Opinion writing, I argued, was an easy job with a terrible cost to the soul and the mind.
Gawker because internet we cranks now professional#
Last year, I wrote a piece about what professional punditry does to a person’s mind on how constant, regular churn of opinion requires the human brain to configure itself into an alien shape and how this way of seeing the world leaves the pundit a kind of desiccated take-husk. I think we’ve lost sight of them not because they went away, but because they became unremarkable. Now, this could be that the art of penning demented letters to metropolitan newspapers on a semi-regular basis may be dying out with the last generation of people to use lead toothpaste, but I don’t think that’s it. These people have been a mainstay in the culture from the characters of Dickens to Grandpa Simpson, but recently it seems that the figure of the crank has dropped away from the public imagination. The obsessive writers of letters to the editor, the meticulous hoarders of correspondence, the avid collectors of fine and rare grudges. I am at this point going to assume we all have some familiarity with cranks. Nearly all the callers to the show were regulars. And not just want to - it was clear that these people felt compelled or obliged to. Less clear to me then was why anyone, anywhere, would want to just call up the radio to shout their opinions on any topic into the void. That’s a solid fact that’s been true for as long as we as a species have had the technology to say “poo” to a great many people at once. Now, they may have had the same question of us, but I think our reasons for doing what we did were fairly clear and watertight: it’s fun, whether you’re a 12-year-old boy or the King of England, to hear your own voice say “poo” on the radio. While we were waiting to go on we’d have to listen to the other callers - the callers who’d not phoned in to say “poo,” but to discuss the news - and as the weeks went on, I very distinctly remember thinking this to myself: Why the fuck are any of you people doing this?
We’d call up, try to disguise our 12-year-old voices as pensioners, tell the producer we wanted to talk about the topic of the day, and then when we were finally let on air, we’d blurt out something devastating like “poo” and be immediately disconnected. When I was a kid, a friend and I spent around a month prank calling a late night talk-back show.
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