Frankly, I don’t feel like working. The shoemaker calls to ask if I would like to join a choir that is performing a musical later this year. It must be about the recent cryptocurrency crash that is evaporating wealth and ruining investors. It’s going to be called “Cryptotherapy Massacre” and I have to play a singing dollar.
I’m looking forward to it, more than the boring work on the table in front of me. Boring articles, boring advisory reports. All that aridity could use some musical and operetta. It’s better to write an operetta than an advisory report, I always say during important meetings, and then everyone nods, because it’s just true. But it never happens, because where can you find an operetta composer so quickly?
lies in front of me an advice that a US committee – the Automated Personal Data Systems Advisory Committee – presented to the US Department of Health and Welfare in 1973. †Records, Computers, and the Rights of Citizens‘ is the title of the piece and it is about the safe handling of personal data. Somewhere halfway through the report is a motto from the operetta Princess Ida by Gilbert and Sullivan from 1884.
King Gama, Princess Ida’s father, tells in this motto that he likes to reveal the age of women. That he knows things about people and is happy to point out their weaknesses. That he carefully compares their income data with their tax return. And that he absolutely does not understand why people find him unpleasant: „Yet everybody says I am a disagreeable man! And I can’t think why!†
The Advisory Committee on Automated Personal Data Systems understands best. As early as 1973, she says that careless handling of personal data will in the future create victims among “our most disadvantaged citizens.” She gives government and tax authorities tips to prevent such victims. Very useful, everyone, but fifty years later I think the committee members could only have achieved something if they had put on an operetta costume at the time and sang the report in rhyme.
Writing is pointless, I mean to say. Giving advice is pointless. After fifty years, your advice still has no effect. And so I am bored, no desire to work. What am I doing here behind all those texts and reports? I can be good for humanity, but how could I make this ramshackle world of ours less ramshackle from behind my laptop? Which form do you choose and, above all, which language?
According to one great writer, for a broken world you have to use a broken language; a language that reflects how the world falls apart and crumbles, that makes you feel how all meaning disappears, how unintelligible people have become to each other.
According to the other great writer, the only way to counter the aggressive rhetoric of the outside world is by whispering. You can neutralize the roaring language of world powers by showing in a weak voice that you are not afraid of power. And so I whisper, I mumble, I crumble and I mirror all that animates our time. I sing like a heathen, I let words fall from my hands like a child in a schoolyard.
I don’t feel like I’m making that much progress. I’m bored behind my laptop. And I still feel the burden on my shoulders to promote world peace and contribute to the prosperity of the universe. Until suddenly a quote from the writer EB White comes to mind. Only under a dictatorship are you expected to write with an inspiring tone, he says in his column in 1939 †The Duty of Writers† in Harper’s Magazine†
Why on earth would you want to be inspiring all the time in a free country? There are people who only get constructive and significant and freedom-loving in hard times, White says. “I feel this is bad news in its own way.” Moreover, a despot feels no fear whatsoever of writers who preach freedom. “His greatest concern is that gaiety, or truth in sheep’s clothing, may gain a foothold somewhere, that the joy at any unguarded moment is limitless.”
No idea if it’s true, but it sounds good, that of that joy. Don’t be too serious: also good advice. It’s coming a little late, of course, it would have been better to have thought of this before sitting in front of my laptop to get bored, because now the whole working day has been a bit of a mess. But god, am I glad to know I don’t have to be inspirational next time.
A version of this article also appeared in the newspaper of June 18, 2022