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Buy the Book
Two Cheers for Tyrannicide
Jonah Goldberg catches liberals cheating again — big time.
The Tyranny of Clichés: How Liberals Cheat in the War of
Ideas
By Jonah Goldberg
(Sentinel, 312 pages, $27.95)
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.”
Mr. Arbuthnot skewered clichés and their user/abusers by reeling them off ad absurdum. For example, when asked what he did for exercise in the country, Mr. Arbuthnot replied: “I keep the wolf at the door, let the cat out of the bag, take the bull by the horns, count my chickens before they are hatched and see that the horse isn’t put before the cart or stolen before I lock the barn door.
Unfortunately, although his creator didn’t die until 1976, Mr. Arbuthnot’s appearances in the New Yorker were confined to the years between 1934 and 1952. It was almost half a century before another popular writer took up the cudgel (yet another appropriate cliché); in 2001, Martin Amis, one of England’s leading contemporary novelists—and the son of the great Kingsley Amis—decided to call a compilation of his best essays and criticism, The War Against Cliché. While not, strictly speaking, a polemic against the cliché itself, the Amis book demonstrated its author’s lifelong opposition to the trite, the shoddy, and the false…when and how he recognized them. Eleven years later, in a book that often reads more like a kindred collection of miscellaneous pieces than a unified text, Jonah Goldberg, a prolific and often penetrating conservative columnist and commentator, has declared war in his turn on what he calls the “tyranny” of clichés, especially as that tyranny is practiced by liberal ideologues.
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.
From time to time, he also has trouble drawing clear, logical distinctions. An example is his justified annoyance with the way many contemporary liberals casually dismiss the brutal tactics of groups like Hamas and al Qaeda with the tired bromide that “one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter.” Obviously, in some cases, the two categories overlap: as Mr. Goldberg himself acknowledges, abolitionist John Brown murdered, robbed, burned, and plundered in his self-proclaimed jihad against slavery. Similarly, the Zionists who blew up the King David Hotel, murdering many innocent civilians, and the Irish rebels who resorted to terrorist tactics against the British in their struggle for independence considered themselves freedom fighters—and were recognized as such by many sympathetic to the political objectives behind their tactics. Perhaps a better formulation would be, “Today’s terrorist may be tomorrow’s freedom fighter,” since the final labels will be assigned by the winning side once the struggle is over.
The problem lies not with the clichés themselves but with the ways in which inept writers and speakers unintentionally misuse them and—even more so—the way clever but wrongheaded writers and speakers deliberately misapply them to support false premises, whether political, philosophical, religious, or aesthetic. The worst of both worlds results when a really dumb writer deliberately tries to bend words, and Mr. Goldberg is at his best when deconstructing and dispatching the resultant liberal blather. Consider his handling of one of the best minds of my generation, Hollywood’s answer to the Delphic Oracle, Ms. Barbra Streisand. The fair Barbra attacked the Los Angeles Times for sacking Robert Scheer, a tired old lefty columnist who had littered its commentary page for too many years, and Mr. Goldberg quotes her infantile, semi-literate letter at length, briskly inventorying its contradictions, fallacies, and lapses from basic literacy. Then comes the perfect coup de grâce: the Streisand “mini-manifesto…was so syntactically impaired, if it was a horse it would have been shot.”
And how can one resist an author who begins his book with the following anecdote involving two legendary conservative prose masters?
According to legend, when George Will signed up to become a syndicated columnist in the 1970s, he asked his friend William F. Buckley, Jr.—the founder of National Review and a columnist himself—“How will I ever write two columns a week?” Buckley responded (I’m paraphrasing), “Oh it will be easy. At least two things a week will annoy you, and you’ll write about them.”
Jonah Goldberg is annoyed by the right things… that is to say, the things that are most wrong about the smug, arrogant, and willfully ignorant liberal mindset that has been rejected by most ordinary Americans but still dominates much of academia and pop culture. And, to use a few of his own words in his favor, with Jonah Goldberg, “Annoyance is an inspiration, aggravation a muse. That which gets your blood up, also gets the ink—or, these days, pixels—flowing.” Here’s hoping that Jonah Goldberg keeps annoyed—and keeps writing—for many years to come.
