We Are Burning Our Traditions and Great Works

Mandeville, LA – Exclusive Transcript – There was a guy that lived in the last century.  His name was Ray Bradbury, perhaps you heard of him.  He wrote about this.  He wrote about how what’s going to happen is these elites and ruling masters, here’s how they’re going to James Bond and take over the world, how they’re going to ram this thing down our throats and get away with it without having to shoot a solitary soul.  Here’s how they’re going to do it: they’re going to burn the books.  They figuratively have burned the books.  You say, “Come on, Mike, there are no book burnings.”  Oh, but there are.  I read to you now from Wayne Allensworth’s review of the life of Ray Bradbury in the last issue of Chronicles Magazine, basically his epitaph.  This will tie it all together.  Check out today’s transcript for the rest…

Begin Mike Church Show Transcript

Mike:  I started this exercise off about 25 minutes ago asking if anyone knew, and I gave some names, Dee Dee Myers, John Bolton, John Podesta.  They worked for the Clinton administration.  You would see your Ari Fleischers of the world, these people that you always see popping up on Fox News and CNN, MSNBC.  You see them popping up on CSPAN always dressed to the nines, all of them very wealthy, most of them wealthy beyond what you could ever imagine, and again, none of them working in private production ever, for the most part, ever.  How is that possible is how we started this exercise.

I have just demonstrated to you that we have created this edifice that consumes all of our wealth in what are supposed to be undeniable good things.  We all want to educate our children.  Did you want to go $16 trillion in the hole doing it?  [mocking] “We all want to protect our country, Mr. Church.  We have to protect our country.”  Did the protection of the country mean the bankrupting of it six times over?  I’m just saying.  [mocking] “We all want to have safe food to eat, Mr. Church.  You don’t want to eat salmonella chicken, do you?”  Did that mean that there had to be armies of people hired to study the salmonella bacteria and the containment of it?  This has to be a freaking dream.  It’s got to be a dream.  There’s no way anyone could ever get away with this, no way.  You could never perpetrate this scam, not as long as people were reading the great classic works.

That brings me to the final coda.  How did all this happen?  It happened because we’re too damn smart.  Actually, we’re pretty damn dumb, but we convince ourselves that we’re too damn smart, and we’re getting smarter every day because we have iPhones.  We’re getting smarter every day because we have apps.  Yeah, those apps make you real smart.  Here’s a challenge for you, tough guy.  Turn off your spellcheck on your app and see how well you do.  It used to be, for eons, that men created and had devoted themselves to carrying on certain traditions.  One of them was this literary tradition.  The literary tradition was handed down from generation to generation over thousands of years.  It is part and parcel of, if not the entire canon of, what we call Western civilization.  We’ve just eviscerated that.  We’re about to put the final nail in the coffin.

There was a guy that lived in the last century.  His name was Ray Bradbury, perhaps you heard of him.  He wrote about this.  He wrote about how what’s going to happen is these elites and ruling masters, here’s how they’re going to James Bond and take over the world, how they’re going to ram this thing down our throats and get away with it without having to shoot a solitary soul.  Here’s how they’re going to do it: they’re going to burn the books.  They figuratively have burned the books.  You say, “Come on, Mike, there are no book burnings.”  Oh, but there are.  I read to you now from Wayne Allensworth’s review of the life of Ray Bradbury in the last issue of Chronicles Magazine, basically his epitaph.  This will tie it all together.

So how did we get here?  How did we get $16 trillion in the hole?  How do we get to my news today that we have a $1.1 trillion budget deficit this year and no one seems to care about it?  How do we get to we have presidents that can drone on and cause loud cheers to erupt in a forum talking about something that was basically settled 3,000 years ago, that is how do you educate a young man or a child?  This isn’t a mystery here.  Please, give me a break.  Please, check out of the human race if you think it’s a mystery.  Yet, we’re going to have entire elections based on these silly things when these are basically parental responsibilities.  I digress.  I want to get to the meat and taters of how we got here, and Ray Bradbury can help show us that.  Wayne Allensworth writing in the last issue of Chronicles Magazine, a great magazine.  This is an epitaph for Ray Bradbury, Martian Chronicles, Fahrenheit 451, many other great short stories.

[reading]

Fahrenheit 451 is not so much a story about censorship imposed from above, but book burning (and willful destruction of memory) endorsed from below by a shallow majority that pacifies itself with the equivalent of reality TV and prescription medications.  As Paul A. Trout wrote in the April 1994 issue of Chronicles, in Bradbury’s novel aggrieved minorities [Mike: Listen to this.  Again, I’m going to tie all this full circle in a moment when this is completed.] abetted by a passive or indifferent majority, have pressed for the destruction of books, as the state strives to make everyone “happy”: “The people,” wrote Trout, “got what they wanted: a happy-faced culture in which nobody would have their exquisitely sensitive feelings offended by idea or word.”  Bradbury, in his reflection on Trout’s article (printed in that same issue), concluded that “I did not, 40 years ago, predict.  I observed tendencies or wrote doubts.  Today, there is no fear of book burners, only nonteachers and nonreaders, which means no need of books and so no burning.”  Books, and our heritage, are being “burned” by the technological world we have embraced (as well as degraded and altered by the aggrieved minorities Bradbury foresaw).  We are not so much the firemen of Fahrenheit 451 as the coarse space troopers of The Martian Chronicles, trashing the accumulated wisdom of an ancient civilization—in effect, paving over paradise to build a parking lot.

[end reading]

End Mike Church Show Transcript

ClintStroman

See Full Bio