Thursday, April 16, 2009

Do You Want Trites With That?

Dear Children:

Can you stick with me on a complicated topic?

Picture a predicament that comes up every day, is a source of conflict, is not taught in school and (most of the time) goes unacknowledged.  Picture a set of terms that everyone uses and no one understands.  Picture an impossibility that regularly substitutes for observable reality.

That would be cliché.

Just to be clear, cliché refers to overused but accepted expressions. A bromide, to make a fine distinction, is an unoriginal expression in response to an original happenstance.  Both are applicable here.  Old wives tales, chestnuts, rules of thumb and platitudes may also serve proxy.

Most of the time we easily recognize cliché for what it is: no problem.  It’s just something harmless that gets said to fill up the space between important things.  Most of the time a bromide is the gloss we use to brighten an otherwise dull recitation on a dull subject.  Whether there are any old wives around to enlighten us is debatable.  Most of the time a rule of thumb simply gets us past pesky precision.

It’s the gooey middle ground between the nugget of truth that first spawned the cliché and the rocky hard place of something you can take to the bank – something on which you can depend – that’s the problem.

See, each of us has at least some values, ideals, principles and ethics that suit us well enough – that make sense to us.  We use cliché as shorthand.  “Honesty is the best policy”, as we have discussed before, is a rich tapestry of interdependent threads that are well attended using cliché.  Each of us shares some of these values and threads and differs on others.  That’s okay too.  A little divergence here and there is healthy and makes us hardier.

No, it’s dependability that we need.  Cliché doesn’t work outside our little circle – our tiny circle of shared ideals and established ethical constructs.  Witness our consternation with pirates and rogue states and terrorists and warlords and animists and communists and anarchists and any others with whom we differ fundamentally.  There’s no shorthand to make common cause with those who don’t and won’t share our codes, customs and dispositions.

There are terms for this too: Culture Clash, Racial Narrative, Class Struggle, Received Truth, Religious Animus, Homophobia, White Guilt and (my personal favorite) Self Loathing all come readily to mind.  No definitions need to be made here.  They are mostly cliché about cliché.  They describe Cliché Conflict.

Nobody expects you to solve intractable human relations problems.  For now, let’s confine ourselves to the everyday and close at hand.  In that spirit, here are some tests for sorting out the harmless from the tricky cliché.

If you are asked not only to agree, but to agree in some specific and fulsome way, you just might be in a cliché conflict.

 If you must recite some prescribed mantra or pay some humbug lip service to be admitted into a community, you just might have a cliché conflict.

If you are dealing with someone for whom jargon takes precedence over substance, you just might be in a cliché conflict.

If you express a thought that is met with anger, resentment or sullen silence and you have been sincere and kindly, you just might have a cliché conflict.

If your colleague is only interested in opinions she shares, you have just observed cliché conflict.

If you are accused of being unable to “get” something by virtue of your race, gender or similar circumstance, you just might have been stung by cliché conflict.

There are lots of examples.

Suffice to say that when argot stands in for thought, pique substitutes for engagement and exclusivity relies solely on the plainly apparent, it’s unlikely to be your problem.  You are better than that.  You have been taught to actively engage, look beneath the surface and to mistrust inconsequential certainty.  You are willing to be convinced by force of argument and not by earsplitting harangue.

It may be hard to hear in this age when we honor diversity and embrace differences, but people who will not try to understand you are the ones with the problem.  There isn’t much we can do about it either.  There is no percentage in a program to kiss a bully into right relationship, for instance. Other means need to be employed.

Cliché then, while useful, is merely a basket of thin reeds that neither protect nor instruct.

I’m just sayin’.

Much Love,

Poppy



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