Headlines remind us every day that DUI, driving under the
influence, is dangerous. But writing under influence (WUI) risks a crash of the
word processor, and that includes WUI of MSA. Multiple system atrophy is a new
name for what used to be called OPCA, olivopontocerebellar atrophy. Whatever it
is called, there’s still no known cure.
Maybe tomorrow. The cure may come at any time. Until then it
is an unsolved mystery worthy of Lee Child, John Sandford or Arthur Conan
Doyle.
Word processors are like typewriters the way pipe organs are
like pianos. They can do more things, users can pull out more stops, and the
keyboards of both are light on the fingers. My MSA fingers will no longer punch
the keys on a manual typewriter, but they don’t have to in this age of
electronic invention, a chip off the old writer’s block.
One of these days, they say, writers won’t even have to type
because what they’re thinking will be absorbed electronically into a word processor.
Copies will go silently to the government spy bureaus, known as Obamascare.
The intention seems to be to store all the words written or
spoken on electronic devices, a concept pioneered in the United States by
Father Divine during the Great Depression. FBI records list him as “George
Baker alias God.” He was an African American preacher and advocate for the poor
who took the name Major Jealous Divine. He also claimed to be God.
Stenographers accompanied him everywhere, recording every word he spoke.
I think it was about 65 years ago that I attended a couple
of his banquets for the poor. As a newspaper reporter I qualified as poor, but
I was there to explore one of the few opportunities for African Americans and
other Americans to get to know each other, even a little bit, in the 1940s and
50s. That’s about when I first joined the NAACP, an organization that gained
nothing from my membership and a painfully mixed blessing from the membership
of Eleanor Roosevelt. Her endorsements were powerful, but limited in
geographical, political and racial scope.
So, nobody has to be God to be taped by the government. And
no, copyright won’t protect you. That is not, however, why I am not writing as
much as I used to. This science fiction disease, which intercepts and mangles
messages wired from the brain to the fingers, which intervenes in the breathing
process like wind tunnel fans thrown into reverse, awaits cure. Maybe the
government can take it over and use it against the enemy.
