Harrison Bergeron

It's crazy to think about.

We are talking about elements from Cat's Cradle, Player Piano, Happy Birthday, Wanda June, Harrison Bergeron, and Welcome to the Monkey House.

All in one thing.

All of them colliding in one narrative space.

Exactly.

If the '80s failed because of literalism, the '90s failed because of bloat, boredom, and a total misunderstanding of cinematic pacing.

Let's look at the 1995 Showtime TV movie adaptation of Harrison Bergeron.

Now, this is a fascinating failure of scope.

He would slough it off with a two or three-word diversion and be right into his practiced talking points, and it happened all night long.

A little bit of the story from the AP.

The first debate in Michigan's closely watched Senate race was combative between Rogers and, uh, Abdul El-Sayed.

They re- repeatedly traded personal attacks, talked over each other, mo- I would have to say El-Sayed is, is amazing at that.

Asked later if Iran or Israel posed a more dangerous threat, he called that a ridiculous question, attacked the questioner, of course, and said both of them have proven dangerous in their own way.

Another you-know-what question, or answer from El-Sayed.

After the debate, El-Sayed was asked why he wanted Rogers to answer for his association with Trump while being dismissive of questions about his association with Hasan Piker, an online commentator with a history of common, uh, controversial remarks, and he said, "That's a serious question?" El-Sayed retorted, "To equate the most powerful person in the world with a streamer in California seems to me to be...

I'm just not gonna use the word, but silly." Uh, this guy was practiced on that.

You know, it's like the-- e-except for that E, it's a palindrome wh-where, um, you know, it's like NATO is the reverse of Diane with an O at the center point where you can-- i-if you spin the word on that O, y-you get a, you get a spiral-shaped E in front of NATO, which, you know, is abstract enough, but the fact that that name in particular with its particular spelling is in the credits is fairly important because it's never a spoken name, which means it's a true thing at the heart of the character.

You know, she is the reverse of Diane, and we get no eyes, restrained point of view, Harrison Bergeron-style handicapping of Diane's force of will and strength maybe.

You know, like, what would happen? You know, all the death stares and the fuck yous are restrained.

But connections like Diane in later episodes wearing a Japanese-style robe are visually there connecting them, and the connection becomes explicit in the narrative there in part 17 when NATO is there, and suddenly the next time we see her, there's a redheaded version of Tulpa Diane in her place.

So when you say to yourself, who's the perfect rugby player? Razzy is going to take bits of people and put them all together in this.

It's kind of like Harrison Bergeron.

You know, Kurt Vonnegut is like this guy who's incredible.

And anyway, so here we go.

[laughs]

... uh, Harrison Bergeron for a clue.

How about this sentence?

What's this woman's name? Do you have her name in front of you?

It works as an into activity for any dystopian story that you might be teaching with your students, because pretty much every dystopian novel starts from the same concept, right? A society that claims to be perfect or at least orderly and safe, but is hiding something really dark underneath it.

So if you're teaching something like Harrison Bergeron or the City of Ember or Among the Hidden Hunger Games, Divergent, Animal Farm, right? Any of those big dystopian titles that show up in our middle school classrooms, this activity gets kids really thinking in exactly that right mindset before they start reading.

Right.

So it's less about the specific plot and more about that dystopian genre logic then.

I read The Giver.

Oh, you didn't? But I've taught Animal Farm.

I've taught Harrison Bergeron.

Yeah, I've taught a lot of this type of stuff.

... fairness is fairness, and some people are born very much more attractive than other people.

And when they are born more attractive, should we go like, uh, Kurt Vonnegut does in Harrison Bergeron and throw acid in their face and make them ugly? No.

No.

You know, not everyone has been dealt the same hand, and I'm going to go back to Teddy Roosevelt with you on this.

Teddy Roosevelt says, "If someone is belt- dealt a bad hand or he's dealt a hand and he doesn't know how to play it, that is his affair and his affair alone.

The role of the government is to make damn sure there's no crookedness in the dealings." Yeah, but the dream of this, and I wish all your viewers would read Harrison Bergeron, it's a short story by Kurt Vonnegut, when you try to equalize everyone.

Now, the, me being so good-looking as I am and so...

I mean, they take smart people, they put little drills in their head and have...