Strange World: The Radical Rhetoric of Greta Thunberg
[A version of this piece was published by Green Left on 8 January, 2020.]
On Friday, 20 August, 2018, rather than go to school, Greta Thunberg sat outside Swedish parliament to protest inaction on climate change. The then-fifteen-year-old school student had with her some flyers, and a handpainted wooden sign that read: “Skolstrejk för klimatet” (school strike for the climate). On the first day of her strike, she sat alone, but news of her protest quickly spread via social media. On the second day, others joined her, and so began a youth-led protest movement comprised of millions around the world who have taken to the streets to demand a liveable future.1
If Thunberg’s act of civil disobedience attracted considerable interest, her gifts as a public communicator, evident in numerous speeches given in the intervening months, have merely served to magnify her spotlight. These speeches were gathered and published last May as No One Is Too Small to Make a Difference. In late 2019, the book was reissued in expanded editions 2019 to include speeches delivered by Thunberg between May and September.
Much of Thunberg’s activism involves pointing out what, in the midst of Australia’s nightmarish bushfire season, is now horrifyingly apparent: climate change is not merely happening but is a genuine global emergency requiring unprecedented action. Obstructing urgent progress, she points out, is widespread ignorance of the extent of the crisis. Beginning with our politicians and the media, this ignorance spreads, infecting the populace.
Although we are witnessing its effects all around us, however, Thunberg observes that “there are no headlines, no emergency meetings, no breaking news” regarding climate change itself. “No one is acting as if we were in a crisis.”2 We need to take immediate action to end greenhouse gas emissions by shifting to renewable energy sources. The emission curve, she explains, is the only thing that matters.
And the curve only continues to rise.3
António Guterres, the secretary-general of the United Nations, has deemed climate change “a direct existential threat” and “the defining issue of our time.”4 The Paris Agreement, an international treaty forming part of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, was established in 2016, under which countries pledged to keep the rise in global average temperatures “well below 2°C” while “pursuing efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels.”5
Achieving the 1.5 degree target is critical, as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) says doing so “would reduce challenging impacts on ecosystems, human health and well-being.” However, this “would require rapid, far-reaching and unprecedented changes in all aspects of society,” with “the next few years [being] probably the most important in our history.”6
We have already surpassed 1 degree of warming.7 Yet, much of the world is embarked upon a business-as-usual trajectory, with few if any countries having so far demonstrated a readiness to undertake the unprecedented, transformative changes required to secure a safe and liveable future.8
Confronting climate change therefore means recognising, as Thunberg does, that the world’s political and economic systems seem utterly incapable of solving the very crisis they have helped create. “You [politicians] … are only interested in solutions that will enable you to carry on like before,” she writes. “And those answers don’t exist any more. Because you did not act in time.”9
Thunberg prefers to define herself as a realist rather than a radical10 and resists the perception that she is political: “This is not a political text” the book’s opening speech proclaims.11 Her reluctance to be thought of in such terms is perhaps in part strategic. Her critics, eager to divert attention away from meaningful issues, characterise her as exploited, indoctrinated, and compromised by vested interests.
