I hate the poorly educated...

 ...when they insist on electing one another.

There's a halfwit running for governor of Missouri on a promise to burn books outside the governor's mansion if it's the only way to protect children from "vulgar pornographic material."  It's not clear what set him off, probably The Diary of Anne Frank again.  If his flamethrower is out of gas, he is also open to bulldozing or "launching books into outer space," which is certainly creative.  (The flamethrower may displace the AR-15 as America's National Weapon, depending on how high Biden drives the price of gasoline.) 

 

Book burning is nothing new, Gott weiss, but its mainstreaming marks a new phase in American barbarism.  We know what we mean by Orwellian and Kafkaesque -- perhaps we need a new word:  Bradburian, and not only for the destruction of books and what they represent.  In Fahrenheit 451 Ray Bradbury posited a future where firemen would start fires instead of putting them out.  Look where we are seventy years later.  In Texas (and other places), teachers who want to keep their jobs are required to promote ignorance of history, of sexuality, of science.  In Florida (and other places), public health officials encourage sickness by telling people to refuse vaccines and spurn masks during a continuing pandemic.  A way of structuring the world has been upended, hollowed out.  I wonder if this trend is too well-established to be reversed.

  

No one should be surprised when people chosen to govern refuse to do so, instead attacking the state itself like scavengers.  They are not revolutionaries.  They have no plans to build anything new in its place.  Nothing motivates them but rage.  This week we will see how well established they are.