When writing functions as a big-time sleeping pill

Red flag, red flag

(This article is Part-0 in a series; for Part-1, go here.)

Maybe it doesn’t rise to the level of a felony.

But certainly a citation should be issued.

The writer should have to pay. He should have to surrender an old typewriter or a keyboard—along with a promise to do better in the future.

I’ve found a soporific passage. I want you to read it. I’m not going to name the writer.

Try to stay awake. It’s a paragraph of sheer diabolical torture:

“Saying that Africans must have control over their own countries and their own future, U.S. officials backed the admission of the African Union to the Group of 20 (G-20), welcoming the organization’s 55 member states to the intergovernmental forum that focuses on global issues, and pledged more than $55 billion to the continent to aid security, support democratic institutions, and advance civil rights and the rule of law. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Linda Thomas-Greenfield, First Lady Jill Biden, and Secretary of State Antony Blinken have all visited the continent, where they have emphasized partnership with African countries for economic development rather than a competition with China and Russia for resource extraction.”

Wow.

Are you still with me?

Superficial political events covered superficially in prose that comes straight out of the New York Times school of I’m laying down the wood of a long gangplank along which the reader has to stagger before jumping into the sea and disappearing below the waves.

I know. In these times, we ought to be grateful for a writer who can form grammatically correct sentences on his own, without using AI. But still.

It’s coma time. The sun sets in your mind after five or ten words.

I wouldn’t call this New York Times style formal. It’s a collection of trained worms moving in tandem toward an unknown objective. A place we’ll never discover.

It’s shoes shined for a party that’ll never happen.

It’s a big pile of pasta stuck together on a plate in front of you at a pretend Italian restaurant.

It’s dawn breaking at a mental institution.

It’s hubby leaving in the morning for the same office he’s been going to for 40 years.

It’s a defanged rattlesnake playing a sonata on a piccolo at a circus.

Physicists can gather around that paragraph and try to figure out how the ENERGY was drained from every phrase. A miracle. The result of a technology they can’t fathom.

And yet. For many readers, it suffices. They’re satisfied. The writing checks the boxes. They’re trained robots.

Maybe once upon a time they read Scott Fitzgerald. Dostoevsky. Henry Miller.

But somewhere along the line, a mind wipe occurred. Boom. Gone. Replaced by the NY Times MKULTRA operators.

I have a very old note pinned to my wall. You can’t read it now. It’s just a dark red blot of blood. As a young man, I was fishing off the pier along the East River. I hooked a whiskey bottle. The note was inside. This was the quick scrawl: “Somebody help me, I’m trapped in the Columbia School of Journalism.”

Poor bastard. They were taking him apart, piece by piece. Rearranging his thoughts.

I’m sure, after a period of missing time, he showed up at the Times, a bright smile pasted on his fat face. His ambition clanked in his chest like an iron machine turning wire into identical links of chain. On and on and on.

He was a REPORTER.

Or so it seemed.

He was actually selling sleep on the long road to nowhere. Dropping dimes on nobody.

And now, retired, he’s a blogger on a page of mold.

Don’t let this happen to you.

While there’s still oxygen in your veins. While you can still hear thunder. While you can still swim against the sleep-tide.

Go to war against those friggin’ zombies.

-- Jon Rappoport