Eschewing labels and sticking to the science presumably allows Thunberg to safeguard her sense of independence, making it harder for others to dismiss her message as ideologically motivated. “Many people love to spread rumours saying that I have people ‘behind me’ or that I’m being ‘paid’ or ‘used’ to do what I’m doing,” she writes. “But there is no one ‘behind’ me except for myself.”12
And unlike politicians who are desperate to “talk about almost anything except for the climate crisis,” the science itself is at the heart of her message. “We [young activists] don’t have any other manifestos or demands—you unite behind the science, that is our demand.”13 (This point was emphasised when, after addressing the United States Congress in September, 2019, Thunberg submitted into the record a report from the IPCC in lieu of her own testimony.14)
Yet, when one considers the implications of what “unit[ing] behind the science” means for our political and economic systems, to be a realist in a time of crisis requires a willingness to consider radical alternatives. “[O]ur current economics,” she notes, “are still totally dependent on burning fossil fuels, and thereby destroying ecosystems in order to create everlasting economic growth.”15
Responsibility therefore largely rests not with the populace at large but with the corporations and the politicians who work in their interests. “[S]omeone is to blame,” she insists. “Some people—some companies and some decision-makers in particular—have known exactly what priceless values they are sacrificing to continue making unimaginable amounts of money.”16
The cause is of the crisis, in other words, is neither corruption nor aberration; rather, it is our political and economic systems running precisely as intended. “We live in a strange world,” she reflects, “where no one dares to look beyond the current political systems even though it’s clear that the answers we seek will not be found within the politics of today.” She concludes, therefore, that “maybe we should change the system itself.”17 To achieve this, Thunberg advocates “civil disobedience” tactics and “grassroots” social change.18 “It’s time to rebel,” she declares.19
In the chapter ‘I’m Too Young to Do This,’ Thunberg explains that idea of a student school strike came from phone meetings with other activists, facilitated by Bo Thorén from the group Fossil Free Dalsland. During these discussions, Thorén suggested a student strike, an idea inspired by US students who refused to return to school in the aftermath of a 2018 shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High. Thunberg liked it, but the rest of the group favoured other ideas.20 “So I went on planning the school strike all by myself,” she writes, “and after that I didn’t participate in any more meetings.”21
In a tweet, meteorologist Martin Hedberg confirmed Thunberg’s account. “I participated in a phone-meeting with Greta, Bo and others in June 2018. After a while Greta concluded: ‘You are not radical enough. I have to do something myself.’ [A]nd then she hung up. She went on to do her thing, her way.”22
In speeches added to the book’s expanded editions, Thunberg emphasises the global carbon budget, which estimates the amount of fossil fuels the world can potentially consume before we breach the threshold of 1.5 degrees of warming. Citing “chapter 2, on page 108 of the SR15 IPCC report,” she notes that at current rates of consumption, we will have exhausted that budget in scarcely over eight years.23 “No other current challenge can match the importance of establishing a wide, public awareness and understanding of our our rapidly disappearing carbon budget, that should and must become our new global currency and the very heart of our future and present economics.”24
The activist, who has Asperger syndrome, believes the condition has motivated much of her work, explaining that “since I am not that good at socializing I did this instead.”25 Likewise, she believes the condition to be key in her ability to accurately assess the existential threat posed by climate change: because Thunberg sees things as “black and white,” she avoids the cognitive dissonance and doublethink necessary to be passive and complicit within a toxic system. “[T]he rest of the people … keep saying that climate change is an existential threat and the most important issue of all,” she writes. “And yet they just carry on like before.”26
Thunberg is one of the truthtellers of our age, whose use stark binary terms evokes the urgency of our times. “If the emissions have to stop, then we must stop the emissions. To me that is black or white. There are no grey areas when it comes to survival. Either we go on as a civilization or we don’t.”27
Her role role to wrest us from our collective slumber and to awaken us to the horrifying realworld consequences of endless consumption and exploitation. “I have a dream,” she declares, invoking Martin Luther King Jr. (whom she mentions by name).28
“In fact I have many dreams. But … [t]his is not the time and place for dreams. This is the moment in history when we need to be wide awake.… And yet, wherever I go I seem to be surrounded by fairytales. Business leaders, elected officials all across the political spectrum [are] spending their time telling bedtime stories that soothe us, that make us go back to sleep.… It’s time to face the reality, the facts, the science.”29
It is sadly predictable—and a testament to the topsy-turvy nature of our times—that someone so clearsighted should be regularly denounced as a tool of propaganda.30 In 2018, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, an organisation that assesses existential risk, set their metaphorical Doomsday Clock to two minutes to midnight.31 It was the nearest the clock had been set to midnight since a single previous occasion in 1953: the peak of the Cold War.32
Branding the times in which we live as the ‘new abnormal,’ the Bulletin cited, in addition to two major existential threats—the climate crisis and the proliferation of nuclear weapons—an emerging third threat: the “ongoing and intentional corruption of the information environment,” or the spread of propaganda by way of ‘fake news’ and ‘alternative facts,’ which has undermined our capacity for rational discourse.33
Last month, citing a further deterioration in these areas, the Bulletin advanced the clock further still: to 100 seconds to midnight.34
In August, 2019, the Sun Herald columnist Andrew Bolt wrote a tawdry attack piece in which he referenced Thunberg’s mental health, calling her “deeply disturbed” and likening her to a cult leader.35
“Where are the adults?” she tweeted in response.36
A similar question was recently on the mind of the dissident intellectual Noam Chomsky as he pondered, in an interview, this “scandalous” state of affairs in which the fight for a survivable future has been left largely to teenagers. “It’s literally the case that this generation is going to have to determine whether organised human society persists,” he said. “Where’s the rest of us?”37
[The expanded edition of No One Is Too Small to Make a Difference is available in both illustrated and non-illustrated formats. Greta Thunberg’s next book, Our House Is on Fire: Scenes of a Family and a Planet in Crisis is a memoir, cowritten with her family; it will be published in English in March.]
