I published this, in 2018—about something I’d published in 2014. I’m afraid it didn’t go far enough either time. —DM
***
Four years ago here, I called for a National Shut the Fuck Up Day, which I described this way:
I think it would be good to have one day of the year when everyone—this means you—just seriously shuts the fuck up.
No pouring buckets of water on your head and challenging other assholes to pour buckets of water on their heads in the next 24 hours.
No self-important complaints about a company that screwed you over.
No stories on Huffington Post about Isis, right next to a story about an actress showing “sideboob.”
No hot-faced conjecture about what did or didn’t happen on a street in a town you never heard of two weeks ago (let alone in the minds of two people you’ve never met).
None of that shit.
You go to Facebook, and it’s just white space.
You go to The New York Times, and the headline is, SHUTTING THE FUCK UP … and there’s no story to click through to.
You turn on CNN, and Wolf Blitzer is just sitting at his desk in the Situation Room, thinking.
And you realize you might as well spend the day shutting the fuck up, since everyone else is.
And so you do.
You shut the fuck up.
Just for one day.
Just to see how it feels.
When? How about tomorrow?
Yeah, I didn’t think so.
Those were simpler times, when only a day of shutting the fuck up was required.
I think this country could do with a week of shutting the fuck up. A Shut the Fuck Up Week.
And whatever you think about current events, I’m pretty sure you agree with me on this.
So let’s do it.
Let’s shut the fuck up.
Starting next week?
Yeah, I didn’t think so.
***
Everywhere I turn these days—FOX, CNN, MSNBC, Writing Boots—I just want everybody to shut the fuck up. Which is tough, for a guy who makes his living celebrating the power of rhetoric to “promote greater social understanding.”
But what about the idea, that We the People might actually do some good for society by listening “imaginatively,” as I put it in the book, to Others the People who (however astonishingly) don’t vote like we do?
If I thought that notion might appeal to anybody at this moment, I guess I would have tried hard to hawk the book during this election season. I haven’t.
I’ve joked with friends that a 2024 sequel to An Effort to Understand might be something like, Fuck You, You Ass.
I also relate to an old Stephen Wright joke.
“I went down the street to the 24-hour grocery. When I got there, the guy was locking the front door. I said, ‘Hey, the sign says you’re open 24 hours.’ He said, ‘Yes, but not in a row.'”
Similarly, I don’t try to make an effort to understand other people all the time. Why? Because I need chunks of time to make the other bastard understand me. Other chunks of time to hang around people who think like me and drink to our wisdom and courage. And still more chunks of time to vote my conscience and to prod other reachable people to vote the right way, too.
So yes, I still agree with Robert F. Kennedy, who told a grieving Black audience the night that Martin Luther King was shot that we need to make an effort in this country, to understand one another. And I try to take every chance to understand and even see how we share others’ motivations. To accept the possibility that they came to their convictions as honestly (or dishonestly) as we came to ours. As a friend recently almost screamed about some warm, good-humored, generous Trump voters she’d just met: “I want to get in their heads!”
Me too. But I don’t want to live there.
An Effortto Understand was misunderstood from the start by some, as a promise of neutrality. It never was that. The compulsively even-handed are just as corrosive as the blindly partisan.
The legendary PR titan Robert Dilenschneider sent out a note yesterday to his mailing list:
The upcoming Trump-Harris election will be the most important presidential election in our lifetime. Perhaps in our history. Why? Because the disparity in governmental policies and programs could not be greater. The outcome may well determine whether the USA will continue as a world leader and prime force. It is not an overstatement to say that the safety and security of the free world is at stake, as never before.
For all registered voters reading this note, we know you will vote on November 5, and we urge you to ask all you know to cast their ballots.
But he didn’t reveal who he’s voting for! I don’t care who vote for, only that you vote was a nice sentiment about Dukakis/Bush in 1988. Isn’t it a little disingenuous in an election that you think has existential implications for the nation and the world itself?
What, in order to reveal and argue your political point of view, are you waiting for? Does the entire Milky Way galaxy have to be at stake?
Yes, it’s good to make an effort to understand what’s going on. It’s also imperative, at least once every four years, to arrive at an understanding.
My mom taught me to cross my fingers whenever an ambulance went by, for the person inside. Now that I’ve lived long enough to wear out my electric nose-hair trimmer, when an ambulance screams by on Western Avenue, I mutter, “Fuckin’ showoff.”
