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Granger's speech to Montag at the end of Fahrenheit 451:
" 'There was a silly damn bird called a phoenix back before Christ, every few hundred years he built a pyre and burnt himself up. He must have been first cousin to Man. But every time he burnt himself up he sprang out of the ashes, he got himself born all over again. And it looks like we're doing the same thing, over and over, but we've got one damn thing the phoenix never had. We know the damn silly thing we just did. We know all the damn silly things we've done for a thousand years and as long as we know that and always have it around where we can see it, someday we'll stop making the goddamn funeral pyres and jumping in the middle of them. We pick up a few more people that remember every generation.'
He took the pan off the fire and let the bacon cool and they ate it, slowly, thoughtfully.
'Now, let's get on upstream,' said Granger. 'And hold onto one thought: You're not important. You're not anything. Someday the load we're carrying with us may help someone. But even when we had the books on hand, a long time ago, we didn't use what we got out of them. We went right on insulting the dead. We went right on spitting in the graves of all the poor ones who died before us. We're going to meet a lot of lonely people in the next week and the next month and the next year. And when they ask us what we're doing, you can say, We're remembering. That's where we'll win out in the long run. And someday we'll remember so much that we'll build the biggest goddamn steamshovel in history and dig the biggest grave of all time and shove war in and cover it up. Come on now, we're going to go build a mirror factory first and put out nothing but mirrors for the next year and take a long look in them.' "
I finally got around to reading F451 last week, and I thought this speech was just a brilliant way to drive the point of the book home: Information doesn't matter unless you use it, and a government with an uninformed populous can do pretty much whatever they want. Any dictatorship that survives for any period of time at all does so by controlling the flow of information. If a government is able to control what people know, it can then control how they think by manipulating what they know so that they can convince the population to fall in line with whatever the government has planned. When this time comes, it's up to the people that "remember", as Bradbury put it, to set the record straight whenever and wherever possible.
And this is why we're here.
A :toast: to all of DU. :)
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