1 The “millions” figure comes from estimates of numbers at global protests in March and September of 2019. See Damian Carrington, ‘School Climate Strikes: 1.4 Million People Took Part, Say Campaigners,’ The Guardian, 19 March, 2019; Matthew Taylor, Jonathan Watts, and John Bartlett, ‘Climate Crisis: 6 Million People Join Latest Wave of Global Protests,’ The Guardian, 28 September, 2019.
2 Greta Thunberg, No One Is Too Small to Make a Difference, United Kingdom: Allen Lane, 2019, page 19.
3 Ibid., page 85.
4‘Secretary-General’s Remarks on Climate Change [As Delivered],’ United Nations, 10 September, 2018.
5‘Summary for Policymakers of IPCC Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5°C Approved by Governments,’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, 8 October, 2018.
6 Ibid.
7 Myles Allen et al., ‘Frequently Asked Questions,’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, 2015.
9 Thunberg, No One Is Too Small to Make a Difference, page 87.
10‘Interview mit Greta Thunberg: “Ich bin Realistin. Ich sehe Fakten.”’ ARD, 31 March, 2019; Sarah Kaplan and Brady Dennis, ‘Teen Activist Greta Thunberg Takes Her Youth Climate Campaign to Washington,’ The Washington Post, 14 September, 2019; Greta Thunberg, tweet, 12 December, 2019, 12:16 PM.
11 Thunberg, No One Is Too Small to Make a Difference, page 10.
12 Ibid.
13 Ibid., page 54.
14 Somini Sengupta, ‘Greta Thunberg, on Tour in America, Offers an Unvarnished View,’ The New York Times, 18 September, 2019.
15 Thunberg, No One Is Too Small to Make a Difference, page 86.
16 Ibid., page 35.
17 Ibid., pages 28, 64.
18 Ibid., pages 21, 136.
19 Ibid., page 21.
20 Ibid., pages 45–46; Wesley Lowery, ‘He Survived the Florida School Shooting. He Vows Not to Return to Classes until Gun Laws Change,’ The Washington Post, 19 February, 2018.
21 Thunberg, No One Is Too Small to Make a Difference, pages 45–46.
22 Martin Hedberg, tweet, 3 February, 2019, 4:13 AM.
23 Joeri Rogelj et al., ‘Mitigation Pathways Compatible with 1.5°C in the Context of Sustainable Development,’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, 2018, page 108; Thunberg, No One Is Too Small to Make a Difference, page 120.
24 Ibid., page 39.
25 Ibid., page 48.
26 Ibid., page 18.
27 Ibid.
28 Ibid., pages 117, 122.
29 Ibid., pages 117–118.
30 See for instance Dinesh D’Souza, tweet, 22 September, 2019, 12:04 PM; Sebastian Gorka, tweet, 23 September, 6:04 PM; Daniel Lee, ‘Greta Thunberg and Samantha Smith: Propaganda Poster Girls,’ National Review, 2 October, 2019.
31‘It Is Now 2 Minutes to Midnight,’ The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, 25 January, 2018.
32‘Timeline,’ The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, accessed 9 February, 2020.
33‘Press Release—Welcome to “The New Abnormal,”’ The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, 24 January, 2019.
34‘Closer than Ever: It Is 100 Seconds to Midnight,’ The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, 23 January, 2020.
35 Andrew Bolt, ‘The Disturbing Secret to the Cult of Greta Thunberg,’ The Sun-Herald, 1 August, 2019.
36 Greta Thunberg, tweet, 1 August, 2019.
37 Noam Chomsky, ‘8.0,’ YouTube, uploaded by Thomas Pogge, 4 November, 2019.
United States, 2081 AD. Amendments to the US Constitution have brought about widespread equality, to the exclusion of no one. That venerated phrase of the 1776 Declaration of Independence declaring that “all men are created equal” has been enacted literally, enforced by the tyrannical Handicapper General and her agents. The society that emerges is an absurdist dystopia whose denizens are hobbled via inconvenient and unwieldy contraptions. Radio earpieces emit shrieking tones to restrict extraneous thought, athletes and dancers stagger beneath sash weights and bags of birdshot, and masks and prosthetics render attractive people hideous, so that no single person might take advantage of their innate intelligence, strength, agility, or beauty.
