More than 50 years after NPR and PBS first hit the airwaves, the two public broadcasters with hundreds of member stations face millions in budget cuts after Republican senators voted to claw back previously appropriated funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB), which funds public media like NPR and PBS.
The House cleared the measure after midnight Friday, sending it to President Donald Trump for his signature.
Republicans have framed the spending cuts bill as part of an effort to target purported “waste, fraud and abuse” in government-funded programs. GOP lawmakers have accused NPR and PBS of having a liberal bias, and in March, Republicans claimed that they were “anti-American airwaves.”
Fahrenheit 451 is probably my most read book, but then again I grew up in a house where there was a Bradbury book laying around almost always within arms reach. I’ve always said when Bradbury writes, it’s almost poetry, and creates that pacing like where you say the internal audio speeds up and slows down. Of what I’ve called the “dystopian trilogy” of 1984, Brave New World and Fahrenheit 451, it seems that one is the least read and I feel is definitely one more people should read because it really looks less on the government and more on the people themselves… and it’s frankly frightening.
But, I feel often Bradbury was an optimist. Unlike many, while Fahrenheit 451 is one of the dystopian novels, it does have hope written into it as well.
Complete aside, my dad was a firefighter, and as I said, I was raised on Bradbury due to him. There’s an artist who made clay dragons, many were incense burners. I saw one where it’s a dragon reading a book, and the incense would come out from its nostrils and pour over the book. I said I’d need to get one for my dad that had Fahrenheit 451 as the book, the artist hadn’t read it before. The next week she had read it, and made one of these dragons where it’s wearing a fire helmet with the 451 on the shield, and the book he’s reading is Dante’s Inferno, and instead of the smoke coming from the nostrils, the hole is hidden by the book so the pages would look like they’re smoking. She caught the feeling of the book with that one, so that’s one of those that has been most prominently on display at my dad’s house since I got it.