Yawning Chasm

The words of celebrity John Mayer: “What is being black? It’s making the most of your life, not taking a single moment for granted. Taking something that’s seen as a struggle and making it work for you, or you’ll die inside. Not to say that my struggle is like the collective struggle of black America. But maybe my struggle is similar to one black dude’s.”
These are also the words of John Mayer: "I’ll be defragmenting my mental and psychological hard drive during the first seven days of the new year, and I invite you all to participate." The fact that all of these words have been widely disseminated across cyberspace may have something to do with the "digital cleanse" Mister Mayer is suggesting. He wants to be accountable for his thoughts, but sometimes they seem to come out in such a rush that he is unable to control them. Try as he might.
John Mayer is not alone. If you stick a microphone in front of just about any cognitive being, they will almost certainly deliver a gaffe or a malapropism within moments. It's almost Pavlovian, so if you find yourself in the public eye, why not do the clever thing and keep your mouth shut? Of course, then you run the risk of appearing aloof or uncaring. What will the public think? Abraham Lincoln, who never maintained a Twitter account, once suggested, "Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak out and remove all doubt." John Mayer is a pop star, but he could certainly learn a thing or two from our sixteenth president.
Or our forty-fourth. Barack Obama takes a lot of grief for his use of a teleprompter, but it is precisely the moment when he goes "off script" that the trouble begins. Are you listening, Joe Biden? And even when Sarah Palin is cribbing off her hand, she seems just as likely to put her foot into it as when she's speaking off the top of her pointy little head.
Maybe it's not the microphones at all. A few weeks ago, my wife decided to try and discover what made roosters start their mornings by screaming their lungs out. There are some who speculate that the early light hits a nerve in their brain that sets off crowing as a reflex. Maybe that's what happens when people get famous. Suddenly their brains are pushed to deliver soliloquies whenever they are caught in the spotlight. And just what connection am I drawing between John Mayer and a rooster? I leave that to you.