Meanwhile, George and Hazel Bergeron are at home watching TV, when the broadcast is interrupted by a news bulletin revealing that Harrison, their fourteen-year-old son, has escaped from gaol, where he had been held on suspicion of plotting against the government. “He is a genius and an athlete, is under-handicapped, and should be regarded as extremely dangerous”, the announcer warns. Just then, Harrison himself bursts into the studio and hijacks the broadcast, attempting to stage a coup. Unquestionably, it’s high-farce satire, dripping with irony. Rather more contestable is what it is, exactly, that Vonnegut is satirising.
Most predominantly, ‘Harrison Bergeron’ has been read as ridiculing an excessive desire for equality, describing a project of egalitarianism taken to certain extremities. Strangely, this has led to the story, by an ostensibly socialist writer, becoming widely celebrated amongst conservatives. It was, for instance, a favourite of William F. Buckley, who re-published it in National Review—allegedly mistaking the writer for a fellow conservative,i he declared Vonnegut “one of the handful of genuinely great writers of science fiction”.ii
Through a centre-right lens, by parodying egalitarianism, Vonnegut’s story likewise parodies, by extension, modern liberal and leftist politics,iii out of which egalitarianism has emerged a central tenet.iv In the society of ‘Harrison Bergeron’, the pursuit of equality has arguably been taken to its logical conclusion, with the Handicapper General, Diana Moon Glampers, serving as a despotic figurehead for leftist overreach, backed by state power and her own propensity for violent force. ‘Harrison Bergeron’ would therefore seem to be a prophetic warning of where societal trends are taking us, and it’s been widely cited as such (by journalists, lawyers, and even a Supreme Court justice).v
A second reading, in direct opposition to the first, posits Vonnegut as in fact parodying that very same equality-gone-too-far worldview outlined above, constructing an absurd strawman of egalitarianism in order to mock conservative paranoia. Accordingly, the wider interpretation of ‘Harrison Bergeron’ has made it into an example of Poe’s law, which holds that extreme parody, when not overtly identified as such by its author, will inevitably be misconstrued as genuine belief.vi Darryl Hattenhauer, a scholar arguing for such a reading, claims that the 1961 short story satirises Cold War-era hysteria surrounding communism and socialism. In support, Hattenhauer points to Vonnegut’s personal politics, as espoused in speeches, interviews, and throughout his written work. “If ‘Harrison Bergeron’ is a satire against the Left”, says Hattenhauer, “then it is inconsistent with the rest of Vonnegut’s […] oeuvre.”vii
But the best evidence for this interpretation comes from the text itself. If Diana Moon Glampers is the story’s villain, what are we to make of its titular hero—Nietzschean Übermenschviii and embodiment of the resistance—whose grand entrance elevates the story, literally, to new heights of absurdity? Fourteen years old and seven feet tall, Harrison Bergeron rends the TV-studio door off its hinges and tears apart his shackles with the ease of Godzilla. “I am the Emperor!”, he declares, “a greater ruler than any man who ever lived! Now watch me become what I can become!”ix Selecting himself a ballerina for an empress, the couple dance, soaring sylphlike into the air where they find themselves suspended in space, having transcended Newtonian laws entirely. At which point, Glampers bursts in with a shotgun and blasts them dead.
The scene’s so overdone, in other words, that it’s difficult to take anything about it at face value. And so grandiose a figure is Harrison—one hardly less dictatorial than Glampers herselfx—that it’s hard not to read the suddenness with which he’s dispensed as a violent rejection of his being any genuine Randian saviour.xi “Critics have missed the object of this text’s satire because they miss the irony of the narration”, says Hattenhauer. “They do not recognise the narration as unreliable. (Given what we know about the author [and his politics], the narrator cannot be the authorial delegate.) […] Perhaps such critics […] are interpellated into the very ideology that the text satirizes.”xii
It’s useful at this point to distinguish between different notions pertaining to equality. Generally speaking, the ideal espoused within liberalism is ‘equality of opportunity’,xiii which isn’t opposed to social hierarchy as such, so long as individuals are free to compete for their place within its ranks and can do so on equal terms with others (as opposed to—in the case of a caste system—being assigned a place at birth).xiv But many critics of egalitarianism fear that what’s actually being proposed—or what inevitably occurs in practice—are forms of ‘equality of outcome’, which equalise “where people end up rather than where or how they begin”.xv (The story’s mode of egalitarianism is ‘equality of outcome’ taken to extremesxvi—a kind of compulsory equality arrived at “by delimiting positive qualities rather than ameliorating shortcomings”.xvii) And to be fair to said critics, equality of outcome is a metric sometimes used to assess the extent to which equality of opportunity might exist—a crude metric at that, since it relies on inference (a lack of diversity among staff at a particular workplace might strongly suggest, but doesn’t necessarily prove, biases within the hiring process).xviii And when there’s talk of targets and quotas in order to redress some of these disparities, warning bells start ringing, and it can all start to feel a bit like ‘Harrison Bergeron’, to some.
