Using Technology to Deepen Democracy, Using Democracy to Ensure Technology Benefits Us All

Thursday, November 22, 2012

"A Thanksgiving Prayer" by William Burroughs



A longstanding Amor Mundi tradition. The paranoid reference to "Laboratory AIDS" along the long ugly delineation of Americana to which Burroughs offers his poisoned thanks almost spoils the piece for me, but with Burroughs you tend to get a septic souffle in which the awesome and the awful commingle indispensably. And there is in any case in that moment of cussed counterfactual conspiricizing, I submit, a succumbing in Burroughs himself to some of the worst in America he otherwise scalpels so mercilessly in the piece itself, on this day of days that demands the thankless scrutiny of critics and self-critics if ever there was a day for it.

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