Do Liberals Live Under A 'Tyranny Of Cliches'?

[Valin]

NPR:

Steve Inskeep

May 2, 2012

 

Conservative critic Jonah Goldberg says he's inspired to write when he gets annoyed. "Aggravation is a muse," he says. And after speaking on a number of college campuses, he grew aggravated enough to write a book. It's called The Tyranny of Cliches: How Liberals Cheat in the War of Ideas.

 

"One of the things that really drove me crazy was the way in which college kids in particular are educated to think that ideology is dangerous and bad. They'll say, you know, 'Mr. Goldberg, that sounds like an ideological statement,' when I'm talking about tax cuts or something. ... Of course it's an ideological statement. You know I'm a conservative; I was asked to come here and be a conservative," Goldberg says.

 

Goldberg, a columnist and editor-at-large for National Review Online, argues that ideology is not something to be shunned — in fact, it's an inevitable part of political debate. "We are a species that must try to impose and find systems — systems of thought, ways of organizing and categorizing reality," he says.

 

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My personal favorite

[Valin]

[Valin]

Two Cheers for Tyrannicide

Aram Bakshian, Jr.

May 2012

 

Like that humble survivor, the common cockroach, the cliché will always be with us…and that is not entirely a bad thing. Carefully chosen and properly applied, a cliché can become a concentrated dose of common sense, folk wisdom or simple truth. When, way back in the 1960s, then-Vice President Hubert Humphrey warned that pressuring the South Vietnamese government to negotiate power sharing with the communist Viet Cong would be like “letting the fox into the chicken coop,” he was using a cliché. But he was using it as an effective image to reinforce a valid point. (All too valid, as subsequent events would prove.)

 

At its best, a cliché is a triumph of linguistic Darwinism: one of that small, brave band of phrases that acquire lasting resonance and find a permanent—or at least long-term—place in the language and life of a people. Unfortunately, like so many of us, clichés are seldom at their best…and we notice them most at their least favorable moments. No one understood this better than Frank Sullivan, a talented contributor to the New Yorker during its long-gone salad days (to use an appropriate cliché), when most of its articles still managed to be as clever as its cartoons. Today Sullivan is best remembered, by those who remember him at all, as the creator of Mr. Arbuthnot, “The Cliché Expert.”

 

(Snip)

 

Readers who enjoyed Mr. Goldberg’s first book, Liberal Fascism, will find plenty to appreciate in The Tyranny of Clichés. The same high energy, nimble argument and welcome flashes of humor that helped to make Liberal Fascism a best-seller are on ample display here, and, if one is willing to accept The Tyranny of Clichés as an exercise in advocacy rather than belles lettres, there is much to admire and little to complain of. In 24 short, not-always-cohesive chapters, Mr. Goldberg takes on—and usually bests—liberal semantic folly and abuse in fields as vast and varied as ideology, pragmatism, diversity, dogma, dissent, science, and religion. His writing is never dull, but there are times when less (to use another appropriate cliché) might have been better than more. In his effort to dazzle the reader, Mr. Goldberg sometimes piles on superfluous layers of marginal trivia the way someone’s elderly aunt might clutter a small collection of genuine objets d’art with a few too many tchotchkes.

 

(Snip)