Growing up, Ray Bradbury’s Farenheit 451 was a seminal novel for me–less for the book itself than for the concept, namely a world where everyone is so afraid of differing points of view and knowledge in general that they resorted to destroying it as close to the wellspring as possible.

And that wellspring are books.  Destroy them, you destroy  links to our past, and potentially control the future.

Luckily we don’t live in a society where scientifically-verifiable truths are demonized and people are sedated into complacency by thousands of channels of television, right?

Bread and circuses, indeed