About the Author
Aram Bakshian, Jr. served as an aide to Presidents Nixon, Ford, and Reagan and writes frequently on politics, history, gastronomy, and the arts.
Letter to the Editor View all comments (48) | Leave a comment
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Appleby| 5.3.12 @ 6:50AM
A serious lack of vocabulary has caused many people to misstate cliches, for example "reign him in" or "tow the line", or my favourite, the counterintuitive "wreckless driving." If one tries to explain where they went off the rails (another cliche!) their eyes glaze over and they mutter, "Well YOU know what I mean!" I know what they mean because I am not illiterate. They got it wrong because they are.
Jack in Wi.| 5.3.12 @ 7:18AM
The whole career of Jonah Goldberg it built on the fact that there was a stain on Monica Lewinsky's dress. What Goldberg and gang have done to National Review is disgusting. They are talentless bunch of juveniles. I was a subcriber and financial supporter of National review for 42 years. I finally had to let my subscription lapse 10 years ago.
Soljerblue| 5.4.12 @ 1:56AM
I'll wager they're getting along just fine without your two cents -- fiscal or verbal.
spike59| 5.5.12 @ 9:46AM
"I finally had to let my subscription lapse 10 years ago."
-----------------------------------------
what was the problem, Jack; couldn't get anyone to pay for your subsrciption anymore, or couldn't find anyone willing to explain the 'big words' to you?
Alan Brooks| 5.3.12 @ 7:18AM
Jonah Goldberg is comic relief- but he is no great writer.
Alan Brooks| 5.3.12 @ 7:22AM
agreed, Jack...
did you see Rich Lowry's piece in Time magazine? this is the Lowry who wants Jeb Bush for president.
Jack in Wi.| 5.3.12 @ 7:27AM
Lowry is even more talentless then Goldberg. Buckley must have been senile when he turned his legacy over to those guys.
Alan Brooks| 5.3.12 @ 7:43AM
Correct, Lowry is an editor, THE Editor
of NR-
but he isn't much of a writer.
DTOM!| 5.3.12 @ 8:01AM
Quite a day when I find myself agreeing with JAck and Alan. But I do. NR is not even a shell of its former self. I place the inflection point at the installation of Ms. Lopez as editor. Poor thing couldn't spell and couldn't reason...
I cancelled my own damn subscription after 25 years...
Alan Brooks| 5.3.12 @ 8:55PM
They are all driving their NR car on Reagan-fumes in the tank.
cuban pete| 5.3.12 @ 9:07AM
If you are "talentless" can someone be "more talentless?" Just asking.
Mike 3/505| 5.3.12 @ 8:24PM
They appear to have a wider audience than either of you....jes sayin'
Alan Brooks| 5.3.12 @ 8:56PM
pity for them, not us!
Soljerblue| 5.4.12 @ 2:00AM
put it this way, Alan -- the market's decision is that NR writers make good money. You and WI Jack, on the other hand, make noise on various blogs.
Methinks you protest too much.
spike59| 5.5.12 @ 9:47AM
...and i'm pretty sure the NR's writers aren't living in their mommy's basement
Herb| 5.3.12 @ 7:56AM
Or, as James Thurber wrote,
"The fat is in the fire, the die is cast, the jig is up, the goose is cooked, and the cat is out of the bag."
Peppermint Tea| 5.3.12 @ 1:11PM
Avoid cliche's like the plague!
Alan Brooks| 5.4.12 @ 12:25AM
Two cheers for tyrannicide?
One cheer for Goldberg,
DTOM!| 5.3.12 @ 8:29AM
Appleby - fine point: It's 'toe the line.'
Pax.
JimH| 5.3.12 @ 11:01AM
Also rein in and reckless driving. I assume the misuse was intentional.
Appleby| 5.3.12 @ 11:22AM
It was in fact intentional, an illustration of the way the illiterati get cliches wrong, thus wreaking unintentional michief in the world.
And P.S. although it's not a cliche, Mama used to go ballistic when she saw a reporter write, "He poured over the documents."
