Katie Hines
11/1/2012
Block 4
Harrison Bergeron and Anthem
Harrison Bergeron
Kurt Vonnegut
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. This relates to Anthem because even in the first few
pages, Equality expresses how everyone must be the same, and it is a sin not to
be.
Some things about living still weren’t
quite right, though. April, for instance, still drove people crazy by not being
springtime. And it was in that clammy month that the H-G men took George and
Hazel Bergeron’s fourteen-year-old son, Harrison, away.
In Anthem, no parents were allowed to raise
their own children. Although they never got to meet these kids, it was still a
hard loss like this one.
It was tragic, all right, but George and Hazel couldn’t think about it
very hard. Hazel had a perfectly average intelligence, which meant she couldn’t
think about anything except in short bursts. And George, while his intelligence
was way above normal, had a little mental handicap radio in his ear. He was
required by law to wear it at all times. It was tuned to a government
transmitter. Every twenty seconds or so, the transmitter would send out some
sharp noise to keep people like George from taking unfair advantage of their
brains. Equality is
bright and intelligent, but he was assigned to
be a street sweeper rather than a scholar or leader, because the Council
did not want him to think too hard...
George and Hazel were watching television.
There were tears on Hazel’s cheeks, but she’d forgotten for the moment what
they were about.
On the television screen were ballerinas.
A buzzer sounded in George’s head. His thoughts fled in panic, like bandits
from a burglar alarm.
“That was a real pretty dance, that dance
they just did,” said Hazel.
“Huh?” said George.
“That dance—it was nice,” said Hazel.
“Yup,” said George. He tried to think a
little about the ballerinas. They weren’t really very good—no better than anybody
else would have been, anyway. They were burdened with sash weights and bags of
birdshot, and their faces were masked, so that no one, seeing a free and
graceful gesture or a pretty face, would feel like something the cat drug in.
George was toying with the vague notion that maybe dancers shouldn’t be
handicapped. Equality
begins to question why many of the rules and restrictions are in his world as
well. But he didn’t get
very far with it before another noise in his ear radio scattered his thoughts
George winced. So did two out of the eight ballerinas.
Hazel saw him wince. Having no mental
handicap herself, she had to ask George what the latest sound had been.
“Sounded like somebody hitting a milk bottle with a ball-peen hammer,” said
George.
“I’d think it would be real interesting, hearing all the different sounds,”
said Hazel, a little envious. “All the things they think up.”
“Um,” said George.
“Only, if I was Handicapper General, you
know what I would do?” said Hazel. Hazel, as a matter of fact, bore a strong
resemblance to the Handicapper General, a woman named Diana Moon Glampers. “If
I was Diana Moon Glampers,” said Hazel, “I’d have chimes on Sunday—just chimes.
Kind of in honor of religion.”
“I could think, if it was just chimes,”
said George.4
“Well—maybe make ’em real loud,” said
Hazel. “I think I’d make a good Handicapper General.”
“Good as anybody else,” said George.
“Who knows better’n I do what normal is?”
said Hazel.
“Right,” said George. He began to think
glimmeringly about his abnormal son who was now in jail, about Harrison, but a
twenty-one-gun salute in his headstopped that.
“Boy!” said Hazel, “that was a doozy, wasn’t it?”
It was such a doozy that George was white
and trembling, and tears stood on the rims of his red eyes. Two of the eight
ballerinas had collapsed to the studio floor and were holding their temples.
“All of a sudden you look so tired,” said Hazel. “Why don’t you stretch out on
the sofa, so’s you can rest your handicap bag on the pillows, honeybunch.” She
was referring to the forty-seven pounds of birdshot in a canvas bag which was
padlocked around George’s neck. “Go on and rest the bag for a little while,”
she said. “I don’t care if you’re not equal to me for a while.”
George weighed the bag with his hands. “I
don’t mind it,” he said. “I don’t notice it anymore. It’s just a part of me.”
