Politics & Power Quote by Stanley Crouch

Crouch’s line lands like a backhanded civics lesson: the problem isn’t that Americans don’t have opinions, it’s that we’ve lost the patience to hear one develop. The repetition of “somebody” works as a jab at how quickly we depersonalize speakers into avatars of tribes, takes, and demographics. Before the sentence is even finished, we’ve already filed the person under a category and started composing the rebuttal.

The key word is “patient.” Crouch isn’t praising politeness; he’s defending the slow labor of comprehension. In a culture trained by TV pacing, debate formats, and later the dopamine churn of online life, waiting becomes a kind of intellectual vulnerability. If you pause long enough to “figure out what somebody is saying,” you might discover they’re smarter than your first impression, or worse, that they’re saying something that complicates your side’s script. That’s the subtext: impatience isn’t just a bad habit, it’s a strategy for staying unchallenged.

The sly twist is the final clause: “Somebody might actually be saying something.” It’s comic, but not gentle. Crouch implies we’ve built a public sphere where the default assumption is emptiness - noise, branding, posture - so meaning feels like an upset. Coming from a critic who championed craft, argument, and the discipline of attention (especially in jazz and cultural criticism), it reads as a defense of listening as an ethical act: treat speech as potentially substantive before you treat it as target practice.