Reflection: The Martian Chronicles

I mentioned in my last post that it struck me as rather odd that pretty much everyone on Mars who wasn't Martian was American. Quite obviously so. Knowing, of course, that it's a Bradbury book, and knowing some of Bradbury's inclinations when idealizing midwestern America (and colored by the fact that I'm rereading Something Wicked This Way Comes), I wasn't surprised that it was an explicitly American Bradbury book, but it made me uncomfortable that a book that was so clearly about colonization of another planet didn't have this whole, united Earth feel. In Ender's Game we get Armenians, the Dutch, French, Algerians, etc., but I realized about halfway through the class on Thursday that what Bradbury's really trying to get at in The Martian Chronicles is the most American of values: the American Dream.

That's right, I capitalized it. Because that's how we idealize it in our culture, isn't it? And when Spender's going on his rant that we didn't put a hot dog stand at Karnak because it wasn't economically feasible, it struck me that we will, however, basically eradicate a mountain in the Black Hills of South Dakota so that people can look at faces of presidents etched in stone. Most of the people who leave Earth in this book to get to Mars are looking for a New Start, a New Way of Life, Freedom, the Opportunity to Succeed...What does that sound like? I'm sure we'll get more into this while reading Manifest Destiny, but I also noticed that we kept accidentally inserting the word "smallpox" into our conversation about the Martians, even though they hypothetically died of chicken pox. Thank you, American history.