INFLECTION, INFECTION ... IS THERE EVEN A DIFFERENCE?

My good friend David Schoffman has done it again! He has read the pulse of his adolescent country and has turned his despondency into cash. Having long abandoned his frivolous hopes of correcting the world through ideas, in pure, gung-ho American fashion he has turned foolishness into an active and potentially lucrative enterprise.

Schoffman has taken to the airwaves!

His podcasts and audio books have brought his gravelly baritone into the cars and earbuds of thousands of listeners. Capitalizing on his countrymen's insatiable appetite for carefully curated self-esteem, David has culled the collective idiot wisdom typically found in your average, large-type, pop psychology, trade paperback mash-up and has packaged these platitudes into neat half hour digital hors d'oeuvres.

But allow me to digress.

As a child in the turbulent 60's the 19ème was a place far removed from the rage of Nanterre and the chaos that followed. Instead of burning cars and hurling cobblestones at policemen, I spent most of my time smoking Moroccan hashish in the Buttes Chaumont and writing bad poetry about unrequited, bisexual love.

 And yet one could never fully escape the feeling that something radical was changing in French culture. Les idées reçues were not only questioned but rejected outright. "Received wisdom" was by definition suspect and as a result le bébé a été noyé dans le bain. Much that was valuable was jettisoned into the general rubble and only in retrospect did we realize that the baby had indeed been tossed out with the bathwater.

Simone de Beauvoir

Who would have imagined that almost 50 years later the banality of 'received wisdom' would experience such an unexpected renaissance.

And who would imagine that the anarchist gadfly David Schoffman would be turning this turn of events into coin.

Reading, as we all know, is an active engagement between the writer and the reader. This dynamic has produced a fabulous tradition of what Dr. Richard St-Gosse called "skeptical empathy." Gosse writes that when a person approached a page the text becomes propriété communale or communal property. Implicit in the relationship is that the book can never be a commodity but rather a conversation.

In contrast to propoganda, there is little desire to persuade and more of a need to pick a fight. We love our books even as we debate with them. The reason early education specialists emphasize literacy is that they consider small children capable of critical thinking.

Which, of course, gives children a massive intellectual leg up on their Facebook/FakeNews elders.

In any event, having failed to fix this mess during the first half of his ineffectual life, my dear friend David is intent on exploiting technology in order to infect the world instead.

Or to put it in Schoffman's own blunt language, "it's not my fault everyone has become so fucking stupid!"