Tag Archives: Bernstein moment

Golly gee, Mr. B

I’ve already explained the concept of a Bernstein moment. Maybe what occurred to me the other day on the train home should be called a Bradbury moment.

It’s all because I recently re-read Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury’s novel about a future society in which books and reading are strictly forbidden, but the noisier forms of mass media are all but required. Bradbury’s chief target was television, then still becoming a household fixture when the novel was published in 1953, but his wrath also encompassed transistor radios, which he saw as creating a wall of noise to keep out the real world. Early in the book, the protagnist comes home and anticipates an empty evening with his vapid wife:


Trouble is, I was listening to my iPod when this scene occurred to me. I wasn’t wearing Seashells, but imagine the sport Bradbury could have had with the spectacle of people marching down the street with earbuds trailing wires like tendrils from potatoes left too long in the bag.

Does this make me one of the bad guys, Mr. B? Do I get any credit for listening to Melvyn Bragg on my iPod?

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