Editor’s Note: This piece is a work of satire. The byline above belongs to Captain Beatty, the book-burning fire chief of Ray Bradbury’s 1953 novel Fahrenheit 451 — a man who is wrong about every single thing he is about to tell you. We hand him the column, just this once, so you can hear for yourself how warm and reasonable the wrong thing can be made to sound. Then we ask you to go read the book he’d burn.

Don’t miss Captain Beatty and the rest of the cast of Fahrenheit 451 as Windmill Productions stages the show this weekend – set for 7:30 p.m. Saturday, Oct. 3, and 2 p.m. Sunday, Oct. 4, at the Holland Theatre. When I light a book on fire, I imagine all of the people who will never have to read it and that makes me feel accomplished. I’m helping my community.

You have the wrong idea about me, and about my men. You picture us as brutes with a tank of kerosene and a grudge against anything with a spine and a jacket. Let me correct the record. I have read more than you have. I have, in my time, read very nearly everything — which is precisely what qualifies me to strike the match.

The thinking probably exhausts you — the endless, private thinking after what is true — then let me make you my last and best offer. Let me do the reading for you. Stop thinking. You were never built for it and look what it has done to you.

Leave the knowing to me. I have done the reading — all of it, every argument and every counterargument and every treacherous middle — so that you need never swallow a page again. Ask me what is true and I will tell you cleanly, with none of the mess.

Ask me who to trust and who to fear, what to keep and what to burn, and I will hand you the answer, already warm, already certain, with the doubt cooked out of it.

A man who thinks for himself is a man alone at midnight, turning it all over, sure of nothing. A man who lets me think for him sleeps like a child. Understand me plainly: I am not taking your mind from you. I am relieving you of it. There is a difference — and one day, believe me, you will thank me for the difference….. READ MORE….