Fahrenheit 451 is “not about censorship,” said Ray Bradbury last week.
“It’s about the moronic influence of popular culture through local TV news and the proliferation of giant screens and the bombardment of factoids. All the popular programs on TV, the competition programs, they don’t give you anything but factoids… We’ve moved into this period of history that I described in Fahrenheit 50 years ago.” In other words, it’s like a grimmer version of Mike Judge‘s Idiocracy, which is itself similar to the classic Cyril Kornbluth short story “The Marching Morons,” and not like The Crucible the way your junior high English teacher inisted.
(Embedded version of the video pinched from Raw Story, because it’s handier than the one on Bradbury’s website.)