From The Spooky Art

The Spooky Art - Thoughts on Writing | 1961 | Norman Mailer

[AD from SpringBay]

Now journalism has become an offshoot of the welfare state. Every last cigar-smoking fraud of a middle-aged reporter, pale with prison pallor, deep lines in his cheeks, writing daily pietisms for the sheet back home about free enterprise, is himself the first captive. It is the best free ride anyone will find since he left his family’s chest. Your room is paid for by the newspaper, your trips to the particular sports attached to the event ...are by chartered limousine. Who but a Soviet bureaucrat, a British businessman, a movie star, or an American reporter would ride in a chartered limousine? Your typing paper is free if you want it; your seat at the fight, or your ticket to the convention, is right there, under the ropes; your meals if you get around to eating them are free, free sandwiches only, but then a reporter has a stomach like a shaving mug and a throat like a hog’s trough: He couldn’t tell steak tartare from guacamole. And the drinks-if you are at a big fight-are without charge…It’s like being in an Army outfit everyone’s forgotten. You get your food, you get your beer, you get your pay, the work is easy, and leave to town is routine. You never had it so good-you’re an infant again: You can grow up a second time and improve the job…

…If you haven’t done your homework, if you drank too late last night and missed the last limousine...if there’s no poop of your own on Floyd’s speed or Sonny’s bad mood, you can turn to the handouts give you in the Press Kit. No need to do your own research. The Kit is part of the free list, an offering of facts with a little love from the welfare state.

[AD from SpringBay]

I offer the above as something I found just over midway in a book by Norman Mailer. He wrote that excerpt for Esquire in 1961. With recent events and discussions it still sounds timely.

[AD from SpringBay]

bump and sorry for the ugly html in the titles