Sally cared. Should I?

For about 20 years I wrote a weekly newspaper column. It was popular, often funny (I hoped) and offered (I also hoped) some insights into the peculiarities of life in what was then the last quarter of the 20th Century.

I liked writing my column because it helped my thought processes. I also liked it because it was popular. It won a few newspaper awards, and people would stop me in the street to tell me how much it meant to them. A public declaration that immediately made me like the people who said such things to me. Nobody writes who doesn’t have an ego. In that I (and probably the rest of us who blog here or write elsewhere) must be honest.

I once mentioned here an incident in which a reader asked me why I didn’t declare myself politically in my column. I replied that I didn’t want to alienate half my readership by so doing. I meant it at the time, but what I maybe didn’t ‘get’ was that some of my motivation in writing the column was ‘people pleasing.’ I didn’t want to come out and declare myself because I wanted my readers to ‘like’ me. I was like Sally Field when she won her Oscar – “You like me! You really, really like me!” Nothing wrong with that. It’s better to be liked than disliked in a world gone mad. There are pressures enough all around us, surely. But, at the same time, if I find myself refraining from stating what I truly believe for the sake of placating readers, then I am compromising my integrity.

And, no, I’m not going to declare my politics, because they change day-by-day, depending on whom I’m pissed off with. I’m like WC Fields in that I always vote ‘against.’

But, speaking of pissing off, I am put in mind of a bit of wisdom offered by octogenarian (and still going strong) author, Norman Mailer. He recently offered the following insight into the writer’s craft – and obligation:

“…most writers who are timid are afraid of pissing people off because they feel they’ll lose part of their audience. My feeling has always been that one mustn’t be afraid of that. It’s much better to write with the notion that if you’re good enough, you can change people’s lives. That’s one of the powerful motives of writing, to feel that you’ve enlarged other people’s consciousness…”

In essence, I agree with Mailer. And maybe when I’m 83 I’ll have the self-confidence to have completely shucked all manifestations of people pleasing. I don’t think I’m necessarily a timid writer, but sometimes I believe I don’t have the ‘right’ to ram my opinions down the throats of others. Yet, at the same time, I have always loved inflammatory writers. I enjoy people (in literature and in life) who say exactly what they think, even if what they think is (in my esteem) bullshit. Such people may not be popular, but they possibly don’t care all that much.

Just some thoughts on this Monday morning. Gee, I hope you ‘liked’ it and then, by default, ‘liked’ me.