{"id":3439,"date":"2012-06-10T15:19:17","date_gmt":"2012-06-10T22:19:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/index.php\/2012\/06\/individualist-451\/"},"modified":"2012-06-10T15:19:17","modified_gmt":"2012-06-10T22:19:17","slug":"individualist-451","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/2012\/06\/10\/individualist-451\/","title":{"rendered":"Individualist 451"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><em><a href=\"http:\/\/reason.com\/archives\/2012\/06\/08\/ray-bradbury-enemy-of-the-state\" target=\"_blank\">from Reason<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n<h1>Ray Bradbury: Enemy of the State<\/h1>\n<h2>Remembering the late science fiction writer<\/h2>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/reason.com\/people\/charles-c-johnson\/all\" target=\"_blank\">by Charles C. Johnson<\/a><\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/reason.com\/assets\/db\/13391866007503.jpg\" style=\"margin-top: 5px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 20px; margin-left: 20px; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-weight: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-size: 14px; font-family: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; display: block; float: right; border-width: 1px; border-color: #cccccc; border-style: solid; padding: 1px\" width=\"240\" height=\"146\" class=\"pic right\" \/>Ray Bradbury won\u2019t \u201clive forever,\u201d as he wished, but he may well live on as the most-read critic of the state in America\u2019s public schools. It was in public school that I first encountered Bradbury\u2019s magnum opus,\u00a0<em>Fahrenheit 451<\/em>, which is required reading in the government schools he would have shuttered.<\/p>\n<p>Bradbury, who died this week at the age of 91, was a man of the right, a detail sadly airbrushed out of most obituaries this week. Like the best science fiction writers, he imagined worlds and realms outside the grasp of government, where the focus was always on the people that populated them, not on the gizmos in their pockets.<\/p>\n<p>Libertarians can easily see one of their own in the non-comformist nonagenarian, who, despite moving to Los Angeles in the 1930s, never bothered to learn how to drive. A consummate autodidact, he also never went to college. And good thing too! He hated affirmative action, condemned \u201call this political correctness that\u2019s rampant on campuses,\u201d and called for an immediate ban of quotas in higher education. \u201cThe whole concept of higher education is negated,\u201d\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/www.raybradbury.com\/articles_playboy.html\" target=\"_blank\">he told<\/a>\u00a0<em>Playboy<\/em>\u00a0in 1996, \u201cunless the sole criterion used to determine if students qualify is the grades they score on standardized tests.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>But Bradbury\u2019s antipathy to formal education went deeper than passing controversies. He knew that educators, like politicians, are the natural enemies of dreamers. \u201cScience fiction acknowledges that we don\u2019t want to be lectured at, just shown enough so we can look it up ourselves,\u201d he continued in that<em>Playboy<\/em>\u00a0interview. His can-do optimism recalled the small Illinois town his family left, ultimately finding its place in his fiction even if it was set on distant worlds, which he longed to explore and colonize. For Bradbury, it was the politicians who \u201chave no romance in their hearts or dreams in their heads\u201d that ultimately kept America earthbound. And Bradbury, who grew up on the romantic fiction of Hugo, had romance and love to share, penning some 27 novels and 600 short stories.<\/p>\n<p>[ <a href=\"http:\/\/reason.com\/archives\/2012\/06\/08\/ray-bradbury-enemy-of-the-state\" target=\"_blank\">click to continue reading at Reason.com<\/a> ]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>from Reason Ray Bradbury: Enemy of the State Remembering the late science fiction writer by Charles C. Johnson Ray Bradbury won\u2019t \u201clive forever,\u201d as he wished, but he may well live on as the most-read critic of the state in America\u2019s public schools. It was in public school that I first encountered Bradbury\u2019s magnum opus,\u00a0Fahrenheit [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":26,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3439","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-literary-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3439","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/26"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3439"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3439\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3439"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3439"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3439"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}