column will be instantly fact-check using online encyclopedias that are purified daily by an army of book burners and gossips.
People read, but they mostly read memes, blurbs, soundbites, and bite-sized propaganda pieces. (They are certainly not reading this, and if you are… let me know.) And, those that do read long-form materials are self-segregated into samethink ghettos where the characters are all dogmatically pure and inoffensive. All of the old stories are being canceled. History is being bleached and cleaned and all the old myths and legends are being lined up against the wall and shot.
Once upon a time (a cool way to start a story) even people that couldn’t read would have been considered “well read” compared to today. Some stories and books were cultural guidestones and landmarks. Elements from Tom Sawyer, Moby Dick, Huckleberry Finn, The Old Man and the Sea, Anne of Green Gables, and the Bible were part of the universal lexicon. If someone said that your life was “a Horatio Alger story,” it meant that you were a rags-to-riches success. I’m sure some woke do-gooder will write in or comment to tell me that Horatio Alger was very likely a pedophile child molester because they just learned that on Wikipedia. And maybe he was. But that’s exactly the point. 99.9% of you don’t even know who Horatio Alger was when you started this article, or that his books (regardless of his predilections) inspired millions of the poor to improve their own lives and the lives of others. Once upon a time, we didn’t connect the author’s sins to their unrelated works. At one point in history, Alger was one of the most read authors in the world. So was Mark Twain, who is now considered by some to be an inexcusable racist and just plain mean. Steinbeck was a bad husband who forced his wife to have an abortion. Hemingway was a misogynist abuser. Tolstoy was an anarchist. T.S. Eliot was antisemitic. Mary Shelley was a homewrecking serial adulterer. William S. Burroughs murdered his wife when he tried to shoot an apple off of her head.
You get the point. According to today’s ethics, David raped Bathsheba and killed his ten thousands. Imminently cancellable. He also wrote most of the Psalms.
All of that is to say that back then we read books and ignored the authors. Today we obsess with the gossip of people’s lives, and we don’t read. Every day we grow more stupid.
In 1915, YouTube and Netflix consisted of your uncle or sister standing up in the parlor and reading from Tarzan of the Apes. Your sister or uncle didn’t pick up the idea that Burroughs was a racist and a supporter of eugenics from the story. They didn’t have Wikipedia to tell them that. The purifiers of our national memory – the fact checkers and misinformation correctors, the Karenati, and the book burners had yet to find access to your parlor.
In the first half of the 1900s, cigar rollers (torcedors) in the factories of Havana were read classic novels while they rolled cigars. A professional “lectura,” a reader, would read them entire works of classic literature… from works of ancient history to classic English and Russian novels, even Romeo and Juliet and The Count of Montecristo, etc. (Romeo y Julieta and Montecristo became famous Cuban brands.) For mostly illiterate factory workers, the cigar rollers of Havana were the most literarily literate factory workers in the world. The lecturas were paid by the workers out of their own pay. Later, after Castro, the literary novels disappeared and instead, the lecturas (now paid by the state) read from Cuban newspapers, propaganda treatises, comic books, and baseball scores from English language papers. IQs and functional intelligence plummeted. Even later, up to our own time, the lecturas generally would read romance novels and cheap love stories, but every factory has different tastes.
I said this wasn’t a lament but an encouragement. If you want to know things that the people who don’t want you to know things don’t want you to know, read books. Read them to your children. Get them to read too. And don’t only read them infantile books targeted to their age. This is a downward spiral that will handcuff them to the intellectual entropy of our age.
Light an intellectual fire. Your enemies are lighting one to virtually burn books and eradicate your history. Most of you will go along with it, but you don’t have to.
Go to the bookstore this week. The actual, physical bookstore.
Tell them I sent you.
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Michael Bunker is a local columnist for BrownwoodNews.com whose columns appear periodically on the website.
