Cliché: noun, 1. a phrase or opinion that is overused and betrays a lack of original thought. Installment 3
Clichés are bad for the brain. For proof, see below:
Exhibit A: “Do what you love and you’ll never work a day in your life.”
Wrong.
The correct advice is, “Become really good at what you do.” Whether or not you love the thing is of secondary importance. Actually, it’s of thirdary importance. In fact, who cares if you love what you do?
Just become good at it. Work hard every day at becoming useful to society. If you do that, you’ll probably work every day of your life, but at the end of that life there will be a long line of people who will be grateful that you showed up for work.
Worry about what you do, not about how you feel.
P.S. Don’t follow your heart.
Speaking of hearts…
Exhibit B: “Soul Mates.”
Soul mates don’t exist. Stop looking for yours.
Alright… technically, someone who is currently looking for a soul mate somewhere, will find a soul mate. But note that I concede the existence of soul mates in the same way that I concede the existence of Michael Jordan.
Yes, Michael Jordan was a real basketball player, but you aren’t him.
So what?
Is Michael Jordan the only player who has ever enjoyed the game? Does love only exist at the very peaks of Mount Bliss?
Look reader, except in scenarios where you married a creep, your soulmate is your spouse. You serve him or her with your entire soul, all day long, every day, until the day you die. You serve when he’s nice and when he’s mean, when she’s appreciative and when she’s ungrateful. When they need you and when they don’t.
You don’t find a soul mate. You create one.
P.S. The word “spouse” was used intentionally. Get married.
Exhibit C: “Free as a bird.”
Just because a bird can leverage feathers and air currents to soar over a canyon while gravity forces you to inch your way down one side and claw your way up another doesn’t make the bird free. Think about it, what’s a bird free to do?
Work.
The bird is free to work.
That parakeet doesn’t get weekends off, sick days or social security. He can’t crash in his grandma’s basement when he gets laid off from his job ruining your lettuce crop. The parakeet might as well be a groundhog. There’s no fridge, no food stamps, no disability. Everyday is the same.
Nothing but work. And then he dies.
If you must use a cliché to express your urge to live unshackled from human constraints, use the phrase free as a human.
Exhibit D: “I don’t see color.”
Yes you do. Stop saying you don’t. Color is the first thing you see when you look at another human being. What’s wrong with that? What’s wrong with recognizing that some people are black and others are brown and others are white-eyed, pale-faced Swedes?
And since we’re on the subject, the term Person of Color is absurd. Although I can switch from saying “the black dude” to saying “the colored dude” with relative ease, I can’t haul around — everywhere I go — all of the syllables required to say “the dude who is a person of color.” By the time I finish that sentence I will have missed to the opportunity to meet the black guy. Polite society will have robbed me of the opportunity to find out his favorite soup.
Hopefully it’s tomato soup, because that’s the greatest soup on earth. And hopefully he likes to extract the soup with some sort of variation on the theme of the turkey melt. Ideally the bread is panini by nature, and it’s got those corduroy burn marks from the iron you used to get the cheese to melt. Go easy on the condiments though. Yes I want some sort of spread on one slab of panini, but remember, I’m viewing the sandwich as more of a spoon than a sandwich. It exists primarily to extract the soup. So keep its essence subtle, because I’m here to eat soup. I don’t want a clash of flavors to ruin my meal.
Anyways, unfortunately I never got to invite him to lunch because he sped off on his Lambretta before I could extend the invitation. All because YOU keep obligating me to drag around a bundle of always-under-revision vocabulary words that slow me down and make me feel like some sort of syntaxed version of Jacob Marley!
Enough!
And since my blood is up, it’s as good a time as any to state that we ought to shorten the Army’s phrase from Be All You Can Be to the much more concise, and meaningful and inspiring…
Be An Indian.
I don’t know what Be All You Can Be means. Be All You Can Be sounds ephemeral. It feels nebulous. I think it would make a great motto for a school of culinary art or a yoga studio, but not an army.
Meanwhile the phrase Be An Indian reminds the modern day recruit of the greatest foe the United States Army ever faced. Our most worthy opponent.
The Native American.
Take Geronimo for example. It took nearly one quarter of the entire United States Army, roughly five thousand men aided by an additional 3,000 Mexican soldiers to finally convince Geronimo to surrender. And note that they never caught him, he surrendered. You’ll also note that it wasn’t like Geronimo represented a foe the Army had never seen before. By the time he turned himself in in 1886, the U.S. government and its progenitors had been fighting Native Americans for nearly 300 years.
I don’t know why the German army gets so much press where war is concerned. We wrapped those amateurs up on two separate occasions in less time than it takes to earn a bachelors degree. But had the Kaiser or Adolph been armed with a couple million Apaches of the Chiricahua brand, my great-grandchildren would be eating sauerkraut and dancing polkas.
It’s important though to understand that this isn’t some nod to a historic anecdote. To this day the warrior impulse moves Native Americans to enlist in greater numbers per capita than any other ethnic group in America. To this day they still want to fight, and if you ask them why, they will tell you that it’s in their blood.
So when trying to recruit soldiers, instead of promising them an opportunity to be all they can be, let’s encourage them to aspire to something truly honorable. Let’s tell them that if they become disciplined enough, and resourceful enough, and courageous enough… they just might have what it takes to be an Indian.
Exhibit E: Nazis
Allegedly on Tuesday, November 8, 2016 half of the country adorned itself with swastika armbands and goosestepped its way to the nearest polling station in order to elect Grand-Wizard-In-Chief Trump, President of the United States of America.
The very vocal subset of America that swears this happened is also convinced that the 4th Reich is already here and that the only way to keep minorities and various other vulnerables out of the under-construction gas chambers is to preemptively strike against neo-fascists, peacefully if they must, violently if they can.
Personally, even though I didn’t vote for Donald, I dispute that interpretation of the 2016 electoral map. But if you can show me that the Federal government is intent on rounding up millions of minorities for the purpose of executing them and turning their bodies to ash, then by all means I will retract my statement and join you on the front lines.
Until that day I will assume that those who suggest that half the country blankets itself with the Nazi flag, do so because of intellectually torpidity. Their incurious minds don’t want to have to consider the many reasons why someone may have wanted to vote for anyone other than Hillary Clinton. It’s much easier instead to chalk the election results up to Mein Kampf-ism, which gives them permission to vent their rage without self-reflection. If all conservatives are also members of the National Socialist Party then there’s nothing left to debate. The punches are pre-justified, the heckler’s vetoes are the natural impulse of any lover of liberty, their…
Yeah… I don’t think so.
Congratulations Antifa and company. Of all of the clichés I’ve covered so far, you’ve created — by far — the most boring one of all.
