By Jim Hagarty
I was listening to two seasoned radio announcers one day a while back when one of the men brought up a topic the other was not comfortable discussing.
“I’m not going there,” the second guy, who has to be close to retirement, said to the first, who chuckled in instant recognition of what his on-air partner was saying. I forget the subject. Maybe it was Monica Lewinsky.
If these shadows of long-gone radio days are now using the language of some hip young U.S. sitcom characters, what hope is there for the rest of us?
Across the country, people by the hundreds of thousands are not going there. Wives are ordering husbands, “Don’t go there!” when they ask them how their trip with the kids to the library went. Kids tell their mother, “Don’t go there, Mom!” when she wants to know why she has found mouldy peanut butter sandwiches in the bottom of their knapsacks. Friends in conversation agree not to go there when a line of discourse, pursued, might take them into an area of their relationship they’d rather not explore.
It seems not unlikely to me that some sinner at the Pearly Gates is, at this very moment, cautionning St. Peter to not go there, when the pre-admission interviewer wanted to inquire about the huge gambling debts the poor soul inflicted on his family before losing his last bet.
When the heck did we all become so reluctant to go there? What a long way we’ve come from the 1960s when we were all enjoined to “let it all hang out.” Now, supposedly, are we not only not willing to let it all hang out, we’re not even prepared to look at the thing we’re not prepared to hang out.
The irony is, though the talk was brave 45 years ago, little of substance was ever truly discussed. Today, though we say we won’t go there, we rarely restrain ourselves from doing so. In fact, we’re there at the drop of a hat. No topic is really “there” not to go to. A couple of years back, on continentwide radio, Melissa Gilbert, one of the girls on the popular TV show Little House on the Prairie, openly discussed her sexual habits, telling listeners where she did it for the first time and revealing the name of the boy who stole her virginity. Certainly no reluctance to go there on her part. If one of Charles Ingalls’ daughters is willing to tell the masses details of her first sexual encounter, it may, in fact, be time for our governments to pass laws ordering people not to go there.
What’s also curious is how quick we are not to go there when ordered not to go there by someone with whom we’re conversing. We roll over, laugh a dirty little laugh and move on, wink, wink, nod, nod. Doesn’t anybody anywhere ever insist on the right to go there any more? “Don’t tell me not to go there. I’m already there and if you know what’s good for you, you’ll go there, too,” should be the response, at least once in a while.
Given the ease with which lines of questioning are deflected by simple commands not to go there, it seems unimaginable that Bill Clinton’s team of lawyers didn’t suggest the president put this potent curiosity-deflector to work. Instead of saying he never had sex with “that” woman, Monica Lewinsky, he should have just told the reporters assembled at that infamous news conference to not go there.
And they probably have wouldn’t have.
Now, that’s one there I wouldn’t have minded being left there.
I’d tell you why, but really, let’s not go there.
There. I said it.
