The Credentialling of America

John Young jya at pipeline.com
Thu Jun 7 20:58:27 PDT 2001


Many years ago I explained that I, like Sandy, write explicitly
for money, as much as possible, and the people who pay me
expect that I will do whatever text can do to get readers to
obey those who pay for the text. One method for this is to
write clearly in the most authoritarian language of the day,
the most grammatically correct, the most literate, the most
accepted as being the proper way to write in an unmarked,
unidiosyncratic way, the most likely to have been written
by someone who embraced without shame the way the
masters of writing write, the way the writing manuals
recommend, and recommend as nauseum, purest banal.

And to never write the way poets do, oddballs do, gibbering
idiots do, for that will allegedly diminish the value of your
writing the way the payers want you to write, that is to
write as if their and your shit don't smell, your and their
skin is hued the preferred color,  our accent the dominant
unaccent of the day, you and they don't copulate the wrong 
kind of people, you and they have no faults to hide, you and
they have no guts to face up to your inability to break away 
from hiding behind conformity not of your making.

Shit, I understand Sandy all too well. And totally admire
his talent to blow prefabricated sunshine where it's needed.

Even so I won't do what the grammatically correct crowd
never cease trying to impose here. Fuck them as one of
them has said often here when he's tired of explaining why
he won't do what some assholes keep demanding. Or to say 
it my way, correct writing, clear writing, comprehensively 
coherent writing, is just another way to tyrannize, bully, 
hector and obscure jive-ass agendas, though those who do 
it don't always own up to , or not admit the arousal it gives 
them to be part of a me-too maleducated mob.

This is a friendly joke, as ever, in respect for the asshole
language rules-makers here. (Spit)





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