American Consequences - August 2019

driving his 12-year-old protagonist mad, as an “ever present cascade of ‘Noise.’” It’s also the premise of a 2000 rom-com starring Mel Gibson and Helen Hunt, What Women Want , which is scary in the sense of being a frighteningly bad movie. Mel Gibson gets a shock from his electric hairdryer. (He has a hairstyle from the year 2000.) This causes him to be able to hear what women think. They aren’t thinking good things about him. Being that it’s a romantic comedy – as opposed to something closer

and says, “What we’ve got here is... failure to communicate.” Or, more succinctly, by Joan Rivers: “Can we talk?” The hazards of talking too much are proverbial. The Oxford Dictionary of American Proverbs has 52 entries on the subject of “talk” and “talking” – all of them admonishments:

Big talk will not boil the pot. Idle talk burns the porridge. Talk is easy, work is hard. Big talker, little doer. Who talks the most knows the least. People who wouldn’t

“ If the medium is

think of talking with their mouths full often speak with their heads empty. in two years, but it takes him sixty years to learn to keep his mouth shut.

to real life such as a terrifying YA novel – this makes Mel Gibson (after much predictable plot) a better person. Although not in real

blather-by-the-billions, the message is a load of crap.

A child learns to talk

Crap and vicious crap. Crap thrown with intent.

Money talks, but all it ever says is goodbye. Or, as my mom also said, “Not everything that runs through your mind has to pour out your mouth.” With social media, we’ve done something worse than create a world where we can hear what everybody says. We’ve created a world where we can hear what everybody thinks . And that’s a scary thought. Scary enough that it’s the premise of a terrifying 2008 young-adult novel by Patrick Ness called The Knife of Never Letting Go . Ness describes the phenomenon, which is

life. In 2006, Gibson got in a lot of trouble for an anti-Semitic outburst at a Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputy who’d pulled Mel over for suspected DUI. After we got to hear what Mel was thinking, he had to enter a substance abuse recovery program... which should remind us that we’ve always had a way to hear what everybody thinks. (It’s called booze.) Sure puts my mouth in gear. Meanwhile what social media should be drinking is a big cup of shut up.

American Consequences

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