timeimmortal

David Warren provides a most appropriate reflection, which I have chosen to use to re-open blogging after pausing a while to mark my wife’s birthday.

Some young aspiring journalist — obviously fishing for secrets of the trade — asked me the other day in email: “Do you purposely say things that are outrageous?”

“No,” I replied, “people are not so easy to shock, and these days everyone is used to the outrageous. Outrageous statements, and especially, outrageous half-truths and outright lies, will never ‘bring the ceiling down’. For if they did, politicians would never say them, let alone endlessly repeat them. Politicians, journalists, lawyers, university professors, and the other lower orders, constantly say the most outrageously untrue things, for the simple reason that they are so common, so uncontroversial. Nobody bats an eye.

“No,” I continued, “if you really want to bring the house down, say something that is obviously true. But it has to be something everyone knows, at least in his heart; something that everyone is thinking — subconsciously perhaps, but fairly near the surface. Be the first person to say aloud what everyone in the room is thinking, and then you may watch the ceiling come down.”

Amen. This is as good an answer to the question of why your good blogger, O Reader, does what he does as could be hoped for.

~ by Kenneth on August 7, 2008.