Lawler Literature: The Media on Fire

There you have it, Montag. It didn’t come from the government down. There was no dictum, no declaration, no censorship, to start with, no! Technology, mass exploitation, and minority pressure carried the trick, thank God. Today, thanks to them, you can stay happy all the time, you are allowed to read comics, the good old confessions, or trade journals. P. 58

So, the Supreme Court just recently ruled that the sale of violent video games to minors need not be restricted. Coincidentally, I just finished re-reading Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451. For those of you who have heard rumors about the book’s contents, rather than actually skimming through it, you may be surprised to learn Bradbury’s actual stance on censorship.

He was not, after all, advocating blanket protection for all mediums, no matter their profanity, offensiveness, and insipidity. In fact, the text is staunchly against mindless entertainment. In the above passage, It is mindless entertainment that replaces good books, thus necessitating that those good books burn. The public was allowed to keep comics, confessions, and trade journals, or anything that had more spectacle than substance. (That’s not to say that I think these formats lack substance, necessarily, today. At the time F451 was written they were each a bit more concerned with visual appeal.)

The point was to keep people happy, content, and unquestioning. Deep thoughts tend to make people unhappy, restless, and prone to question the validity of, say, international warfare. And so Montag’s version of the United States is perpetually involved in global excursions, with fighter jets streaming across the sky night and day.

Sound familiar?

The Supreme Court’s ruling is not a victory. It’s a distraction. Scalia claims that a ban on violent video games is a restriction on “ideas,” which the first amendment protects. Bullshit. Violent video games aren’t ideas, they’re images. Often, they’re meant to discourage ideas, to induce thoughtlessness.

I’m not against video games. I thoroughly enjoy them, in fact. But it’s just too much to decidedly sanction an activity where young kids can watch themselves virtually beat a prostitute or ram over a pedestrian.

As the passage points out, effective censorship comes from below, not from above. Scalia and company can’t really enforce such measures, Not really. They can slap a label on an extreme game, but that’s about it. True censorship would involve forbidding the manufacture of them in the first place. I’m not endorsing that either, but simply reveling in the pointlessness of the Supreme Court’s involvement. The best action, I think, would be to introduce a wide variety of quality alternatives. Americans vote with their wallet, after all.