…at the (beautiful) main Tacoma Public Library was a smash. Some 60 Citizens of Destiny listened to me, KIRO-AM’s Dave Ross, and two Tacoma News Tribune writers debate whether or not we’re all amusing ourselves into oblivion. I, as I told you here I would, said we’re not.

If anything, I said, the current would-be social controllers aren’t trying to get us to ignore serious issues by force-feeding us light entertainment. They’re trying to get us obsessed with certain serious issues at a non-rational level of fear and obedience.

As I’d expected, there were several cranky old hippies who pined for the pre-TV golden age they were absolutely convinced had existed just before they were born, and who didn’t believe me when I told them the old newsreels had war theme songs long before CNN. I also tried to reassure some of the library loyalists in the crowd that books weren’t going away anytime soon (even if library budgets are currently big on DVDs and, in Seattle’s case, on building projects rather than on book buying); whether the stuff inside tomorrow’s books will be worth reading is a different question.

One woman in the audience noted that Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 (the topic of an everybody-in-town-reads-one-book promotion to which this panel was a tie-in event) ended with a scene of people reciting from their favorite banned books, which they’d cared to memorize. In a variation on the old “desert island disc” question, she asked the panel what books we’d prefer to memorize. I mumbled something about The Gambler and Fanny Hill, saying they represented skills and pursuits that some people in a post-apocalyptic situation might not consider vital to survival but I would. I’m sure tomorrow I’ll think of a few tomes far more appropriate to the hypothetical situation. If you’ve any desert-island books, feel free to email the titles and reasons why you’d choose them.