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.
