What's Better Than Book Burning?

 Facile Decensus Averno...

Easy is the descent down the stairway to Hell (but try getting back up!)

What's better than book burning? Well, it may be the closing of libraries, those quaint and ancient receptacles of books. Detroit is closing a good 6 of the useless things, and the budget balancers will probably be driving the inmates population out into the streets of winter... where that integration of Black Ink & White Paper will draw out the rest of their homeless lives, living under highway overpasses, warming their tomes by fires in barrels where every now and then one will nod off and inflame, letting the accumulated experience and knowledge of its soul become a gift of the Magi: a burning Incense to spread over the city, seeking to infiltrate every nook and cranny of that city like so many others which resisted its literate influence while it was alive and well.

However, there are eBooks and Kindles, the Gizmos of knowledge. These are dependent on the power grid infrastructure we still refuse to spend money on... and they are capable of outside influence and working like a fifth-column, betraying our interests and actions to a soulless technocracy which seeks to mine enormous data sets in order to locate us, inform on us, and to create temptations of desire within us... so we may spend more money on more gizmos. 

All electronic gizmos are subject to the Power of government and the Greed of business.
Therefore, in a society which does not control the impulses to Power and Greed, all electronic gizmos are subject to extremely rapid (and thereby de facto invisible) control and degradation.

The Gizmo-ization of Books is equivalent to delivering old man Guttenberg into the hands of the Inquisition.
It is the Ministry of Truth in 1984 where all things bright and beautiful will be edited by hacks and appartchiks.

You don't think so? Look at how the 1% run things now; when push comes to shove, will they love Books and Literacy far more than their own schemes and complots? (Or do you think they will conspire to increase literacy and welfare?)

Why is the greatest nation in the world (as it calls itself often) incapable of balancing budgets without destroying access to literacy for many of its people? (Some people cannot afford computers or other gizmos.)
It's Fahrenheit 451, man! Like I keep telling ya!
The things which will destroy us are not signs on the wall today; the destructive things are the evolution of nasty tendencies which we are now nursing at our breasts.
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