Ray Bradbury

Southern Illinoisan, June 19, 2012

When Ray Bradbury died on June 5 at age 91, America not only lost one of its most popular authors of the last century, but also one of its most perceptive social critics. In a career that spanned seventy years, Bradbury wrote nearly a dozen novels and hundreds of short stories—largely science fiction and fantasy—that consistently challenged America's dominant political pieties and the comfortable assumptions of consumer culture.

Bradbury began publishing his work in the early 1940s in such journals as Weird Tales and Planet Stories. As he reached his peak in the late 1940s and early 1950s, American politics was dominated by the Cold War and a widespread fear of communism. Dissenting voices increasingly were driven out of mainstream discourse through political blacklists and the tactics of intimidation used by politicians like Joseph McCarthy.

Bradbury spoke out publicly against such political strategies, warning, "I have seen too many campaigns . . . won on the issue of fear itself, and not on the facts."

Bradbury's fiction, though, is steeped in fear. His characters constantly find themselves under siege by everything from totalitarian governments and alien invaders to the natural elements and newborn infants. But this theme was not a simple reflection of the official paranoia of Cold War policy, as Bradbury occasionally made his invaders benign travelers who fall victim to the lynch-mob mentality of paranoid Americans or by turning the tables and making Americans the aliens invading distant lands.

As a popular cultural artist, Bradbury largely escaped the notice of political witch-hunters, freeing him to articulate a more fundamental critique of American politics than those working in more respectable media. In the form of fantasy stories he could portray the effects of, for instance, nuclear war, racism or environmental destruction, topics most artists in this era were reluctant to discuss. In The Martian Chronicles (1950), he used allegorical tales to raise unsettling questions about U.S. foreign policy. At a time when U.S. dominance was spreading around the world, Bradbury depicted the consequences of the American colonization of Mars, which results in wiping out the indigenous population and then allowing commercial interests to despoil the environment.

In Fahrenheit 451 (1953), Bradbury portrayed a totalitarian society in which books are banned and a fireman's job is to burn contraband literature. The novel is a parable of the official repression of the McCarthy era and Bradbury devoted his life to speaking out against political censorship of any stripe. When, several decades later, someone suggested he revise The Martian Chronicles to include more female characters, Bradbury commented, "There is more than one way to burn a book."

But more fundamentally, Fahrenheit 451 reflects a broad-based critique of consumer culture. Bradbury's dystopia, in which the culture industry slowly crushes peoples' ability to think critically through a constant appeal to more physical desires, seems eerily familiar. People sit in their air-conditioned homes with small radios stuck in their ears or viewing real-time police chases on wall-size televisions. Consumerism pervades every part of people's lives down to the piped-in commercial jingles in public places, leaving people no private space in which they can reflect in solitude.

The goal of this mass culture is the creation of a happy consciousness though the results are far different. Drug addiction and suicides are widespread. Meanwhile, the permanently militarized economy demands global U.S. influence so that Americans can maintain their material abundance. "I've heard rumors," one character says, "the world is starving but we're well fed. Is it true, the world works hard and we play? Is that why we're hated so much?"

As one defender of the state argues, "That's all we live for, isn't it? For pleasure, for titillation? And you must admit our culture provides plenty of those." But Bradbury insisted on the intellectual poverty and spiritual hollowness of such a society.

There is great irony, of course, in the fact that this indictment of mass consumer culture was made in the form of a science fiction novel, which was, at mid-century, a culturally disreputable branch of literature. But in an era of widespread political conformity, Bradbury articulated a critique that connected the imperatives of U.S. foreign policy with the threat of nuclear war, the legacy of racism, environmental spoliation, the growth of consumer culture, and the consequent loss of imagination.

And he managed to be a damn entertaining writer too.