Ray Bradbury (Fahrenheit 451) speculated that books would someday disappear altogether in book burnings. Until the computer age there was no reason to think that would ever actually happen. Why would it? Even today a book offers advantages over computers and Kindles and the like, mainly its independence of electricity. It’s easily portable and not particularly fragile. It can survive being dropped on the floor or even a bathtub. No screen or battery is required. While storage can be a bit of a nuisance for those whose book collections number in the hundreds and thousands, shelves of tomes do add a feeling of solidity to a house or office.

Library at Trinity College, Dublin

Public domain photo by Marouh via Pixabay

But something else is going on related to books that reeks of the sinister.

With the advent of Google, people are gradually losing any sense of history. Kids are losing all ability to remember even basic information such as the multiplication tables or simple history such as when did the Great Depression occur. And in a sense, why should they? They can always google up whatever they need to know. How many miles is X kilometers? What is 22^o Celsius in Fahrenheit? No problem, and no need even for a computation, much less remembering the conversion equations.

But that convenience poses a real threat to liberty beyond mental laziness.

Without a book unalterably fixing history, those in charge at Google or Wiki can gradually rewrite history to show whatever they want it to show. Need more ethnics to make historic inventions? Simple. Attribute the discoveries of Jonas Salk to the ethnic of your choice, say, Al Sharpton. Cher Bono can become the inventor of relativity, Rigoberta Menchú’s great grampa the creator of the light bulb.

Everything bad that ever happened can be laid at Donald Trump’s feet, from slavery to nuking Japan. The few cranks who dispute it will be jeered at as conspiracy theorists on the authority of Wikipedia, where the ghosts of Winston Smith will have rewritten slavery into the middle 20th century and the Civil War into the early 21st.  The racist President Trump of the Confederate States of America will have ordered the nuking of Hiroshima and Nagasaki to provoke WWII in 2017.

We ain’t altogether there yet, but this is happening before our eyes, literally right in front of us. Just as Democrats are destroying evidence of election fraud, Winston Smiths are rewriting history online. Teachers are trained to use online references to teach without textbooks, pitching everything back into online reference resources which unfailingly lean hard Left. Who controls those resources controls what kids get taught.

From Bradbury to George Orwell to Aldous Huxley, the ugliest possibilities in canonical literature are coming alive before our eyes. We may never get completely away from books, but their centrality in education and in fixing history is already slip-sliding away on a base of Leftist slime.