When I hear Eminem coming out of a car stereo, my heart soars; that’s my national anthem. The F.C.C. controls the airwaves but they can’t control the streets, the Blaupunkts and the boomboxes. Maybe Eminem isn’t even really saying what he thinks, just what he thinks will piss people off, but either way the principle is the same: let him have his say.
Bono’s only real message is I’m-saying-something-nice. He doesn’t have to make sense and you don’t have to listen carefully because both of you already know what is being said and neither of you believe it: Yes, life is wonderful and yes, we are all still passionate if rather incoherent. Bono gets away with vague nonsense because all he is really giving you is permission to pretend to feel the way you wish you felt, he is giving the signal for two minutes of cheap joy not essentially that different from the two minutes of authoritarian hate that Orwell warned about. His vagueness authorizes your inattention and everybody wins.
Once you back down and stop speaking your mind you soon realize it isn’t worth the trouble to formulate your thoughts if you aren’t going to express them, and the next thing you know you don’t have thoughts anymore, just a dull rage you struggle to keep down with popcorn and liquor. Meanwhile the rewards of silence are immediate and obvious. Suddenly you get along with everyone. There is no evil in the world, only opportunity.
But once the cat has got your tongue, it’s hard to get it back. To make it back to honesty, you have to pay a double price, not only the painful labor of learning how to sort your confusion into words all over again, but the stigma attached to specific opinions and to even daring to have an opinion at all. That’s why we put experts on TV shouting matches, to parade the foolishness of even having opinions when any opinion seems to carry with it a fifty-fifty chance of being wrong, while having none gives you a 99% chance of being in the right.
Say the worst and find out if it isn’t true. If you’re thinking it, say it and find out if you’re wrong. Usually the people who are afraid to say something bad are the ones who are sure it’s true. In the upside-down world we live in, the idealists are the real cynics, the optimists the true pessimists, and our worst punishments are reserved not for actual enemies but for whoever tries to remind us of our own nature and wake us from shallow dreams.
