Long ago, when I was still in grade school, I took an interest in Kurt Vonnegut and read a number of his books and short stories. Recently, while thinking of the equality mandate that is such an important part of feminist dogma, I remembered one story from the Welcome to the Monkey House collection of Vonnegut’s short stories. Although I couldn’t remember the name, I knew it was in that particular book, so I went and bought a used copy in the local University District.
After flipping through the pages for a while, I found the story I was thinking of, and it is titled Harrison Bergeron. Written in 1961 and first published in the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, it describes America in the year 2081, after a number of constitutional amendments mandating equality had been ratified.
The story opens with this paragraph:
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.
It is noteworthy that Vonnegut wrote the story several years before equality was mandated by law in the Civil Rights Bill, which demanded preferential hiring based not on ability, but on sex or ethnicity. He wrote it years before the push for the Equal Rights Amendment, and decades before workplace discrimination lawsuits and the equal pay movement really began to take off.
Although Harrison Bergeron is not high literature in the same manner as, say, Hemingway’s The Snows of Kilimanjaro (another good read for men), it contains in its few pages of text the originality and appreciation of the absurd that characterizes Vonnegut’s writing. The Handicapper General is a shotgun-wielding, presumably butch woman named Diana Moon Glampers, intelligent people are forced to wear earpieces that transmit alarming and annoying noises, strong people must wear bags filled with birdshot, and television announcers all have speech impediments. It is a ludicrous dystopia ruled over by a fanatical matriarch who ruthlessly enforces equality of outcome.
Harrison, the protagonist, is a superlative youth, gifted with extreme intelligence, athletic prowess and good looks. His handicaps are therefore so severe that he is a walking freak, bedecked with sheet metal, headphones, glasses designed to give him headaches and hideous makeup. Arrested by the “H-G men” at the age of 14 for his superiority, Harrison eventually breaks out of jail and seizes a TV station, proclaiming himself emperor. He rips off his handicaps, then removes the handicaps from a ballerina who is dancing on stage, and the two launch into an incredible, passionate display of art and athleticism, which is cut short when Diana Moon Glampers herself arrives on the scene and blows them away mid-leap with a 10-gauge shotgun.
Although the story obviously wasn’t intended as a prediction of the future, it is interesting to see that even fifty years ago Vonnegut saw the trend that has resulted in something like a Handicapper General Office in the United States, and in most other Western countries. It’s also worth noting that in Vonnegut’s time the American concept of “equality” was still widely understood to mean legal and spiritual equality rather than exact equality in all things, which was still a foreign concept largely cherished by Marxists. However, he correctly saw that the meaning was shifting, and the old concept of equality was beginning to give way to the new. Today, the process is largely complete, so whenever you hear someone talking about “equality” they don’t mean legal or spiritual equality, but sameness in one measure or another.
Although one should always be careful about attaching too much importance to semantics, it seems that the shift in the interpretation of equality has been of profound significance in the West. Because the old sense of equality, in which we are all equal before the law, conflicts in many ways with sameness, achieving the new version of “equality” often requires the suspension of the old, so today we find ourselves less equal before a judge – perhaps the contemporary version of an H-G man – than we were fifty years ago when Vonnegut wrote his story.
Perhaps we should start referring to the modern, feminist version of equality simply as “sameness,” because there’s nothing equal about a system that handicaps some people to make them the same as others.
