What Do Firemen Do?

Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury depicts firemen burning books. It is what they do. In a story that is disconcerting for those of us who believe in the right of freedom to read, MSNBC reports that firefighters are being trained by Homeland Security in the USA in a test program. They are being trained to look for illegal materials and report people who may be "hostile, uncooperative or expressing hate or discontent with the United States."

While law enforcement officials have stringent rules that control their access to private property, fire fighters have access in order to make inspections for the purposes of preventing fires. The ACLU is concerned about the implications of this program with regard to first amendment issues.

According to New York City Fire Chief Salvatore Cassano, information related to terrorism has been passed on from firefighters to law enforcement since the program began three years ago.

It would be interesting to see what kind of information officials are collecting that they believe relates to terrorism and to what degree one needs to be "discontent" before one is reported to the government.

This would be great fodder for a dystopian novel. Oh, wait....

MTV Movies Blog reports that Tom Hanks is showing great interest in starring as Guy Montag, the “fireman” in Fahrenheit 451.

Mourning the Passing of A Great Author

Newspapers around the world yesterday reported the death of writer Kurt Vonnegut at the age of 84.

His books such as Cat's Cradle, Breakfast of Champions, and Slaughterhouse-Five faced many challenges over the years, likely for their dark, satiric humour.

The Columbus Dispatch describes his novels as "classics of the American counterculture" and go on to compare his humour to that of Mark Twain.

Like Mark Twain, Vonnegut used humor to tackle the basic questions of human existence: Why are we in this world? Is there a presiding figure to make sense of all this, a god who in the end, despite making people suffer, wishes them well?
He also shared with Twain a profound pessimism.

He was the author of 14 novels and wrote in other genres as well.

His experience of the fire bombing of Dresden during the war was the basis of Slaughterhouse-Five, which was published in 1969, just as America was experiencing the war in Vietnam, racial unrest, and other social upheaval. It struck a chord with American society. The author became a cult hero when Slaughterhouse-Five became a best seller. It was challenged in schools and public libraries for its violence, sexual content and rough language. Vonnegut took on censorship as an active member of the PEN writers' aid group and the American Civil Liberties Union.

Boing Boing offers a podcast of the very first reading of Breakfast of Champions by the author.

A number of people who are signed up for the "Banned Book Challenge" are moving the order of their books or adding a Kurt Vonnegut book to their list, in honour of his passing.

A leaf from George Orwell's "1984?"

That is Joe Crankshaw's assessment of the Miami-Dade School Board's decision to remove "Vamos a Cuba" ("A Visit to Cuba") from their school district's libraries (along with 24 other titles depicting life in other countries).

Crankshaw identifies the anti-Castro political agenda that has cause the removal of this book and warns of the long-term consequences of this kind of thinking.

Now the battle against Castro is being waged on the field of ideas, and the methods being used mirror the straitjacket control of thought in Communist countries. In other words, the champions of democracy and free thought don't want it for any view but their own. The risk is they could become dictators just like Castro.

Yesterday, according to a Reuters report, a federal court judge the ban lifted. The American Civil Liberties Union filed a suit against the Miami-Dade School Board on June 21, 2006. The ACLU says this marks the first major battle over book censorship by a US public school system since 1982.

Lawyers for the ACLU do not dispute critics’ claims that the book, with its pictures of smiling children, fails to depict many aspects of life in Cuba. But they argued at a hearing in Judge Gold’s courtroom last Friday that the book and its content were appropriate for its target audience of children aged 5 to 7.

U.S. District Judge Alan S. Gold ordered the book returned to libraries until a final ruling is made. According to Gold,

The only books in contention in this case are library books, books that are by their nature optional rather than required reading. By totally banning the Cuba books and the rest of the series, the school board is in fact prohibiting even the voluntary consideration of the themes contained in the books by students at their leisure. This goes to the heart of the First Amendment issue.

The ACLU argued that the book ban violated the First Amendment of the US Constitution, which guarantees freedom of speech, and defied a US law prohibiting censorship.