Hope! Change! Together! Cliche!
By Alan Stewart Carl | Related entries in General PoliticsIn my line of work (writing marketing copy), I’m often asked not to use the word “luxury.” Why? Because so many profoundly cheap products have used the word as to render it meaningless. The same dismemberment of the language is happening in politics as well. Let’s let the great modern polemicist Christopher Hitchens lay it on the line:
It is cliché, not plagiarism, that is the problem with our stilted, room-temperature political discourse. It used to be that thinking people would say, with at least a shred of pride, that their own convictions would not shrink to fit on a label or on a bumper sticker. But now it seems that the more vapid and vacuous the logo, the more charm (or should that be “charisma”?) it exerts. Take “Yes We Can,” for example. It’s the sort of thing parents might chant encouragingly to a child slow on the potty-training uptake.
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Pretty soon, we should be able to get electoral politics down to a basic newspeak that contains perhaps 10 keywords: Dream, Fear, Hope, New, People, We, Change, America, Future, Together. Fishing exclusively from this tiny and stagnant pool of stock expressions, it ought to be possible to drive all thinking people away from the arena and leave matters in the gnarled but capable hands of the professional wordsmiths and manipulators. In the new jargon, certain intelligible ideas would become inexpressible.
Are we becoming a people devoid of complexity doomed to an Idiocracy future? Are we losing our connection to ideas expressed not in vacant clichés but in profound depth? Or is Hitchens just a curmudgeonly elitist who wants political discourse to exist primarily for the over-educated and by the over-educated?
Words matter a lot. At their best, they can inspire monumental acts and change millions of minds. But they are also bluntly utilitarian, simple tools we use for most of our daily communication. Political discourse must walk the divide between language as art and language as hammer. Politicians are expected to raise us up while also detailing the 24-steps to social security solvency – and they get no more than a short speech or a catchy phrase in which to capture their full essence. The distillation process rarely creates a smooth result.
Political slogans like corporate taglines should never be considered the end-all, be-all of communication. If you buy Nike because you feel like just doing it, you’re an idiot. Likewise, any voter who chooses a candidate based on their slogans is already living in their own idiocracy. I have a little more faith than Hitchens that, beneath the gauze of banality, real discussions are happening – not everywhere and maybe not even by the majority, but by enough voters and enough politicians to keep the abuse of language from becoming an abuse of governance.
Still, Hitchens’ point should not go without consideration. We must be careful to remember a well-worded cliché is still a cliché. Inspirational speeches should inspire us to act for better causes not just inspire goosebumps.
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March 3rd, 2008 at 3:34 pm
[...] chuckle from Donklephant: "If you buy Nike because you feel like just doing it, you’re an idiot." [...]
March 3rd, 2008 at 3:43 pm
[...] Justin on Hitchens: Words matter a lot. At their best, they can inspire monumental acts and change millions of minds. But they are also bluntly utilitarian, simple tools we use for most of our daily communication. Political discourse must walk the divide between language as art and language as hammer. Politicians are expected to raise us up while also detailing the 24-steps to social security solvency – and they get no more than a short speech or a catchy phrase in which to capture their full essence. The distillation process rarely creates a smooth result. [...]
March 3rd, 2008 at 4:24 pm
“Is Hitchens just a curmudgeonly elitist?” Well, yes. But I don’t think political discourse is doomed to continue a downward spiral. Banal, pithy slogans have been around for decades, but there have always been - and I hope will always continue to be - people who question simplistic answers to difficult problems and demand candidates go into more detail about their positions.
For example, we have blogs, where we can discuss this sort of thing. And since I wasn’t blogging back in 2000, I’d just like to say that the meaningless catchphrase “compassionate conservatism” annoyed me to no end during that campaign.
March 3rd, 2008 at 4:29 pm
To make matters worse, human language is incapable of accurately describing full ranges of understanding. There are countless paradoxes that exist within our language that display this lack of range I am talking about. Examine these three statements, as an example:
1. Nobody is everybody. (How is everybody be noboday when they are clearly everybody? But how can everybody be “every”body? Nobody is that.)
2. This statement is false. (If this statement is false, then that would mean that it’s false that this statement is false, which would mean that it’s true. But how can it be true if it is false?)
3. I know nothing. (How can you know that you know nothing, if you know nothing?)
These are paradoxical statements that are both true and false at the same time. Yet, the only real reason why they are that way is simply due to the language and it’s inability to go beyond such a scope of paradox.
My point is that our language limits us, and many of the things we say are simply folly.
March 3rd, 2008 at 5:06 pm
Hitchens is “on the money” — the problem is that one can not so easily seperate language from thought/ideas. We can’t say, “well, really we mean deeper things, but it is more effective marketing to condense it into the meaningless bumper-sticker idiocy for the great unwashed.” Language, thought and ideas are inextricably connected, so that a dumping down of one, leads almost simultaneously, to a dumping down of the other. This is way William F. Buckley was an intellectual and ideological hero and why, Bill O’Reilly, is a populist moron. WFB was about ideas/history, the other is about marketing and manipulation. We leave in a depressing era of total stupidity.
March 3rd, 2008 at 7:53 pm
Ted Kennedy recently said the present American population was the most under informed over stimulated population in history. Based upon what Hitchens says, I too believe there is a small percentage of the population that actually does involve itself in deep political discourse and intelligent thoughtful conversation. Unfortunately for our nation however, there appears to be a huge percentage of the population that looks for distraction and escape. I like to read Mark Twain from time to time and it would appear that in the late 19th century we had pretty much the same two issue’s without much additional thought. I try not to feel to depressed when I think about the state of things, and wish the American people would stop taking what they have for granted - maybe that’s asking too much. Two things are certain, and have always been certain -”there are 2 constants in the Universe, death and stupidity.
March 3rd, 2008 at 7:59 pm
Which came first, the sound bite or the short attention span? Recently The Moderate Voice had this wonderful piece where you could hear a speech delivered by Teddy Roosevelt. What kind of news coverage would it get now? How much would be taken out of context or condemned as elitist? It’s unfortunate that it has come to pass.