Nonetheless, “the object of Vonnegut’s satire is not all leveling [processes]”, argues Hattenhauer. “Rather, the object of his satire is the popular misunderstanding of what leveling and equality entail.”xix Hattenhauer proceeds to cite a letter he received from Vonnegut in 2000, which he uses to establish that the character with whom the writer most identifies isn’t Harrison Bergeron, but Diana Moon Glampers.xx “I can’t be sure, but there is a possibility that my story ‘Harrison Bergeron’ is about the envy and self-pity I felt in an over-achievers’ high school in Indianapolis quite a while ago now”, reads the excerpt. “Some people never tame those emotions. John Wilkes Booth and Lee Harvey Oswald and Mark David Chapman come to mind. ‘Handicapper Generals,’1 if you like.”xxii
As Hattenhauer would have it, Vonnegut’s apparent identification with Glampers constitutes a form of sympathy for the character and, in turn, her ideological purpose.xxiii He asserts, moreover, that in order to get the story published in popular magazines of the day, Vonnegut had to disguise its politics. “Just as Twain could not have sold Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Pudd’nhead Wilson if their sympathy with African-American characters had been obvious, so Vonnegut could not have sold a story overtly sympathetic to leveling.”xxiv Here, it all gets a bit tenuous. Yes, student-aged Kurt Vonnegut might’ve shared Glampers’ envy of overachievers, but it doesn’t follow that Vonnegut the adult writer remained sympathetic to his earlier tendencies, nor Glampers’ leveling agenda. I don’t know what else Vonnegut might’ve expressed within the full letter, but the excerpt suggests that if the story warns about anything, it’s about becoming like Glampers by letting antisocial and destructive feelings run amok (hence his invocation of Booth, Oswald, and Chapman). And to the extent that he admits a likeness between himself and Glampers, I think Vonnegut is being self-depreciating, making light of his youthful preoccupations.
Indeed, in an unpublished letter to the Lawrence Journal-World from 2005, Vonnegut appears to endorse the rather more traditional interpretation of his story, and to warn against individuals like Glampers. “My story mocks the idea of legally eliminating envy by outlawing excellence”, he writes. “May I say to those who know my story, which ends in the execution of an enviably gifted student by a Handicapper General: We have always had Handicapper Generals among us, empowered by envy….”xxv We shouldn’t take this statement as the final word on the matter—he was bothered, at the time he wrote it, with an article the newspaper had run and may have been simplifying the story’s themes to make a point—and it certainly doesn’t refute that there appears to be various layers of irony at play within the work. But it remains the most explicit statement I’ve encountered by Vonnegut regarding authorial intent.
However, Vonnegut’s equivocating in the earlier letter (to Hattenhauer) seems meaningful, too. That he “can’t be sure” what the story’s about, and can only entertain “a possibility”, suggests that his creative instincts are at least partly influenced by unconscious choices, as Hattenhauer acknowledges.xxvi
Aaron Rabinowitz, a philosopher-in-residence at Rutgers University, thinks there’s strong textual support to make the case that ‘Harrison Bergeron’ ultimately parodies rightwing attitudes, but believes the story to be multifaceted. “[It] is like one of those really good pieces of art where you can debate the meaning and the interpretation”, he says.