"We do not POUR over documents," she would say tartly. "We are not Niagara Falls!"
JimH| 5.3.12 @ 12:43PM
Niagara Falls. Slowly I turned, step by step, inch by inch…
cuban pete| 5.3.12 @ 2:30PM
Jim:
I have not heard a reference to that in years. Like me you must be old.
Thanks,
cp
JimH| 5.3.12 @ 2:59PM
Old enough.
DTOM!| 5.3.12 @ 4:04PM
Doesn't Niagara fall about an inch or two a year?
spike59| 5.5.12 @ 9:49AM
NIGARA FALLS???!!!
"slowly i turned, step by step, inch by inch..."
DANG you!
Petronius| 5.3.12 @ 12:50PM
In truth, "wreckless driving" should mean arriving at one's destination without being involved in a collision. Careless is another matter.
PattyMor| 5.3.12 @ 8:22AM
My favorite cliche is, The Democrats Are For The Middle Class. This is while they will loot anyone with a dime to further their real aim: Power.
Ground Control| 5.3.12 @ 8:59AM
Frankly, I think one should avoid cliches like the plague.
Lawrence| 5.3.12 @ 9:11AM
Jack in Wi. and Alan Brooks:
I would definitely agree with the assessment that National Review has drifted very, very far from the explicit mission statement that Buckley penned, that NR would be a "vigorous and incorruptible journal of conservative opinion," but it's not uniformly awful.
Mark Steyn, Andrew McCarthy, and Victor Davis Hanson are easily among our strongest writers, and I think their writing has real staying power, and Jonah Goldberg is generally very good even if his Simpsons-and-Star-Trek shtick isn't what one would expect from a serious Buckleyite writer. Liberal Fascism deserves its reputation as a significant broadside in the war of ideas.
The problem with NR is that the wheat is buried by a lot of chaff, partially due to the decision to embrace a progressive like Romney and partially due to a big-tent view that has, at various times, given a platform to anti-theists like Stuttaford and Derbyshire, sexual relativists like Potemra and Steorts, and "moderate" hacks like Frum and Dreher.
Goldberg hasn't been immune from either tendency, as he's argued against the Buckley Rule of supporting an electable conservative in order to make the case for Romney -- that it's better that he's NOT a conservative, because it's better that he "owes" us rather than "owns" us -- and he once denigrated as "cruel and absurd" Christian sexual ethics that insist upon marriage (real marriage: lifelong heterosexual monogamy) and celibacy as the only two moral options. But generally he's better than most of NR/NRO.
The recent cover story that was sheer propaganda against the Christian opponents of Mormonism prompted me to cancel my subscription -- it was the most significant outrage, but certainly not the first.
I typically express my admiration for SOME of NR's writers and my frustration bordering on disgust for the rest by pointing out that NRO's Saturday morning one-two punch of Steyn and McCartney is usually among the best reading you'll find on any given week, but that it stands apart not only from the MSM but also from the entirely too progressive views that you find on NR during the rest of the week.
DTOM!| 5.3.12 @ 10:27AM
NR WAS uniformly excellent in the 70's, 80's, and 90's. Now it's very Jerry Ford and Nelson Rockefeller. Chris Buckley, not Wm F Jr.
And Mark Steyn and VDH are excellent, reasoning, rational, well read, and well spoken. But some of the dross is just too much. You don't need NR to access Steyn and Hanson...
I actually did get a response from one of the online editors to a complaint that they were becoming very 'compassionate' in their conservatism. The response was "So what."
TTFN NR
Don't Tread On Me...
CNR| 5.4.12 @ 12:41PM
NR has always been a chickenhawk mouthpiece, ever since Buckley broke with the traditional conservatives (like Peter Viereck) in support of Blacklist Joe McCarthy. His second book was in defense of that weasel. The fact that neoconmen run that rag should surprise no one.
Crassus| 5.3.12 @ 12:01PM
NR has become Weekly Standard II. If I want to read the Standard's brand of conservatism I'll just read the original not some pale imitation.
Lesser Weevil| 5.3.12 @ 12:32PM
Well said, Lawrence. I just let my subscription lapse after 35 years.