“You been so tired lately—kind of wore
out,” said Hazel. “If there was just some way we could make a little hole in
the bottom of the bag, and just take out a few of them lead balls. Just a few.”
“Two years in prison and two thousand
dollars fine for every ball I took out,” said George. “I don’t call that a
bargain.” Like the Corrective
Facility in Anthem, there are fierce consequences for acting out.
“If you could just take a few out when you
came home from work,” said Hazel. “I mean—you don’t compete with anybody around
here. You just set around.”
“If I tried to get away with it,” said
George, “then other people’d get away with it—and pretty soon we’d be right
back to the Dark Ages again, with everybody competing against everybody else.
You wouldn’t like that, would you?” In
Anthem, the Dark Ages, or Unmentionable Times, referred to before this
revolution and change, and nobody seems to want it.
“I’d hate it,” said Hazel.
“There you are,” said George. “The minute
people start cheating on laws, what do you think happens to society?” If Hazel
hadn’t been able to come up with an answer to this question, George couldn’t
have supplied one. A siren was going off in his head.
“Reckon it’d fall all apart,” said Hazel.
“What would?” said George blankly.
“Society,” said Hazel uncertainly. “Wasn’t
that what you just said?”
“Who knows?” said George.
The television program was suddenly
interrupted for a news bulletin. It wasn’t clear at first as to what the
bulletin was about, since the announcer, like all announcers, had a serious
speech impediment. For about half a minute, and in a state of high excitement,
the announcer tried to say, “Ladies and gentlemen——”
He finally gave up, handed the bulletin to a
ballerina to read.
“That’s all right——” Hazel said of the announcer, “he tried. That’s the big
thing. He tried to do the best he could with what God gave him. He should get a
nice raise for trying so hard.”
“Ladies and gentlemen——” said the
ballerina, reading the bulletin. She must have been extraordinarily beautiful,
because the mask she wore was hideous. And it was easy to see that she was the
strongest and most graceful of all the dancers, for her handicap bags were as
big as those worn by two-hundred-pound men. Like the boy in the poem, the ballerina must suppress
her talent and creativity to please authority.
And she had to apologize at once for her
voice, which was a very unfair voice for a woman to use. Her voice was a warm,
luminous, timeless melody. “Excuse me——” she said, and she began again, making
her voice absolutely uncompetitive.
“Harrison Bergeron, age fourteen,” she said
in a grackle squawk, “has just escaped from jail, where he was held on
suspicion of plotting to overthrow the government. He is a genius and an
athlete, is under-handicapped, and should be regarded as extremely dangerous.”
A police photograph of Harrison Bergeron was flashed on the screen—upside down,
then sideways, upside down again, then right side up. The picture showed the
full length of Harrison against a background calibrated in feet and inches. He
was exactly seven feet tall.
The rest of Harrison's appearance was Halloween and hardware. Nobody had
ever born heavier handicaps. He had outgrown hindrances faster than the H-G men
could think them up. Instead of a little ear radio for a mental handicap, he
wore a tremendous pair of earphones, and spectacles with thick wavy lenses. The
spectacles were intended to make him not only half blind, but to give him
whanging headaches besides.
Scrap metal was hung all over him. Ordinarily, there was a certain
symmetry, a military neatness to the handicaps issued to strong people, but
Harrison looked like a walking junkyard. In the race of life, Harrison carried
three hundred pounds.
And to offset his good looks, the H-G men required that he wear at all
times a red rubber ball for a nose, keep his eyebrows shaved off, and cover his
even white teeth with black caps at snaggle-tooth random.
"If you see this boy," said the ballerina, "do not - I
repeat, do not - try to reason with him."
There was the shriek of a door being torn from its hinges.
Screams and barking cries of consternation came from the television set.
The photograph of Harrison Bergeron on the screen jumped again and again, as
though dancing to the tune of an earthquake.
George Bergeron correctly identified the earthquake, and well he might
have - for many was the time his own home had danced to the same crashing tune.
"My God-" said George, "that must be Harrison!"
