Wake up and smell the copy

ITHACA, N.Y. — From the Patent Office: Fall’s finished, folks; everything’s dead and raked up. Well, almost everything. Something is falling faintly through the universities, like leaves, except leaves are crisp and brilliant, like snowflakes, except that no two snowflakes are alike. Stop and squint: they’re admissions essays. They rustle, murmur and sigh as thick-gloved groundsmen shove them by the fistful into lawn bags; ‘tis the sound of the young, trying to Find Their Own Voice. God help them! Failing Him, I’m available, and I accept PayPal.

If it takes a village to raise a child, it takes a suburb to send him to college. Ideally a leafy, prosperous suburb, because someone will have to do his homework and write his essays, and that someone will have to be paid. Upfront, no exceptions.

Legend has it that a budding writer must find his or her own voice. From within, legend sometimes adds, warming to its theme. Otherwise it won’t really be yours, legend, growing garrulous, appends by way of explanation.

Balderdash. I once flew a pet detective named Carl from Georgia up to Boston and paid him a small fortune to find my cat Harry. Using a poodle, a Jack Russell, a laptop and a safari vest, Carl found Harry in minutes. He was in the pantry. Alright, so I felt a little foolish. But did Carl thenceforth enjoy joint custody of Harry? Did he even want it? Did Steve Jobs personally direct Apple’s TV ads? Does Alan Dershowitz write his own books? When the cure for AIDS is found, will Big Pharma have to share it with the sufferers whose sufferings made their clinical research possible in the first place? The answers to these questions are no, no, hell no, who knows and certainly not, respectively.

Ours is an ownership society based not on ridiculous legends but on the hard science of supply and demand, in which an invisible hand clutching a pink eraser rubs out ethical qualms as swiftly as they arise. Busy executives and other patriots get this instinctively. And based on the volume of work I have this season, so do the kids.

While they chew gum and fish out their credit cards, I find their voice faster than Carl found Harry — and with a whole lot less yapping. They fill in their social media coordinates, tell me a little about themselves (from a branding perspective), they give me a half-second to give them the once-over twice, then they get lost. I do the heavy lifting, with fingertips on the keys and eyelids at half-mast.

How do I do it? Well now, wouldn’t you like to know. Sorry, that’s intellectual property. It is my original creation, it makes me who I am, it is inalienable from me and if you get near it I’ll sue your nuts off.

But I’ll give you a clue. A metaphor. Make that two metaphors, wrapped in a conceit and packed up in a parable. The renowned certified handwriting analyst Silvia Friedman says on her “TRUTH blog” that our script is “the blueprint of our brain,” inseparable from our irreducibly unique self. Just stop and think about that. Even if the latter is nowhere to be found, it can be reconstructed from the former, just as surely as you can extrapolate the whole dinosaur from his butt bone or finger fossil or whatever.

Kids, who is America’s quintessential self-made man? No, not Robert Frost, though I’ll be quoting him in your essay (roads, traveled, difference, etc.). It’s Ben Franklin. Where did he find his voice? In a forest, in a monastery? From the hidden depths within? Hah! He found it in a newspaper. He clipped some articles he wished he’d written, put them in a drawer and tried to write them from memory, took them out of the drawer and corrected his efforts, translated them into poetry and bulked them with his metastasizing vocabulary, translated them back into prose, doofussed around some more with the bulging word-mass and shoved it back in the drawer and took it back out again and I forget the details but hey presto, he’d found his voice.

Now imagine that process cranked up to warp speed with today’s microprocessors and a crack team of caffeinated lawyers buzzing around.

“If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property,” wrote Thomas Jefferson, “it is the action of the thinking power called an idea.” With all due respect, Mr. Founding Father, that depends on how killer your idea is, and how good your counsel.

Franklin, being a halfwit as well as a genius, gave away half his inventions — the lightning rod, the map of the jet stream, God knows what else. We won’t be doing that here. The voice we find will be yours and only yours. All rights reserved. It will sally forth into the world like a verbal porcupine, bristling with legal protections.

Parents, don’t go all dewy-eyed on me. Before you start in on how the best colleges and the best employers will surely want young people who can write persuasively and “think for themselves,” let me point out, with all the gentleness I can muster, that no they won’t. They’ll want people who understand credit, property, human capital and how to delegate. Your child showed great promise and initiative when she handed me your MasterCard.

“The child is father of the man,” wrote Wordsworth, and pay heed grownups, because you too will soon be coming for my services. Content, copy — “writing,” as the quaint still call it — will be the domain of the polytechnics, and after that the trade schools, with maybe the odd dude-ranch concept school like Deep Springs fitting it in between sorting slop and fixing tractors in their boutique manure version of the contemplative life.

The good news in all this is that folks like me will finally have a shot at a plumber’s salary.

You open the door to my brick-and-mortar shop and a bell jangles. A faint smell of dust and mold, a clatter of keys from the back room. I emerge from the recesses with furrowed brow, thick forearms, work apron tied taut over bulging midsection, and the craggy aloofness of the fully competent. “Can I help you?” I bark.

You bet I can. The average human adult in the 21^st century understands that he needs to hire someone to write his legal correspondence and his company’s webpage, but goes on foolishly believing himself capable of writing his own tweets, diary entries and letters to loved ones. Wake up, grown-ups. This is like wiring your own house. You have better things to do.

“We got a nice letter from Uncle Tim today,” someone in the year 2030 will say.

“Did you think so? I thought it seemed like … I don’t know. Like he’d written it himself.”

“Ah. Yes, I see what you mean. Well you know Tim, always looking to save himself a nickel.”

DIY writing will be the next generation’s Shoe Goo, a tacky, repulsive reminder of raw need and dim prospects. That said, all turning tides create a little backwash; and somewhere in the middle distance I see a rough beast slouching beard-first to Brooklyn, muttering about “classes in artisanal letter-writing.” Snicker into your shirt sleeves all you like. I’ll be selling him handcrafted paper and ink at a 1000 percent markup, keeping, as ever, a straight face.