Kurt Vonnegut's science fiction short story "Harrison
Bergeron" is set in the year 2081, a year in which everyone has been forcibly
equalized. In order to ensure that its citizens remain equal, handicaps are compulsory
for those who have more talent, more athleticism, more
intelligence.
A virtual superman, Harrison Bergeron is
seven feet tall. He wears the heaviest handicaps of his society: a red rubber ball for
a nose, a huge pair of earphones, spectacles with wavy lenses that not only prohibit his
sight, but also give him headaches. Harrison looks "like a walking junkyard" with his
three hundred pounds of handicaps. So, when the seven-footer breaks out of prison
and then crashes into the television station where his photograph has been flashed upon
the screen from different angles, his weight with the handicaps is so heavy that the
photograph of him jumps "again and again as though dancing to the tune of an
earthquake."
That Harrison causes the ground to shake is
evinced by Vonnegut's having written,
George Bergeron correctly identified the
earthquake, and well he might have--for many was the time his own home had danced to the
same crashing tune.
Just
then, George's thought is cut off by the brain waves that he is sent so that he will not
be doing something that others cannot.
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