Remembrance as a Radical Act

By Marlene L. Daut

AMASA DELANO: “But the past is passed; why moralize upon it? Forget it. See, yon bright son has forgotten it all, and the blue sea, and the blue sky; these have turned over new leaves.”

BENITO CERENO: “Because they have no memory . . . because they are not human.”

--Herman Melville, Benito Cereno

In Kurt Vonnegut’s classic 1961 short story, “Harrison Bergeron,” the character George attempts to console his wife Hazel—for what, he is not sure—by telling her to “Forget sad things.” But Hazel cannot forget, or rather, she has already forgotten, or well, it’s more like, possessed of only average intelligence, she can’t ever remember anything for longer than a few seconds. “I always do,” she replies. “That’s my girl,” George tells her. 

But forgetfulness, in Vonnegut’s bleak vision of the future, isn’t comfort—it’s control. Living in an oppressive regime that enforces absolute equality by suppressing beauty, intelligence, and strength, what George and Hazel are failing to remember is the death of their 14-year-old son, Harrison Bergeron, shot dead on live tv after staging a coup d’état against the government.

But the reader, of course, will not forget this so easily. For, the reader does not live in the world of George and Hazel, or rather, the world of Diana Moon Glampers, the Handicapper General, whose job it is to enforce the government imposed “handicaps” that prevent supremely intelligent citizens, like George, from “taking unfair advantage of their brains”:

"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."

Yet, as you might imagine, and as Vonnegut’s narrator reminds us, “Some things about living still weren't quite right.” In order for George, for example, not to take “unfair advantage” of his brain, the government has placed a “little mental handicap radio” in his ear. The radio blasts loud sounds into George’s head every twenty seconds so that he can’t concentrate, or ever form a complete thought, or truly and realistically think about anything in a deep and meaningful way—twenty-one-guns firing all at once snuff out a thought of Harrison’s face; the loudest of sirens stops him from contemplating different ways to evade his handicap; the sound of a car crash crushes away the realization that the fugitive staging a coup on tv is his own son. Watching George wince from the painful sounds but having no idea of what is causing his pain, Hazel can only muster a pithy, “Gee - I could tell that one was a doozy.”

You see, Harrison, the seven-foot-tall teenage child of George and Hazel, had already been arrested and imprisoned once for trying to overthrow the government. Upon his escape, a news broadcast flashes a deliberately frightening photograph of Harrison weighted down with metal scrap to make him slow and ugly, as the announcer, whose voice was not allowed to be more beautiful or authoritative than anyone else’s, reads with a “grackle squawk:” “He is a genius and an athlete, is under-handicapped, and should be regarded as extremely dangerous."

It would be tempting to try to find a parable in this story, depending on how you read it, for the modern-day politics of DEI (Diversity, Equity, Inclusion), or alternatively, for the increasingly totalitarian backlash against it. Is it the right or the left that wants to crush difference into sameness in the name of egalitarianism? The right-wing rails against academia, the mainstream news media, and other intellectual and “Hollywood” elites, citing bias and unfairness, while the left, also citing bias and unfairness, rails against the overt policies and the unspoken practices in hiring, housing, schooling, and policing that have historically marginalized the disabled, the queer, women, and people of color, along with all those not professing the right religion.

Yet “Harrison Bergeron” is not a simple political allegory. It offers instead a profound thought exercise on the mechanisms (technological, political, cultural) that numb us all to—and shut down any efforts to resist—suffering and oppression.

What makes “Harrison Bergeron” such a compelling story is precisely the reader’s inability to find within it an overarching ideology that would explain who is right and who is wrong. Tempted to side with Harrison, who has been busy ridding himself of his mental handicaps, which is what enables him to revolt, the reader will quickly be cured of this ill-placed identification. Before shedding the last of his material handicaps—the metal covering his body as if he were a dystopian tin man—Harrison proclaims while stamping his foot in true toddler-like fashion, “I am the Emperor!” “Do you hear? I am the Emperor! Everybody must do what I say at once!" 

In a speech eerily reminiscent of several contemporary heads of state, Harrison then tragicomically mimics—after all, he is only a kid— the same authoritarian impulse he seeks to overthrow, “I am a greater ruler than any man who ever lived! Now watch me become what I can become!”

It turns out that the absurd conundrums in this story—which mix up our minds like we are Hazel, prevented from remembering that the “something real sad on television” making her cry was Diana Moon Glampers killing her son—do not belong to another world, or even another time. This story is patently our own, which is precisely how and why it derives its power. 

The best artists show us back to ourselves—and, in this case, uncomfortably so. Here, everyone is wrong—just in different ways. And, indeed, there are so many things that are wrong, in different ways, in our world too—ranging from the outright calamities of wars to the less blatant, but still harmful everyday violence of economic structures and institutions. 

The mental handicaps meant to distract and silence us from objecting to such ills have changed over time. Maybe. But aren’t they ever as frightening? From the opiates doled out by pharmaceutical companies to those shouted in sermons and speeches by the religious, to the seductive pull of television, radio, computers, and cell phones, along with the dizzying glow of screens—Internet, iPads, 24-hour news, social media, chatbots, robots, and AI: “Forget,” lose your mind in the vast morass of it all, so loud, so loud, and yet seeming to gently coax too, as if trying to encourage peaceful slumber. Forget, forget, forget, all the sad things, forget them, like a TikTok challenge from one day to the next.

But I know, and somewhere in your brain, despite all the loud and never-ending noise, so do you, that all our lives, and especially those of our children, depend upon every last one of us staring down with our clear-eyed memories what the Martinican poet Aimé Césaire called the “forgetting machine” in his famous essay Discourse on Colonialism (1955). We must stare, no shout it down not just by reckoning with past oppressions but with those that are happening right now—from the wars in Gaza and Ukraine, to armed para-military violence in Haiti and the Sudan, to police and school shootings right here in the United States, to global assaults on the climate, women’s rights, and diversity.

In his famous essay, Create Dangerously, Albert Camus reminded the world of the task before anyone with a pen: “we cannot hide away from communal misery,” he wrote: 

"…and our sole justification, if one exists, is to speak out, as best we can for those who cannot. And we must do this for everyone who is suffering at this very moment, despite the past or future greatness of the states or political parties that are oppressing them; to artists, there are no privileged torturers. That is why beauty, even today, especially today, can serve no political party; it only serves, in the long or short term, the pain or freedom of humankind."

No, we must not stay locked away in the prison of our phones, or the towers of our typewriters, trying, hoping, and fearing the political and personal consequences of our memories. 

For, the beautiful thing is that we do not yet live in Vonnegut’s United States of 2081, and for all those endowed with healthy body, mind, and spirit, remembering is still, in fact, a choice, but so is forgetting.

How to cite this article:  Marlene L. Daut, "Forget Sad Things," King of Haiti's World Blog, May 29, 2025 <https://marlenedaut.com/blog/forget-sad-things-remembrance-as-a-radical-actby-marlene-l-dautamasa>