“The reason that [Vonnegut is] so effective at the satire, I think, is partly because he’s sincere about his fear of government-enforced uniformity. He is a socialist but he is a wild-hippy socialist. And [in] a lot of his stories, I think he is critical of the idea that you would limit people’s freedom of expression in various ways.”xxvii
Similarly, Benjamin Reed, a writer and English professor at Texas State University, draws from a biography of Vonnegut by Charles L. Shields in order to argue that Vonnegut—though he publically advocated socialism and tends to be claimed by leftists as a fellow radical—was in fact a more complicated and reactionary thinker than is widely acknowledged, which contradictions allowed Vonnegut to astutely reconstruct the ideological polarities existing within society at the time of the Cold War.xxviii Regarding the political purpose behind ‘Harrison Bergeron’, Reed warns, therefore, against “too heavily adducing Vonnegut’s personal beliefs to clarify his intentions”.xxix Instead, he draws our attention to the story’s structure, noting that ‘Harrison Bergeron’ is bookended by scenes of George and Hazel watching TV. “In one sense, that’s the whole story. Fade in: George and Hazel watch television. Blackout. There is no change of physicality, no jumping forward or backward in time. The drama of Harrison and the ballerinas and the Handicapper General exist within the Bergerons’ TV set, as a play within a play.”xxx Through this structure, according to Reed, Vonnegut critiques the “Randian allegory” that plays out on TV by situating it within an “anti-Randian morality tale” comprising the wider story.xxxi
Reed, who proceeds to sideline partisan politics altogether, hereby introduces another interpretation of the story—‘Harrison Bergeron’ as a satire about the consumption of mass media in the American home. The mid 1950s had seen television become a fixture of most North-American households,xxxii replacing books and magazines as the dominant mode of entertainment, effectively costing Vonnegut his job as a freelance short-story writer for popular magazines.xxxiii “Vonnegut, ever concerned with weapons of mass destruction, had found one in nearly every living room in America”.xxxiv
The handicapping of denizens is, for Reed, a sardonic metaphor for the cognitive decline wrought by televisual mass media, its effects observable “upon society at every level—the family, the nation, and human civilization”.xxxv In the current era of portable devices, perpetual connectivity, and endless streaming, the story, read in this way, is more pertinent than ever.xxxvi Beneath the high farce and hilarity runs a terrible undercurrent of sadness and loss. The final moments are a portrait of two parents, following the broadcast of their son’s execution, alone in their living room. George, returning from the kitchen with a beer, asks Hazel why she’s been crying. “I forget”, she says vaguely. “Something real sad on television.”xxxvii
That such a short, sparse story can yield a number of conflicting-yet-plausible interpretations suggests something of the talent behind its creation. Some time ago, I borrowed Vonnegut’s novel Mother Night (1961) from the library, but, even though I liked its themes, it somehow failed to resonate with me. I picked up another by him later—Cat’s Cradle (1963), I think—only to abandon it partway through. The very funny ‘Harrison Bergeron’, though, has renewed my faith in Vonnegut.
Read 19 September, 2018. Reread 1 February, 2019.
1 [sic]? I recently had the pleasure of meeting Aaron Rabinowitz, co-host of the podcast Philosophers in Space, an episode of which was the impetus behind my reading the Vonnegut story and subsequently writing this post.xxi I mentioned it to him, the post, which he was later generous enough to read. He wondered if perhaps the plural form of ‘Handicapper General’ ought to be rendered ‘Handicappers General’ (as in ‘attorneys general’ or ‘governors general’) rather than ‘Handicapper Generals’. Perhaps so. In any case, the phrasing is Vonnegut’s own, so I’ve retained left it as is. [Endnote added 3 September, 2019.]
i William F. Buckley, in John J. Miller, ‘The Many-Sided Sci-Fi Master’, National Review, 16 October, 2017.
ii Jerome Klinkowitz, Vonnegut in Fact—The Public Spokesmanship of Personal Fiction, United States—The University of South Carolina Press, 1998, page 15.
iii Darryl Hattenhauer, ‘The Politics of Kurt Vonnegut’s “Harrison Bergeron”’, Studies in Short Fiction, volume 25, number 4, fall, 1998 / Kevin D. Williamson, ‘Inching toward “Harrison Bergeron”’, National Review, 7 May, 2015.
iv Gerald Gaus, Shane D. Courtland, and David Schmidtz, ‘Liberalism’, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, edited by Edward N. Zalta, 22 January, 2018 / ‘Left’, The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Politics and International Relations, fourth edition, edited by Garrett Brown, Iain McLean, and Alistair McMillan, United Kingdom—Oxford University Press, 2018 / Andrew Reeve, ‘Liberalism’, The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Politics and International Relations.
