Monday, November 11, 2019

Kurt Vonnegut on this Day in History


This day in history: Writer Kurt Vonnegut was born on this day in 1922. My favorite work of his is Harrison Bergeron, a dystopian and prophetic short story about a society where everyone is fully equal and not allowed to be smarter, better-looking, or more physically able than anyone else. The Handicapper General enforces the equality laws, forcing citizens to wear "handicaps": masks for those who are too beautiful, loud radios that disrupt thoughts inside the ears of intelligent people, and heavy weights for the strong or athletic.

This is similar to another novel released a year earlier in 1960 called “Facial Justice” by L.P. Hartley about a society that has banished privilege and envy, to the extent that people will have their faces surgically altered in order to appear neither too beautiful nor too ugly.

Jordan Peterson reads Harrison Bergeron
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vvDYuj1Bs6Y

Read Harrison Bergeron
http://www.tnellen.com/cybereng/harrison.html

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