In the slides, I brought up Justice Antonin Scalia’s use of “Harrison Bergeron” in a dissenting Supreme Court opinion. Vonnegut is among the most quotable of 20th-century authors in English, dispensing quips, aphorisms, and confusing proverbs about the modern human condition. His genius is for simple, compressed phrasing that exposes depths of contradiction, joy, pain, or confusion:
Here’s an example: “One of the few good things about modern times: If you die horribly on television, you will not have died in vain. You will have entertained us.”
How is this quotation relevant either to “Harrison Bergeron” or “Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow”? How do these stories see television and its social impact?
Or, if you prefer, how does the quotation shed light on an actual and widely televised death that “entertained us” in recent years? Perhaps some of the truth(s) in Vonnegut’s comment are proven by how often we see people dying on our screens.
While I agree that the quote works for both of the stories, I think the ideas of the fleetingness of television and death as a form of entertainment are more apparent in Harrison Bergerson. His death is showy, surreal, and sudden, the way it was described felt like a plot twist in a daytime drama. Then he is quickly forgotten, which shows that his death is meaningless and can’t affect change. I also think there is a level of helplessness that is present in the story. The characters seem unhappy in the story, given that Hazel cries at her son’s death. If she truly fit in society she would be angry that he stripped himself of all his handicaps. Even if she feels sad for her son she is unable to remember long enough to think about his death. Much like how television show death now, tragic things happen, but very little happens or can be done to fix the issue and eventually people move on forgetting the incident. To have it all take place on television also critiques what gets shown to us on media. They could have stopped Harrison Bergrson from being on the air, but showing it allows for something entertaining to happen. I also think showing it reaffirms the power that society has over people. As it shows what is right and wrong and who is meant to die.
The quote given to us above is relevant to both the “Harrison Bergeron” reading as well as the “Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow” reading. In the Harrison Bergeron reading, television seems to be a form of entertainment, but people are censored into what they can understand given the handicaps that people are given due to their intelligence. This is further displayed when Harrison, their son, appears on national television in an attempt to overthrow the emperor. Both Hazel and George see their son get shot, Hazel starts crying, but with the handicap on George’s intelligence, both seem to forget quickly about the situation. People try and envision what life would be like without the handicaps given to them, but quickly forget about them. This is connected to the quote given to us since it seems like the death displayed here was just an “alternate reality” and seem to not actually digest the meaning and things that are displayed in media. Similarly, in the “Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow” reading, because everyone does not have to worry about “death” and “disease”, it seems that everyone continues to fight against one another within the family, with no purpose to better society as a whole. Days are just spent in front of a television, where the Grandpa frequently states that the same things have happened over and over again and mindlessly looking for a form of entertainment.
In a similar vein, celebrating the deaths of celebrities and those on television just seem like a way to pass time and a way for people to be entertained, just as Vonnegut’s quote mentions. Celebrity deaths almost seem to be a medium for media outlets to report and get broadcasting viewers to watch their channel. It almost seems that through examples such as broadcasting celebrity deaths, media and television is giving a false reality into things that are actually going on. It may be best to just rely on reading books in the future for information that is accurate and reliable.
As Ben Barry analyzed, the quote here is much more directly related to “Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow” than it is to “Harrison Bergeron”. The chaos that ensues after Gramps leaves his will to the extensive family is broadcast to 500,000,000 “delighted viewers” as a sort of reality TV program. The scene, with the flying vase and the fighting of the different generations, certainly seems to me like something that would appear on “Keeping Up with the Kardashians”, serving to give people some sort of alternative life to follow on the recurring TV episodes. Vonnegut plays with this idea to the extreme as he presents the McGarveys as a never-ending serial series on its 29,121st chapter. Though the show is hundreds of years old, it still entertains Gramps as if time stands completely still, functioning as something to do with your time once you’ve lived as long as he has.
The death and two-and-a-half-hour televised memorial service for Michael Jackson came immediately to my mind when I read this quote for the first time. The “king of pop” had a career and death riddled with various controversies. His death was certainly quite “horrible”, as he overdosed in his bedroom at age 51. However, the huge and widely-broadcast memorial service, complete with speeches from various famous musicians, was a celebration of his life and served to entertain the world in a positive light – a distinct contrast when juxtaposed with his public image before death. In Michael Jackson’s case, as with many other musicians such as Biggie Smalls and 2Pac, the publicity of the death seems to overshadow the socially ubiquitous controversy of celebrity life. Is this an inherently “good” or positive property of television and mass media? Does it help see the positives of someone’s life while avoiding the shadows? Does it hide important problematic parts of a celebrity’s life in their glorification? Are there negative impacts of this? I think about these questions all the time!
The quote “One of the few good things about modern times: If you die horribly on television, you will not have died in vain. You will have entertained us” is especially relevant in Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow with Gramps, the 172 year old man who is still alive. In an era where overpopulation is prevalent and Gramps’ family is crammed into a living space, his family members want him to die so they can all get their share of the will. Lou, Em, and Mortimer are very concerned with Gramps’ impending death as they want his possessions. With no meaning to their life, Gramps’ family is strictly entertained by when he will die and what happens to the property. Gramps’ family did not care about what happened to him when he left, just what they would receive now. It was a madhouse when they could not figure out what was for who in his will. At the same time, Gramps’ impending death entertains himself because he is able to have people waiting on his every need in order to keep their place in the will, so it works both ways. He has power and control along with personal entertainment all because of what will happen after he dies. Another example of people finding entertainment in death is when basketball player Kobe Bryant died. Some people did not really care that he suffered a terrible fate in a helicopter crash, but were more concerned with trying to find a video of the crash. They wanted to see exactly how he died. This directly relates to the quote about deaths entertaining people in modern times.
I would like to touch upon a tv death that has not occurred (and may never occur), namely the Queen of England. In several ways she represents the same head of family as Gramps Schwartz. Poor Prince Charles has been waiting for years for her to die, so he can inherit, and the extended royal family courts her favors on a regular basis so much so that almost every aspect of that family’s life needs approval from the Queen herself. The recent revelations by Meghan Markle show how far this iron fist extends.
Yet in imagining her TV death/funeral, I would be strongly surprised if anything negative surfaces at all and can easily picture her being heralded as a generational symbol and the end of a bygone era. These national figures and their deaths become a coming together moment for all people that transcend our communities as we grief a figure who we’ve read about and seen for so long yet never really knew. In my eyes these rare occurrences show the nobility and sorrow of death that is missing from most TV deaths and are poignant exceptions to the rule.
This quotation is relevant to both “Harrison Bergeron” and “Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow”, in that it exposes how we consume media. That is, consuming media does not necessarily mean you consume the information presented to you. That is why a subject like death entertains us because as we see it in television it is simply an unfortunate event. In a similar fashion, the death that we read about in both short stories is simply an event that occurs. So at surface level, these events are consumed at a very superficial level, that is, we know that death is unavoidable. As a result of this, we do not think about the implications of death. At least when thought of in this way, “Harrison Bergeron” touches on a similar notion, albeit with equality. At face value, most people want equality, but what does a world in which equality has been achieved look like? We can always reciprocate a superficial response which is no more an action of regurgitating what we have consumed, but when thinking about this question, how would one answer? “Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow” is similar, but asks a different question–if you had the choice of not dying would you do it? Again, we can regurgitate media that attempts to answer this question, but then what is the point of that?
This quote seems to argue that television trivializes events, like death. However, I think that it does more than that, I think that part of the cynicism of this quote is trying to answer why we do not put more thought into the information we consume.