The realization was blasted from his mind instantly by the sound of an
automobile collision in his head.
When George could open his eyes again, the photograph of Harrison was
gone. A living, breathing Harrison filled the screen. V, from V is for Vendetta, also communicated to
London through making a statement on live TV.
Clanking, clownish, and huge, Harrison stood - in the center of the
studio. The knob of the uprooted studio door was still in his hand. Ballerinas,
technicians, musicians, and announcers cowered on their knees before him,
expecting to die.
"I am the Emperor!" cried Harrison. "Do you hear? I am the
Emperor! Everybody must do what I say at once!" He stamped his foot and
the studio shook.
"Even as I stand here" he bellowed, "crippled, hobbled,
sickened - I am a greater ruler than any man who ever lived! Now watch me
become what I can become!"
Harrison tore the straps of his handicap harness like wet tissue paper,
tore straps guaranteed to support five thousand pounds.
Harrison's scrap-iron handicaps crashed to the floor.
Harrison thrust his thumbs under the bar of the padlock that secured his
head harness. The bar snapped like celery. Harrison smashed his headphones and
spectacles against the wall.
He flung away his rubber-ball nose, revealed a man that would have awed
Thor, the god of thunder.
"I shall now select my Empress!" he said, looking down on the
cowering people. "Let the first woman who dares rise to her feet claim her
mate and her throne!"
A moment passed, and then a ballerina arose, swaying like a willow. The ballerina follows
Harrison like the Golden One follows Equality.
Harrison plucked the mental handicap from her ear, snapped off her
physical handicaps with marvelous delicacy. Last of all he removed her mask.
She was blindingly beautiful.
"Now-" said Harrison, taking her hand, "shall we show the
people the meaning of the word dance? Music!" he commanded.
The musicians scrambled back into their chairs, and Harrison stripped them
of their handicaps, too. "Play your best," he told them, "and
I'll make you barons and dukes and earls."
The music began. It was normal at first-cheap, silly, false. But Harrison
snatched two musicians from their chairs, waved them like batons as he sang the
music as he wanted it played. He slammed them back into their chairs.
The music began again and was much improved.
Harrison and his Empress merely listened to the music for a while-listened
gravely, as though synchronizing their heartbeats with it.
They shifted their weights to their toes.
Harrison placed his big hands on the girls tiny waist, letting her sense
the weightlessness that would soon be hers.
And then, in an explosion of joy and grace, into the air they sprang!
Not only were the laws of the land abandoned, but the law of gravity and
the laws of motion as well.
They reeled, whirled, swiveled, flounced, capered, gamboled, and spun.
They leaped like deer on the moon.
The studio ceiling was thirty feet high, but each leap brought the dancers
nearer to it.
It became their obvious intention to kiss the ceiling. They kissed it.
And then, neutraling gravity with love and pure will, they remained
suspended in air inches below the ceiling, and they kissed each other for a
long, long time.
It was then that Diana Moon Glampers, the Handicapper General, came into
the studio with a double-barreled ten-gauge shotgun. She fired twice, and the
Emperor and the Empress were dead before they hit the floor.
Diana Moon Glampers loaded the gun again. She aimed it at the musicians
and told them they had ten seconds to get their handicaps back on.
It was then that the Bergerons' television tube burned out.
Hazel turned to comment about the blackout to George. But George had gone
out into the kitchen for a can of beer.
George came back in with the beer, paused while a handicap signal shook
him up. And then he sat down again. "You been crying" he said to
Hazel.
"Yup," she said.
"What about?" he said.
"I forget," she said. "Something real sad on
television."
"What was it?" he said.
"It's all kind of mixed up in my mind," said Hazel.
"Forget sad things," said George.
"I always do," said Hazel.
"That's my girl," said George. He winced. There was the sound of
a rivetting gun in his head.
"Gee - I could tell that one was a doozy," said Hazel.
"You can say that again," said George.
"Gee-" said Hazel, "I could tell that one was a
doozy."
