The Tripod

I recently watched the Presidential Debate on YouTube.com. I did not hear anything particularly surprising. McCain successfully reminded me that he has had a sufficient amount of political experience, although I am still unsure of how much experience one has to acquire before one can be deemed "experienced". Obama played his role of the optimistic and youthful force of "change" and "hope" quite well. I "hope" that soon he will identify the "changes" he will make. "Hope," "change," "experienced": these are all clichés. The American populace has recently fallen victim to the destructive force of clichés. It is a force that only we-the victims of cliché-can fight.

Clichés are not simply unoriginal ideas. I think that expression, not just the ideas themselves, is the root of what makes something a cliché. For instance, James Joyce's description of the night sky in Ulysses: "The heaventree of stars hung with humid nightblue fruit." The idea itself is not particularly original. Countless writers before Joyce described the night sky. However, his expression is indisputably original. Had he written, "The sky was dark and starry," we could dismiss this sentence as a cliché. Because he used original language, the cliché of an author describing a night sky becomes something else. His originality of expression produced something distinct that can color our vision of reality in a way that clichés cannot.

So, what is so bad about clichés? It seems that the main reason to fear clichés relates to their quality of familiarity. That clichés are unoriginal expressions implies that they have become familiar to us. The things with which we are most familiar undergo the least critical analysis. The analysis of familiar tasks, ideas, people etc. is redundant because their familiarity allows us to assume a sufficient degree of understanding. This assumption of understanding can allow very bad ideas to become woven into what we consider acceptable or true.

The line, "We are the defenders of freedom" exemplifies the ability of clichés to subvert the analysis of an idea. Many Americans are comfortably familiar with this cliché. However, the "defense of freedom" is synonymous with the perverted brutality of war. I have a collection of family members who took part in the "defense of freedom" at various points in history and I still do not know of any specifics of their endeavors. Their experiences were unspeakably horrifying. Defending freedom sounds nice; immersing oneself in the most terrifying human experience imaginable does not. By slinging around clichés, our president garnered support for his war. After seeing what "defending freedom" actually constituted, this support suffered a rapid decline. Had we not allowed ourselves to be victimized by clichés, it is possible that we could have avoided sinking into this grotesque and embarrassing display of failed international politics.

In addition to facilitating the acceptance of bad ideas, clichés have successfully slowed down our arts. Of course, not all contemporary art is clichéd. Plenty of today's artists do their best to forage their own way of expressing themselves. But people (myself included) often find themselves drawn to accessible, familiar art. Much of this familiar art seems deliberately clichéd. This accessibility can undermine what I consider one important purpose of art: to force us to interpret and understand the unfamiliar, even if it does not comfort us.

In a review of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, the literary critic Harold Bloom asks, "Why read, if what you read will not enrich mind or spirit or personality?" He hated it.  It was not luck that made the transition from the medium of the novel to Hollywood (at times, the mother of cliché slingers) so smooth for J.K. Rowling's work. Her book reads like a string of clichés, and reading it is as constructive as watching a predictable sitcom, or a bad Hollywood film. Accessible art's ability to comfort us can be okay. However, if all we read is Harry Potter and we all worship Lil' Wayne as an artist, we might be neglecting the fresh interpretations and expressions of the human experience that un-clichéd art has to offer.

If Obama wants "change", he should begin to elaborate on what that constitutes, not toss around meaningless clichés like "change" and "hope". If McCain thinks he is the superior candidate, he should prove it to us, not preoccupy himself with euphemizing his absurdly old age with the "experienced" pitch. If we want to use art as a tool to help us expand and improve our understanding of what is going on around us, we should consult art that forces us to think, not art that helps us numb our minds. The "defense of freedom" has proven to be somewhat of a failure; hopefully the defense of originality can experience a different fate.

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