The Revised Boy Scout Manual

William S. Burroughs The Revised Boy Scout Manual (2018)
I always assumed this to have been one of those many lovably cranky pamphlets Burroughs churned out between novels, remembered mainly as also by this author in the opening pages of books benefiting from a much larger print run; but weirdly, it turns out to have been a sort of ghost book of shifting composition, occasionally quoted but never printed in full until now. I first read the opening chapters in Re/Search magazine back in the eighties, in turn forming the impression of it simply having been some out of print obscurity.

This version Frankensteins an arguably definitive text from that which appeared in the aforementioned Re/Search, various typewritten manuscripts, and even three audio cassettes of Burroughs reading the whole thing out to his tape recorder just for a chuckle.

It might be pointed out that Burroughs can be kind of repetitive, begging the question of whether or not this really needs to exist given its focus on the usual themes. I'd say yes because where Burroughs is repetitive, it's usually something worth saying, and The Revised Boy Scout Manual says it very well in particularly concentrated form.

You need a scrambling device, TV, radio, two video cameras, a ham radio station and a simple photo studio with a few props and actors. For a start you scramble the news all together and spit it out every which way on ham radio and street recorders. You construct fake news broadcasts on video camera. For the pictures you can use mostly old footage. Mexico City will do for a riot in Saigon and vice versa… and you scramble your fabricated news in with actual news broadcasts.

You have an advantage which your opposing player does not have. He must conceal his manipulations. You are under no such necessity. In fact you can advertise the fact that you are writing news in advance and trying to make it happen by techniques which anybody can use.

The Revised Boy Scout Manual is a practical text analysing everything that's gone wrong with human civilisation and offering a series of proposals as to what we can do about it, despite that we're not the ones with the tanks or heavy artillery. As with much of Burroughs writing, instructional or analytical text makes frequent digressions into narrative form by way of illustration with a rhythm closer to thought than to a traditional monologue or address; and the question of where the satire ends and the reality begins is probably missing the point. Passages such as the one quoted above should illustrate just how prophetic Burroughs has been, and I would suggest that the world he describes here more strongly resembles our own than the one in which this book was written, 1970 or thereabouts.

If you only read one Burroughs book etc. etc...