Peppermint Tea| 5.3.12 @ 1:13PM
"propaganda against the Christian opponents of Mormonism"
THAT must be a first.
Lawrence| 5.3.12 @ 4:28PM
It's not an exaggeration, either.
Kevin Williamson portrays Christian critics of Mormonism as unhinged, uninformed hypocrites whose faith may not even be legitimate, but he swoons over the Mormon scholars who "cooly dismantles" their arguments -- the least credible arguments against Mormonism. Christians in his Texas hometown are slandered as intolerant while the first Mormon family he met is described as well educated, attractive, extremely talented, popular, and even culturally hip.
http://www.nationalreview.com/.....williamson
The point of the article isn't to correct the record on what Mormons believe -- not one belief is actually described in any clear detail -- but to discredit critics. It's such a colossal error of judgment on the editors' part that the only principled reaction was to cancel the subscription of over 10 years and demand a refund for the outstanding balance.
Vern Crisler| 5.3.12 @ 2:18PM
What you said, Lawrence!
PolishKnight| 5.3.12 @ 11:04AM
One of the charming ways that leftists use to disguise their ignorance is to try to appear to be as educated as possible in everything else. If someone has a PhD and a government position and speaks 3 languages, how could they ever be wrong about replacing coal power plants with windmills?
Sadly, most Americans simply don't care about their warmed over marxism anymore. The vast majority of Democrat voters are either unionized government employees and cronies or illiterate racist third worlders looking for entitlements.
Appleby| 5.3.12 @ 11:24AM
Same way Jane Fonda considers herself an expert on farming because she played a farmer's wife in a movie.
DTOM!| 5.3.12 @ 4:05PM
Susan Sarandon, too...
Mike 3/505| 5.3.12 @ 8:26PM
I killed a gopher with a stick once!
albert constantine jr.| 5.3.12 @ 9:26PM
Bill Murray did it with C4 (varmint Cong).
Petronius| 5.3.12 @ 12:57PM
What would pundits do to sustain life if fecal matter coming into contact with rotating blades did not attract an audience?
therealguyfaux| 5.3.12 @ 4:12PM
George Orwell did it more succinctly and concisely over 60 years ago in Politics and the English Language, a classic essay on the subject, which it will behoove anyone who seriously cares about how language is (ab)used to read. 'Nuff said.
Michael | 5.3.12 @ 5:35PM
Hear! Hear! Or is it Here! Here?
Thank you. A delightful bit of prose about a delightful many bits of prose.
GB
POST American| 5.3.12 @ 11:15PM
---EVEN beyond the more recent
John Wheeler murder, and later
FUKISHIMA world nuclear disaster
COVER UPS-----
NOTHING ---BUT NOTHING confirms
the REALITY of full-spectrum Rockefeller
Globalist CON--troll then the SILENCE
from all quarters on MAO TSE TUNG's
picture still hanging over Tiennamen Square
----and emblazoned on the RED Chinese
currency.
------From Steven Spielberg to Rush Limbaugh
---to Ann Coulter -----NOT A PEEP!
Not even POST NDAA 1021 ---or Pelosi's
leading calls for full spectrum 'SIR--veil-ants'
for America while visiting her 'fave' EUGENICS
paradise across the Pacific.
Even your Gates EUGENICS vaccines
should melt away before the dawning
consciousness of just how profoundly
chilling the iplications of this -er--
'oversight' is.
Just another little REALITY CHECK in
this, the 11th hour of the CFR---RED China
handover and takedown op, on this, the
BURIED without a trace 60th Anniversary
of the staggeringly relevant ---yet unfolding?
-------------------KOREAN WAR---------------------.
In some REAL sense, perhaps even
John Wheeler himself fell in that
continuing ---and 'forgotten' war----?
TAKE HEED
---------------HUAC/ Nuremberg 2012----------------
spike59| 5.5.12 @ 9:53AM
i'm pretty sure there's a salve for that; check with your pharmacist-i'm GUESSING he's on 'speed dial'
shipley130| 5.5.12 @ 12:24PM
The next cliche will be Obama's "Forward".