He was never on any pedastal for me anyway…

Well this possibly explains why I never read Ray Bradbury after I was fifteen years old. By the time I was in tenth grade I’d already decided there was something not right there (I don’t recall what, since I’ve not read him since I was fifteen).

In an August 2001 interview with Salon, Bradbury said of George W. Bush, “He’s wonderful. We needed him. Clinton is a shithead and we’re glad to be rid of him.” In 2004, he became extremely upset over Michael Moore’s use of the title “Fahrenheit 9/11” and was quoted by Swedish interviewers as saying, “”Michael Moore is a screwed asshole …. He is a horrible human being.”

Bradbury also says we’ve never had a problem with censorship and that “Farenheit 451” wasn’t about censorship. Instead it was about television.

I think I once watched, in part, “Something Wicked This Way Comes”, on television and turned it off, reminded of why I didn’t care for Bradbury.


Posted

in

by

Tags:

Comments

8 responses to “He was never on any pedastal for me anyway…”

  1. Jennifer Avatar

    I’d sum it up in one word: dementia. Either that or the Venusians long ago took over Ray’s brain.

    Now that I think of it, Ray is probably in the top 1% of wage earners so I guess he did need George. Shithead Clinton probably didn’t give him enough tax breaks.

  2. gin Avatar
    gin

    Bully for you…..I never could stand him….never could figure out what they all saw in his writing…he fits right in with that ‘poor elbow’,Bush and his favorite nuts and their phony ‘win one in a day, a week at most” fantacies….I think Jennifer may have the answer….dememtia…or perhaps crapola linguistics syndrome

  3. Idyllopus Avatar

    Marty says dementia and crapola linguistics syndrome. I say just plain crapola linguistics syndrome.

  4. Moody834 Avatar

    So very sad. I read this bit the other day and just scratched my head in wistful amazement. When I was in my teens I met the man at a writers’ workshop. He was a jovial, kindly man, perfectly happy to talk and listen. It’s terribly sad to see what he’s come to, like with Bill Cosby. Then again, there is that little matter of his generation. Few and far between are the people who, rugged individualists that they must of necessity be, break free of the bonds of their particular time and place in the history of the world. Bradbury was never so bold, never so adventurous.

    Anyway, back to China Miéville’s The Scar. 😉

  5. Jonathan Versen Avatar

    PNH has an interesting discusssion of Bradbury’s comments here.

  6. Idyllopus Avatar

    Jonathan, thanks for the pointer.

    Moody, you met the man and I never have, so I don’t know. All I can say is there was something in his work that I found distinctly unappealing when I was young, and which I later thought to be (when watching some of it on television) peculiarly subversively conservative. Work that was purported to be one thing, and was sold as one thing, but was something else. Even cruel. And I must have had some strong feelings about this or else I wouldn’t have been so turned off by his work when so young, in such a way that though I continued to read sci fi for quite a while longer, I never wanted to try reading Bradbury again.

  7. Moody834 Avatar

    Oh… I wasn’t trying to defend the man. Really, it’s just weird how one can get one impression of a person and then find out just how off that impression ultimately was. I found his writing to be less than satisfying to me and I never did read much of what he wrote.

  8. Idyllopus Avatar

    The courts are filled with cases wherein at least one person had a very different impression of a person than what was discovered about them eventually. But in those cases it’s not just weird, it’s expensive. 🙂

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *