Card 1:
1st Answer/Question: Do you really want to hurt me? This is the kind of question one asks in desperation, hoping for an honest answer while appealing to the other's higher self. If the other is a liar - and who isn't? - or has no higher self, any answer which uses words only adds to the deceit.
Still, it is said the truth will out. The abusive alcoholic father of an abusive alcoholic friend of mine once told me that he loved the song Do You Really Want To Hurt Me? when it first came out, believing it was sung by a black female R&B singer from the US. When he found out it by a liberal band from England headed by Boy George he felt cheated, and I dare say implicated, and his love of the song turned to hatred. In other words, although people deceive others and themselves, if you give them an inch of rope they'll hang themselves with it a mile down the road. All questions are rhetorical, as are all answers, save those asked and rejoined with action.
precious people always tell me...
Lovers never ask you why
Card 2:
2nd Answer/Question: Are 'friends' electric? It's appropriate to have a question about questions answered with the King of Air - the suit of thought and discernment embodied by a crown head of sorts. Gary Numan has Asbergers, which may account for his interest in robots and alienation and his difficulty with people and feelings. It may also account for why 'friends' is in inverted commas in Numan's song title since friends must remain essentially theoretical.
Lyrics from the 80s fall into 2 categories: a.) those so obvious that a deaf illiterate child from 13th Century Mongolia could understand them and b.) those so obscure even God who is omniscient doesn't quite get them. Are 'Friends' Electric? falls into the latter category, but piecing together comments made by Gary and God, it seems the song concerns a lonely man in a hotel in the future (circa. 2009) who hires a cyborg prostitute. Although no one knew that this was what the song was about - indeed, perhaps because no one knew - it became a huge hit. Is this another way of saying questions are stupid because people can't really understand them and just say whatever comes into their heads and sounds good in the moment before they move on to the next hit? Or is it another way of asking if questions can be answered meaningfully at all, or at least any more meaningfully than they can be asked? Or are all questions tric questions?
So now I'm alone
Now I can think for myself
About little deals
And issues
And things that I just don't understand
Like a white lie that night
Or a slight touch at times
I don't think it meant anything to you
It should be noted that Gary Numan, just as Are 'Friends' Electric and its album Replicas was on top of the charts, fired his band The Tubeway Army. The reason for this was he had become infatuated with synthesizers and realized that he didn't need other people around, with their messy emotions. Like a hired cyborg prostitute, Gary could get along fine on his own, just him and his electric 'friend'. The question, then, becomes: what is a friend? And more: where do one's loyalties lie? It's lonely at the top, just you and your royalties, in a Wembley Stadium full of humans. And you know what they say: power corrupts.
You know I hate to ask
But, are 'friends' electric?
Mine's broke down
And now I've no one to love
.