There’s an old reporter’s saying that they use when a story or rumor perfectly illustrates the point the reporter is trying to make but is probably not true.
A story that good, goes the saying, is “too good to check.”
If you try to verify the details you might find out that the story is untrue, or that you’ve got it backwards, or that it happened to other people in a very different way. Which means you can’t use it, no matter how well it fits into your larger story.
And who wants that?
So with that disclaimer out of the way, here’s a story I heard a few years ago that’s too good to check:
In the early 1970’s a couple is driving on a snowy highway and their car breaks down. This was, of course, before cell phones, so they try to flag down a passing car for a ride to the nearest service station.
Cars keep zipping by, despite their frantic hand waving and “please help us” pantomimes. After an hour of this, one part of the duo — probably, in my version anyway, the husband — asks his wife a question.
“Is it okay,” he asks, “if we take it down just for now?”
She thinks for a bit — perhaps considering the quickening snowfall, the darkening sky, the cars zipping by without slowing — and finally agrees.
“Okay,” she says with a sigh. “We can take it down.”
So the husband gets back in the car and removes a large, hand-lettered IMPEACH NIXON sign from the back window.
Two minutes later a nice older man in a large warm car picks them up and takes them a few miles down the road to a service station, and a few hours after that they’re back on the road.
The moral of the story — which, again, is too good to check — is this:
People do not want to hear your views.
People will tell you when you dropped your wallet, they will help you fix a flat, they will offer you a seat, tell you the time, lend you a stamp, watch your baby, pet your dog, carry over a mis-delivered package, tell you that your children are adorable, offer you a cookie, and donate a kidney.
But they do not want to hear your views.
I thought of this TGTC story when Elon Musk bought Twitter and changed its name to, inexplicably, X. And I keep thinking about it whenever I find myself on the service, scrolling through the many many viewpoints that it platforms.
In one of his first public statements after the Twitter deal closed, Musk wrote that “free speech is the bedrock of a functioning democracy, and Twitter is the digital town square where matters vital to the future of humanity are debated.”
Which sounds like the kind of thing the wife might have said to her husband, all those years ago, when she wrote “IMPEACH NIXON” in Magic Marker on a piece of cardboard and taped it to the rear window of the car.
“I don’t know, honey,” her husband might have said. “Do you think a car window is really the place for vital debate on the future of humanity?”
“Shut up and drive,” she might have explained.
There are currently about two hundred million somewhat active X users, and I’m sure many of them are very nice people. But I’m not sure any of them are there because they desire to participate in a debate about matters vital to the future of humanity. Most of them, it seems to me, are there to shout whatever the 2024 equivalent is to IMPEACH NIXON.
And after a pretty exhaustive search of Wikipedia, I have discovered that a no time in recorded human history has anyone every really wanted an actual town square, let alone one in which there was a lot of free speech.
The Greeks had the agora, of course, but speech there was hardly free. (Ask Socrates.) Nor were the city plazas of Rome, Istanbul, Paris, or Salem, Massachusetts know for free and frank exchanges of political and social discourse. Newspapers, since their conception, were mostly places for propaganda and news items reflecting a political slant. And despite their pompous claims to be centers of free enquiry, colleges and universities have been enforcing speech and thought codes for centuries.
About the only place that seemed to relish letting the crazies and blasphemers have their say was a little patch of ground in Hyde Park, London called Speaker’s Corner. It’s still there. You can find it easily — just look for the place with a weirdo on a milk crate and decent citizens hurrying by without making eye-contact.
What Elon Musk seems to want X to become is a thing that no one is asking for, a “digital town square” where everyone is always telling you what their views are, in as irritating a way as possible. He may be able to attract a certain amount of loyal users, but my guess is, at some point he’s going to have to climb into the car and take the stupid sign down.
So very true Rob. People are generally decent with one another, just so long as you don't share views perceived to be toxic by the other. Speech is less free than ever in the United States as one ends up self-censoring to better get along with their fellow human in these divisive times. Keep up the great work!
A post about a view on why nobody interested in your views.