Ignorance Is Fatal

Ignorance is Fatal Imagine you are reading your favorite book, and suddenly it burns, flaming, eventually curls into a crisp, and turns to dust, right in your hands. You would feel horrible, right, scared even? Well that is exactly how Stendahl felt in The Martian Chronicles, a compilation of short science fiction stories by Ray Bradbury. Bradbury demonstrates his rage towards Government politics which lead to the banning and burning of books by tell a story about a man, by the name of William Stendahl, who is also outraged by the acts of the Moral Climates Committee. In the story “Usher II”, William Stendahl, a very wealthy man, collected many books of fantasy and horror. All fifty thousand books in his library were burnt to the ground by the Moral Climates, a government group that enforced a censorship law. This censorship law caused Stendahl to move to Mars thirty years later, where he could freely read, write, and create art in any manner, but then the Moral Climates came to Mars as well, and started enforcing the censorship law once again. Bradbury’s thoughts on censorship in the 1950’s are portrayed in the story of “Usher II” where Mr. Stendahl shows his outrage at the ignorant actions of the government by taking revenge on all of those who encourage the censorship of great works of literature and art. Mr. Stendahl is angry at the Moral Climates Committee, showing how Bradbury is outraged at the banning and burning of books by the government. Stendahl enjoyed fantasy books and the thoughts of imagination it gave him, but that all had to end when the atomic war started. The Government decided that free thought and imagination was a waste of time because of the start of the atomic war, so they started to ban and burn book as well as control cartoons and films. People are too busy thinking about what will bring of the atomic war to notice that their books are being destroyed and imagination being controlled. ‘“They passed a law. Oh it started very small,”’