If you want the budget to go from pointless pandering to shimmering strategising, all in a microsecond, change the TV channel. Talking heads with faultless credentials spit and stamp on each other’s opinions at deafening decibels.
Greatly empowered by our cosy echo chambers, we forward violently contradictory analyses with self-important glee. The price of onions may be rising, but opinions come free.
And your opinion is wrong!
Look, I’ve even got a forward to show you how wrong you are. You then send me three forwards that proclaim that your opinion is more right than mine — that is the opinion of the person who forwarded the forwarded opinion to the one who forwarded it to you.
No one wins, of course. That’s the whole point. No one even pretends to try. You and I, who shared a class bench, homework, lipstick, secrets, and tiffin, now social distance farther than the coronavirus would ever get us to.
It started with that political post. You called the politician I worship, a worm. I called yours a buffalo’s bladder. A week later, we laughed, made up, and I posted again. About the economy or footpaths or cricket, I’ve forgotten. “You’re wrong, you were always wrong,” you said, “Even back in Class 3 in that Maths sum I copied from you.” “You always lied through your teeth,” I retorted, “Little wonder you’ve got such gaps between them.”
Later, you blamed your unforgivable rant on the heat. And I objected; it had been a cold day. “It wasn’t even day,” you snapped, “It was night.” You’ve always been two-faced, I fumed. I’d always talked rubbish, you raged. You were stupid. I was snobbish. No surprise you got the sum wrong in Class 3. It was Class 4. Your memory has gaps wider than those in your teeth. My eyes were so squinty I could never tell the truth if it danced in front of me.
Before we flush three decades of best friendship down the loo (you always said ‘restroom’, you pretentious prude!), hear this: the head lice you had back in school wormed their way into your brain and destroyed it. As I close my browser, I see you telling everyone I secretly ate chalk which made me delusional.
Whatever you believe, you’re wrong. Whatever I say is wrong before I say it. There is only one way to see it: you’re wrong unless you agree with me that you’re wrong.
Where Jane De Suza, author of Flyaway Boy, pokes her nose into our perfect lives.
