"Around here, this is what passes for reality.

The kind of security they now have at airports, imagine that kind of crackdown at all libraries schools, theatres, bookstores, after the culling song leaks out. Anywhere information might be disseminated, you'll find armed guards.

The airwaves will be as empty as a public swimming pool during a polio scare. After that, only a few government broadcasts will air. Only well-scrubbed news and music. After that, any music, books, and movies will be tested on lab animals or volunteer convicts before release to the public.

Instead of surgical masks, people will wear earphones that will give them the soothing constant protection of safe music or bird songs. People will pay for a supply of "pure" news, a source for "safe" information and entertainment. The way milk and meat and blood are inspected, imagine books and music and movies being filtered and homogenized.

Certified.

Approved for consumption.

People will be happy to give up most of their culture for the assurance that the tiny bit that comes through is safe and clean.

White noise.

Imagine a world of silence where any sound loud enough or long enough to harbor a deadly poem would be banned. No more motorcycles, lawn mowers, jet planes, electric blenders, hair dryers. A world where people are afraid to listen, afraid they'll hear something behind the din of traffic. Some toxic words buried in the loud music playing next door.

Imagine a higher and higher resistance to language.

No one talks because no one dares to listen.

The deaf shall inherit the earth.

And the illiterate.

The isolated.

Imagine a world of hermits."

"Imagine a new Dark Age.

Imagine the books burning.

And the tapes and films and files, the radios and televisions, will all go into the same bonfire.

If we're preventing that world or creating it, I don't know...."