v See, for instance, Peter Ferrera and Stephen Moore, ‘The Poverty of Equality’, The American Spectator, volume 45, number 3, April, 2012, pages 26–30 / Scott Rothschild, ‘Vonnegut—Lawyers Could Use a Literary Lesson’, Lawrence Journal-World, 5 May, 2005 / ‘PGA Tour, Inc. v. Martin’, 532 US 661, Supreme Court of the United States, 29 May, 2001, page 706 / Williamson, ‘Inching toward “Harrison Bergeron”’.
vi Aaron Rabinowitz and Thomas Smith, ‘0G23—Harrison Bergeron and Equality of Outcome’, Philosophers in Space (podcast), 19 September, 2018 / Tomberry, ‘Poe’s Law’, Know Your Meme, 22 November, 2017.
vii Hattenhauer, ‘The Politics of Kurt Vonnegut’s “Harrison Bergeron”’, pages 387–388.
viii Rabinowitz and Smith, ‘0G23—Harrison Bergeron and Equality of Outcome’ / Benjamin Reed, ‘Technologies of Instant Amnesia—Teaching Kurt Vonnegut’s “Harrison Bergeron” to the Millennial Generation’, Teaching American Literature—A Journal of Theory and Practice, volume 8, number 1, spring, 2015, pages 56–57.
ix Kurt Vonnegut, ‘Harrison Bergeron’, Welcome to the Monkey House (1968) / Palm Sunday—An Autobiographical Collage (1981), United Kingdom—Vintage, 1994, page 11. (emphasis in original).
x Hattenhauer, ‘The Politics of Kurt Vonnegut’s “Harrison Bergeron”’, page 391.
xi Rabinowitz and Smith, ‘0G23—Harrison Bergeron and Equality of Outcome’ / Reed, ‘Technologies of Instant Amnesia’, pages 56–57.
xii Hattenhauer, ‘The Politics of Kurt Vonnegut’s “Harrison Bergeron”’, page 392.
xiii Terence Ball et al., ‘Liberalism’, Encyclopædia Britannica, 21 January, 2019.
xiv Richard Arneson, ‘Equality of Opportunity’, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, edited by Edward N. Zalta, 25 March, 2015.
xv Anne Phillips, ‘Defending Equality of Outcome’, The Journal of Political Philosophy, volume 12, number 1, March, 2004, page 1.
xvi Rabinowitz and Smith, ‘0G23—Harrison Bergeron and Equality of Outcome’ / Reed, ‘Technologies of Instant Amnesia’, page 59.
xvii Reed, ‘Technologies of Instant Amnesia’, page 55.
xviii Rabinowitz and Smith, ‘0G23—Harrison Bergeron and Equality of Outcome’.
xix Hattenhauer, ‘The Politics of Kurt Vonnegut’s “Harrison Bergeron”’, page 387.
xx Ibid., page 388.
xxi Rabinowitz and Smith, ‘0G23—Harrison Bergeron and Equality of Outcome’.
xxii Kurt Vonnegut, letter to Darryl Hattenhauer, 23 October, 2000, in Hattenhauer, ‘The Politics of Kurt Vonnegut’s “Harrison Bergeron”’, page 388.
xxiii Hattenhauer, ‘The Politics of Kurt Vonnegut’s “Harrison Bergeron”’, page 387.
xxiv Ibid., pages 388–389.
xxv Kurt Vonnegut, unpublished letter to the editor of the Lawrence Journal-World, 12 May, 2005, in Tristan L. Duncan, ‘(Handi-)Capping Equality and Excellence—The Unconstitutionality of Spending Caps on Public Education’, The Urban Lawyer, volume 45, number 1, winter, 2013, page 183, note 2, and page 202, note 81.
xxvi Rabinowitz and Smith, ‘0G23—Harrison Bergeron and Equality of Outcome’.
xxvii Ibid.
xxviii ‘Benjamin Reed—Teaching ‘“Harrison Bergeron”’, The Daily Vonnegut, 2 June, 2017 / Reed, ‘Technologies of Instant Amnesia’, pages 53–55.
xxix Reed, ‘Technologies of Instant Amnesia’, page 53.
xxx Ibid., page 58.
xxxi Ibid., page 56 (emphasis in original).
xxxii Robert J. Thompson and Steve Allen, ‘Television in the United States’, Encyclopædia Britannica, 18 October, 2017.