“Truth,” or what passes for it these days, descended on the Writer’s Section shortly after the morning editorial meeting, and thus got mixed up with everything else. DeMille was concerned, while Rocket, Loma pursed their lips against a plaintive cry from Splash, lost down in the underbrush beyond the lower lunging ring at The Farm.

So long as we leave something in a jug from Belmont Farms by the fence line things are mostly quiet down there except for some periodic thrashing in the underbrush. But there was conflict in the Editorial Meeting and it spread across the rich green pasture.

We regret if this sounds a bit like inside baseball talk from the publishing business, but everyone in the trade of words and thoughts has to go through it these days. The first screen for the creative process is what might happen if someone actually read what we thought, or might use words that seem perfectly reasonable in this today, reflected by someone else’s tomorrow, and then might be weaponized to discredit us as illiterate domestic something-or-others. Or get Chairman Socotra to fire us.

Then follows a line of prose that would be closer to the reality we think we are seeing. But due to new standards, opposition to the official narrative is frowned upon. We have been warned by an official in the Government office we once served that we could be brought up on charges in a military tribunal, so analysis has to be protected by password access and limited only to trusted sources. Well, today’s trusted sources, another problem. But that is how we have arrived in this peculiar place where there is no truth, only arbitrary justice, and considerable confusion regarding national policy.

Then, the third level is stuff we would consider to be true, but not worthy to peck out on the keyboard or say on an unprotected phone and instead laugh uproariously about by the fire circle adjacent to the Loading Dock. Never to leave the property.

Bridging the first to second step in the process is the challenging part, since it involves actually analyzing what is going on. I got burned a few weeks ago in the morass of disinformation, and the Old Salts laughed uproariously. I had seen a video of a flag-draped casket being carried off an airplane. There were only ground personnel and the military Casualty and Assistance Officer (CACO) there to greet it. I have served as one, and it is an intensely emotional job. The story line in the background to the video claimed the President didn’t show up to receive the remains, which were supposedly from one of the casualties in the Afghan evacuation.

Such behavior fed my cognitive bias and I believed it. Not true, as it turned out, since Mr. Biden and his senior advisors were there to create more headlines just a few days later. But I got caught in an elementary journalistic failure to check the source. In that regard, I simply joined the tide of nonsense. But we are supposed to be better. Today’s minor amazement was similar.

You may have seen the dramatic story: “School Board told to Resign or face Child Porn charges!”

The cover story to that meme was supposed to be an indictment of the radical agenda being imposed on public school curriculums. At specific issue issue was the school issuance of the book depicted below the title to this maundering. I looked it up, to see what lunacy is being distributed now. I anticipated something lurid.

Instead, I found a self-help book for thirty-somethings who are experiencing writer’s block. Parts of it were amusing, other parts were not. Was the content inappropriate for the age group to which it was presented? Of course it was. Was it child porn, possession of which still has legal consequences? Not in the way we understand it, but as noted, we are old. After the meeting, Loma trundled down the hill toward the Lunging Ring and I went back to the touchscreen tablet that provides most of my information.

I didn’t use Google to look, since we know what is up with them. I clicked on “Duck Duck Go,” the web server that claims it doesn’t track us, though our trust level is fairly low at the moment. But since we can’t tell what is going to come at us- normally an amalgam of Steps 1-3, all laid out and attributed to our browsing history.

Th search was easier than I had expected. The book itself is available at what we consider a main-line business, Barnes & Nobel. One of the many reviews included these tips:

It has the strangest prompts, though. For example:

-“Describe a professor coming on to one of his students”
-“Write a sex scene you wouldn’t show your mom” (and then in the next prompt, you’re supposed to rewrite it into one you would show your mum)
-“What your desk thinks about at night”
-“The greatness of sandwiches”
-“Boxers or briefs? Discuss.”
-“Screw you.”
-“Your most transcendent ice cream experience”
-“A sneeze”

…and several others.

Actually, there are 635 more. Whether we would consider this as a “step one” issue was naturally the initial challenge. The book in question is not a high school appropriate text by any traditional standard. Is is pornographic? It contains no pictures or discussions of conduct you would (or would not) show Mom. How it managed to be inserted into public education is the real question, along with another one about why anyone would serve in a once-innocent public office to be accused of crimes against children. The whole thing eludes all of us Old Timers, since being deluged with it is a bit overwhelming when taken with breakfast.

The ads for “642” are apparently targeted at the Millennials who are allegedly having a chore breaking writer’s block. Inappropriate? Of course. The goal here is supposed to enhance communication skills, and we agree that it might, if you had ideas about what that actually means. But instead of a discussion about that, it is just another little flash point in our current social madness.

Likely topics for discussion about the matter were discussed, since some are obviously either Step Two material, or subject to raucous Step Three laughter we cannot share. The first would be resolution on who decides what comes before the curriculum committee in our public school systems. Also in “Step One” is the nature of the naked anger (from both sides) regarding the way the story was framed. In fact, it is that aspect that drives opinion into Step Two territory, in which a rational approach to the level of vitriol abroad in the land. Even mentioning that in “Step One” can lead to trouble we don’t need.

We are left with unrecorded laughter at the idea a school system would use an adult self-help book to stimulate youthful thought and discussion. But that would lead further into territory that really can only responsibly be depicted in terms of laughter at a society that appears to have lost what used to keep us together. The consequences of that seems to be reflected across all three streams of information.

I would tell you what we actually think, but the laughter drowns it out.

Copyright 2021 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com