In "200 journalism clichés--and counting" the Washington Post takes up a topic of interest to me. I'm glad it's not just a list, for the explanations and side snark are more than half the fun.
Needless to say (then don't say it)
Suffice it to say (if it suffices, then just say it)
Opens/offers a rare window (unless it is a real window that is in fact unusual)
Outside the box (describes creative thinking--with a cliché)
Many (196) more. I see that "thoughtful people"--which is, or used to be, a favorite of someone responsible for editorial writing at the Minneapolis Star Tribune--doesn't make the list. I think it's what you say when you don't have an argument with which to support your policy preference. Just attribute the preference to an imagined deep thinker who probably dresses in tweeds and smokes a pipe.
But maybe it's time to devote some attention to the clichés, not of journalists, but of journalism consumers. I'd like to nominate, "This is not who we are," often spoken as: "This is NOT who WE are." It's got some miles on it but has been used a lot, really a lot, in the past couple of weeks, in connection with the Trump administration's policy of separating children from their parents at our southern border. Since it is what we are in fact doing, I guess it is who we are. Why does that not count as an unanswerable rebuttal? I suppose the cliché is an emotional version of, "The policy goes against our principles"--but, in that case, aren't we just extending to ourselves a benefit that we deny to everyone else? The English and the French and the governments of "shithole countries" we judge by their actions, but when we're judged by ours--well, "it's not who we are." It seems that the answer to the question of who we are is: people who ignore the principles we love to lecture on.
Jeff Sessions, the attorney general, isn't shy about owning the appalling policy. He saw fit today to remind some of his kindhearted evangelical friends of Romans, chapter 13. I'm guessing the part he likes best goes:
For rulers are not a terror to good contact, but to bad. Would you have no fear of him who is in authority? Then do what is good, and you will receive his approval, for he is God's servant for your good. But if you do wrong, be afraid, for he does not bear the sword in vain; he is the servant of God to execute his wrath on the wrongdoer.
But from St. Paul esteeming the Roman authorities it does not necessarily follow that we must all similarly esteem all things Trump. By such logic, the American colonists should have knuckled under to British rule, slavery should not have been abolished, and Martin Luther King should have obeyed Jim Crow laws.
Also, I've never said it before, so in case I have the big one in my sleep tonight I want to put it out there now: though the competition is formidable, no one has ever looked dumber in one of those MAGA baseball caps than Jeff Sessions. Even though he fills every hole in that band at the back, only his ears stop the cap from from falling to his shoulders, and his ears are far enough down the side so that the brim teeters over his eyes. Compared to Sessions in a MAGA cap, Michael Dukakis wearing the helmet while peering out of the tank turret looked as good as George Bush in full flight gear pontificating beneath the Mission Accomplished sign, and even white Republican men got a sexual thrill from that.
The former Walmart, now decorated with murals praising President Trump and used to warehouse kids taken from their parents, is an apt monument to our time.
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