In 1986, the unclassifiable countercultural writer William S. Burroughs (1914-1997) laid out his thoughts about language:

My general theory since 1971 has been that language is literally a virus, and that it has not been recognized as such because it has achieved a state of relatively stable symbiosis with its human host; that is to say, the Word Virus … has established itself so firmly as an accepted part of the human organism that it can now sneer at gangster viruses like smallpox and turn them in to the Pasteur Institute. But the Word clearly bears the single identifying feature of virus: it is an organism with no internal function other than to replicate itself.

In his book William S. Burroughs and the Cult of Rock ’n’ Roll, author Casey Rae sums it up this way:

In the Burroughs worldview, language is a mechanism of what the author called Control with a capital C: an insidious force that limits human freedom and potential. Words produce mental triggers that we can sometimes intuit but never entirely comprehend, making us highly susceptible to influence.

The modern left is unabashed about wielding language as a virus—or, really, as a form of control. “Supercut” videos by critics of corporate leftist media, like Tom Eliot, reveal the media figures and politicians repeating the same words and slogans over and over again: President Joe Biden, despite drooling on himself, is “sharp.” Kamala Harris has brought the “Joy, joy, joy” back into politics. Conservatives are “weird.” Abortion is “healthcare.” These word storms rip through the country via television, radio, and social media, infecting hosts from D.C. to California. Millions of people mindlessly repeat them as if they have been infected with some kind of mentally impairing disease. It’s a virus worse than COVID.

So how to fight the language virus? According to Burroughs, language can also be used to liberate. He believed that if words were cut into pieces and rearranged, you could break free from what he called the Control. Burroughs used rearranged texts, “found sound,” and tape-splicing—techniques still used by artists today—to defy the establishment. Burroughs used the method of cutting up sentences and rearranging them in famous countercultural books like Naked Lunch and The Soft Machine. 

My generation took a more direct approach to using language to dismantle Control: punk rock. Not for nothing was Burroughs known as “the Godfather of Punk.” The writer was lionized by people like Lou Reed, David Bowie, and bands like U2, Nirvana, Joy Division, Led Zeppelin, and Steely Dan. In his book American Scream: Allen Ginsberg’s Howl and the Beat Generation, Jonah Raskin describes meeting Burroughs in San Francisco in the 1970s.

I met him in and through the punk music scene. He wanted me to supply him with heroin and I declined. He merely shrugged his shoulders and fired up a marijuana cigarette. We listened to the Dead Kennedys. He was very funny and very sarcastic. He was caustic on Jack Kerouac and on Neal Cassady. In his eyes Kerouac was a salesman for jeans and espressos, and Cassady only cared about going places fast and not about any human beings.

It’s telling that Raskin and Burroughs were listening to the Dead Kennedys. The 1980s punk group were no Republicans, but the concerns they expressed in their songs have come to dovetail those of Donald Trump in 2024. The Dead Kennedys warned about large corporations, Big Pharma, technology stamping out humanity, censorship, the government spying on dissenters, and the hypocrisy of the left. In “Soup is Good Food,” the opener to their 1986 masterpiece Frankenchrist, singer Jello Biafra laments technology displacing workers:

We’re sorry, but you’re no longer needed
Or wanted or even cared about here

Machines can do a better job than you
This is what you get for asking questions
The unions agree, sacrifices must be made
Computers never go on strike
To save the working man you’ve got to put him out to pasture

Looks like we’ll have to let you go
Doesn’t it feel fulfilling to know
That you, the human being, are now obsolete
And there’s nothing in hell we’ll let you do about it?

The worker spirals into a depression and the song ends this way:

We’re sorry, we hate to interrupt
But it’s against the law to jump off this bridge
You’ll just have to kill yourself somewhere else
A tourist might see you and we wouldn’t want that

I’m just doing my job, you know
So say “uncle” and we’ll take you to the mental health zoo
Force feed you mind-melting chemicals
‘Til even the outside world looks great

This is a nightmare scenario of corporate cruelty, pharmaceuticals used to alter moods, heartless bureaucracy, and human beings treated like trash. It is like something right out of a Burroughs novel. There is also a directness to the language that is missing today.

John Lydon, the singer for the 1970s punk band the Sex Pistols, emphasized the importance of the truth and insisted on accurate language. Lydon suffered spinal meningitis when he was a child, and it made him frequently lose his memory. “Not being able to remember your own name or your mother and father, or anything at all, and for little bits of that to be coming in over a period of four years, that’s pretty close to torture,” he told interviewer Laurie Taylor.

To Lydon it became of crucial importance that any person speaking to him was telling the truth. This is probably why he recorded “Bodies,” the most graphic anti-abortion song ever written. Lydon, like a lot of punk rockers, wanted only the cold, hard truth.

As I have written elsewhere, “Burroughs believed in frontier individualism, valorizing ‘our glorious frontier heritage of minding your own business.’” Sometimes, perhaps, Burroughs minded his own business too much, as he did in his toleration for Allen Ginsberg, whose reprehensible life was detailed here at Chronicles last month. Moreover, Burroughs was a famous drug addict, Beatnik, and bisexual artist who shot and killed his own wife under extremely unsettling circumstances.

Still, Burroughs himself was no liberal. In Naked Lunch Scandinavia becomes a model for a place called Freeland. From the book: “Freeland was a welfare state. If a citizen wanted anything from a load of bone meal to a sexual partner some department was ready to offer effective aid. The threat implicit in this enveloping benevolence stifled the concept of rebellion.”

In 1949, according to the Barry Miles biography Call Me Burroughs, Burroughs complained to Jack Kerouac that “we are bogged down in this octopus of bureaucratic socialism.” He also didn’t like rent control or the minimum wage. From Mexico he wrote to Ginsberg: “I am not able to share your enthusiasm for the deplorable conditions which obtain in the U.S. at this time. I think the U.S. is heading in the direction of a Socialistic police state similar to England, and not too different from Russia …. At least Mexico is no obscenity ‘Welfare’ State, and the more I see of this country the better I like it. It is really possible to relax here where nobody tries to mind your business for you.”

Westbrook Pegler, a hard-right defender of Sen. Joe McCarthy, was to Burroughs “the only columnist, in my opinion, who possesses a grain of integrity.” There, again, we see that respect for cold, hard truth.

In 2024 we are desperately in need of a madman like Burroughs, or a genuinely brave punk band, to inoculate the populace against the left’s language virus.