Black Eyed Peas – "Shut Up" (2003)

Shut up, just shut up, shut up!

Shut up, just shut up, shut up!

Shut up, just shut up, shut up!

Shut it up, just shut up, shut up!

The Paper is a 1994 movie that depicts 24 hours in the life of a money-losing New York City newspaper. 

In one scene, metro editor Henry Hackett (Michael Keaton) has an urgent request to make of editor-in-chief Bernie White (Robert Duvall).  But before Henry can ask his question, Bernie launches into a rant about his paper’s columnists:

Bernie:  I hate columnists!  Why do I have all these columnists?  I got political columnists, guest columnists, celebrity columnists . . . the only thing I don't have is a dead columnist.  That's the kind I could really use.

Henry:  Right.  Listen . . .

Bernie:  We reek of opinions.  What every columnist at this paper needs to do is to shut the f*ck up! 

Bernie was definitely on to something.  His only mistake was in limiting his “shut-the-f*ck-up” advice to newspaper columnists.

Although newspaper columnists are #1 on the list of people who need to shut the f*ck up, that advice needs to be taken to heart by just about everyone.  

Which is why it’s the second commandment of The Church of 2 or 3 Lines.

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Judith Martin, who writes the syndicated “Miss Manners” column, is one of the few Washington Post columnists who doesn’t need to shut the f*ck up.

A recent “Miss Manners” featured a letter from a reader who wondered whether it was still considered a breach of etiquette to bring up religion or politics when conversing with one’s fellow guests at a dinner party.  

Here is her reply:

Have you tried, lately, talking with someone with whom you disagree?

Had this not been an old rule, designed to free social life from cantankerous strife, Miss Manners would have had to invent it.

Mind you, she would happily abandon the rule if she could hope to welcome an exchange of ideas. That would be a boon to democracy, as well as a much-needed stimulus to good conversation.

But people no longer exchange ideas; they exchange insults. This is not new, just particularly bad right now. 

The rule surely dates to the first time someone countered a statement with, “Then you must be an idiot” instead of, “Why do you think that?”

 

(This book should be in your library!)

By the way, asking “Why do you think that?” only works if you are sincerely interested in the other party’s opinion, and open-minded enough to give that opinion full and fair consideration.  It does no good to say “Why do you think that?” when you’ve already decided the other party is an idiot, and you’re only interest in hearing his or her reasoning is so you can more effectively belittle him or her.

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I had hoped that all the election-related bullsh*t on social media and elsewhere would die down once the election was a couple of months in our collective rear-view mirror.  But nothing has really changed.  It is still impossible in this country to have an actual conversation about anything that is even remotely related to politics.

Things are fine and dandy as long as you simply agree with and affirm everything the person you’re speaking with says.

But if you express the slightest disagreement with the statements or opinions of someone who is anti-Trump, he or she will immediately accuse you of being a Trump supporter and go off on an anti-Trump rant.

The same thing happens in reverse if you question anything that a pro-Trump person says.

So I’ve decided just to shut the f*ck up until people are prepared to listen to what those with differing points of view have to say and then respond politely and respectfully rather than jumping down the other person’s throat.

*     *     *     *     *

It’s not going to be easy for me to stick to that.  But I know I’ll be sorry if I don’t, so I’m self-censoring myself.

For example, an investment firm recently surveyed Americans who are eligible to receive checks under the recently-enacted $1.9 trillion stimulus law.

Nearly 40% of those people said they planned to invest some of government stimulus money they would receive.  Given that a lot of the money from the earlier rounds of stimulus payments was saved rather than spent, that doesn’t really surprise me.

What does surprise me is that those people said they would invest more money in bitcoin than in stocks.  In fact, the survey indicates that Americans might invest something like $25 billion of their stimulus money in bitcoin.

I found that absolutely astonishing.  I know bitcoin has had an incredible run over the past few months, but I’m shocked that so many average Americans would even consider buying it – much less spend part of their stimulus checks on something so speculative.  (The average household income of those surveyed was only $55,000 so we’re not talking about wealthy people here.)

I almost posted a link to a news story about the survey to Facebook – without commenting on it.  But I decided not to do that because I knew that people would accuse me of being a Trump-loving assh*le if I did.  

Supporters of the new $1.9 trillion stimulus legislation in general – and the $1400-per-person stimulus checks in particular – believe that Americans were in dire need of government help to get through the pandemic-caused recession even if they had never lost their jobs.  (The stimulus bill contained separate funding for those who had lost their jobs.  But the $1400 checks are going not only to the unemployed but also to the millions of people who continued to work and receive their regular paychecks throughout the pandemic.)  

Obviously, someone who is planning to use his or her stimulus money to invest in bitcoin probably isn’t doing too badly – they likely have plenty of money to buy food and pay the rent.  So the survey findings provided ammunition to those who argued that it wasn’t necessary to spend $1.9 trillion – that a smaller amount would have been enough to help all those who really needed help.

Of course, there are a number of reasons why the survey’s results are not dispositive of the question of whether the new stimulus bill’s spending provisions are excessive.  (For one thing, even if some survey respondents say they are going to spend some of their stimulus money on bitcoin, they might not actually do that once the checks arrive – making their survey responses meaningless.)

I would have been interested in hearing what my Facebook friends might have had to say about the survey’s results, and what those results imply about the wisdom of the $1400 stimulus payments.  We all might have actually learned something from such an exchange. 

But I knew that such a post was more likely to result in people telling me to keep sucking Trump’s you-know-what.  So I decided to shut the f*ck up.

Expect me to stick to posting photos of my grandchildren on Facebook for the time being – nothing political from this guy!

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“Shut Up” was released in 2003 on the Black Eyed Peas third studio album, Elephunk.

It was a huge international success, topping the charts in twelve countries – including France, Germany, and Italy.  (It made it to the #2 spot in three other countries, including the UK.)

You American fans of 2 or 3 lines have have probably never heard “Shut Up” because it was not released as a single in the U.S.

Click here to listen to watch the official “Shut Up” music video.

Click on the link below to buy the song from Amazon: