It’s quite an amazing thing, since Vonnegut was a serious socialist. Then again, so was Orwell.
>>>It’s quite an amazing thing, since Vonnegut was a serious socialist. Then again, so was Orwell.<<<
I was going to comment on the liberalism of Vonnegut, but stopped myself and kept on topic. Vonnegut wrote the story in 1961, back in the days when there were still people who thought of themselves as liberals but also thought of themselves as anti-communist and pro-military - I’m thinking of Scoop Jackson and Jack Kennedy, but there were many others. “Harrison Bergeron” shows promise of his eyes opening to the horrors of the utopian state. However, it looks like he was swept up into the leftist antiwar fervor that came soon afterwards, with its focus on America hatred. He wrote an entire book centered around the bombing of Dresden, which was carted out by leftists when I was a boy as the classic example of how we were just as bad as the Nazis.
Still, it’s good that my students have a seed planted in their minds about the evils of so-called good intentions, equality of results, and government overreach. This story’s protagonist is 14 years old, too, and teenagers love reading about themselves.