Harrison Bergeron

"Harrison Bergeron" is a short story by Kurt Vonnegut (1922 to 2007), first published in the October 1961 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction and collected in Welcome to the Monkey House (1968). It is set in a United States of the 2080s, where the 211th, 212th and 213th Amendments to the Constitution have made everyone equal by law and a government office, headed by the Handicapper General, enforces the rule by handicapping anyone who is above average.^[1]

George and Hazel Bergeron are watching ballet dancers on television. The dancers wear weights and masks, so that nobody feels inferior at the sight of a graceful gesture or a pretty face. Hazel is of average intelligence. George is not, and the law requires him to wear a "mental handicap radio" in his ear, tuned to a government transmitter that sends a sharp noise "every twenty seconds or so" so that he cannot think a thought through. A canvas bag of forty-seven pounds of birdshot hangs from his neck, and the penalty for removing any of the shot is two years in prison and a fine of $2,000 for each ball.^[1]

Their fourteen-year-old son, Harrison, is seven feet tall, a genius and an athlete, and the authorities have taken him away. He escapes from prison and bursts into the television studio wearing the apparatus meant to hold him down: scrap metal, oversized earphones, thick wavy spectacles, a red rubber ball for a nose and black caps over his teeth. He calls himself Emperor, tears off his handicaps and those of a ballerina, and the two dance, leaping toward the ceiling. The Handicapper General, Diana Moon Glampers, walks in with a double-barreled ten-gauge shotgun and kills them both, and the musicians are made to put their handicaps back on. In the Bergerons' living room, George comes back from the kitchen with a beer. Hazel is crying about something sad on the screen and cannot remember what.^[1]

The story was dramatized for PBS in 1972 in Between Time and Timbuktu. A 1995 Showtime film, Harrison Bergeron, with Sean Astin and Christopher Plummer, departs considerably from the plot, and a short film adaptation followed in 2009.^[1]

In the story the government levels down everyone with an above-average trait, and what is lost is individuality.^[1] The story has also been quoted in court. Justice Antonin Scalia ended his dissent in PGA Tour, Inc. v. Martin (2001), in which the Supreme Court ruled 7 to 2 that the Americans with Disabilities Act entitled a professional golfer to ride a cart, with a version of the story's first sentence: "The year was 2001, and 'everybody was finally equal.'"^[2]

The essay that introduces Epic Quest Bio refuses to list its author's credentials. "Name-dropping makes Kemmishtree sad," it says. "Never mind the impressive people I've worked with, the august institutions, the cloud capp'd towers." It goes on to describe the usual signals of rank as "all the meretricious social proof signalling that buzzes like a Harrison Bergeron implant", and offers a video of the work instead.^[3] The essay is by Kent Kemmish, under his handle Kemmishtree. Its implant is the story's ear radio, which Vonnegut's government sets to sound every twenty seconds or so. The cloud-capped towers are from Prospero's speech in The Tempest.

• Ideas and influences of Molecular Reality Corporation
• List of works that inspired Molecular Reality Corporation