'Ich frage Euch: Wollt Ihr den totalen Krieg? Wollt Ihr ihn wenn nötig totaler und radikaler, als wir ihn uns heute überhaupt noch vorstellen können?'
'I ask you: Do you want total war? If necessary, do you want a war more total and radical than anything that we can even imagine today?'
-Doctor Joseph Goebbels, Reich Minister of Propaganda.
'It's [guitar playing] my avocation; it's what I really do' -Tyrannical and Terrible Teacher, Davie M.
To-day I aim my sights at what might be called the lügenpreße, particularly a strange lie that they have made. You may have already figured out by the above quotation (or, you kenna, the very title of this post) what exactly this lie is that I am referencing.
I took a 'journalism' claß in high school. One of the first things Dave M told us not to do was use any kind of question, or 'give the reader an out' as he phrased it. Do you want Total War? Nein. Everyone wants Total War, Ja! This also applies to the use of such personification words as you, I, me, us. Silly Herr Doktor, doesn't he kenna that Dave M is smarter than him? A cultured German master of propaganda, versus a Mid-Western redneck peasant neglecting his job as a teacher for more concentration on his shitty guitar-playing and singing 'it's my avocation; what I really do'. Keeping dreaming Davie O'Meartyn Tyrannical.
But I promised you an article which involves the entire lügenpreße, did I not my dearest blokesgenoßen? The rotten AP Style is a killer of morale, and if an army marches on its stomach, then it must fight with its spirit. This, I believe, is why no one submitted an article on time to Dave M. Having to go in and dehumanise our writing, really one of the starkest expreßions of will, demoralised us, broke our impetus to continue with the project of writing. I posit as well that this might have harmed our inclinations to write altogether, even for our own ends.
I will end on a lighter, unrelated matter: typeface, script, font, what have you. Why do we not at the very minimum attempt to reintroduce it back piecemeal into our cultural lives. I have in mind two which I should very much like to see and read in life once more: Fraktur and English Blackletter (Textur? Not sure of its official name). One day far from here, I might delve into this topic on its own.
Comments