The shape of satire is circular; what a satire mocks can never be shown as improving because satire’s aim is to expose, ridicule, and thereby correct, similar folly in reality. Nothing changes in Gulliver’s Travels or Candide because Swift and Voltaire want us to change and the world to change. Fine satire can devastate its object. I just finished watching 2081, The Moving Picture Institute’s film of Kurt Vonnegut’s short story “Harrison Bergeron.” Vonnegut imagines a world in which the familiar “progressive” goals of “equity” and “social justice” and “self-esteem” have been achieved . . . with a vengeance. Vonnegut’s 2000-word reductio begins
The year was 2081, and everybody was finally equal. They weren't only equal before God and the law. They were equal every which way. Nobody was smarter than anybody else. Nobody was better looking than anybody else. Nobody was stronger or quicker than anybody else. All this equality was due to the 211th, 212th, and 213th Amendments to the Constitution, and to the unceasing vigilance of agents of the United States Handicapper General. Equality of opportunity has become equality of outcome. Strong people (and ballerinas) must wear weights; handsome people must wear masks; smart people must wear radios in their ears which shriek every few seconds “to keep people . . . from taking unfair advantage of their brains.”
Screenwriter/Director Chandler Tuttle and Producer Thor Halvorssen have created a tight, well-cast, well-acted, 25 minute visualization of what Richard Bernstein called “the dictatorship of virtue.” I give the film an enthusiastic thumbs-up.
Image: Public Domain
