Dumb Contemporary Commonplaces, Part 1

In the 1950s and 60s the late French scholar Jacques Ellul wrote insightfully about technology, language, politics, and culture. His books The Technological Society (1964) and Propaganda: The Formation of Men's Attitudes (1965) provoked critical conversations in sociology, media and communication studies, political science, and other fields. My personal favorite is the 1966 A Critique of the New Commonplaces. In that work Ellul did something I regard as the responsibility of intellectuals: he exposed the stupidity of much discourse in the public sphere without sounding like an out-of-touch academic elitist. Though Ellul wrote from a French perspective, in urging readers to be more conscious and critical of the language they consume, the book marched on terrain traveled by George Orwell in his classic 1946 essay Politics and the English Language. 

Ellul defines commonplaces as "ready-made ideas which are found in all the newspapers . . . The commonplaces are the excrement of the society." Commonplaces have wide acceptance; politicians, pundits, professors, and really anyone can cite them without having to worry about too much pushback. All cultures have a need for ready-made, "common-sense" ideas; that quality by itself does not make commonplaces comparable to excrement. But when ready-made ideas get hijacked to support vile political agendas, that is when the excremental aroma becomes unbearable. New York Times columnist and Nobel laureate Paul Krugman is in Ellul territory when he calls out "zombie ideas." He writes, "A zombie idea is a belief or doctrine that has repeatedly been proved false, but refuses to die; instead, it just keeps shambling along, eating people’s brains. The ultimate zombie in American politics is the assertion that tax cuts pay for themselves — a claim that has been proved wrong again and again over the past 40 years. But there are other zombies, like climate change denial, that play an almost equally large role in our political discourse."

I agree with Dr. Krugman that today's Republican Party is especially prone to exploiting, for hardball politics purposes, commonplaces that should have been put to rest long ago. However, the GOP's linguistic marksmanship is but a subset of a more general dumbing down that's been creeping up on us for quite some time. In the remainder of this post I want to highlight some particularly dumb commonplaces commonly heard in our society. A few have more ominous political consequences than others, but all of them contribute to the sloppiness in public discourse that frustrates mindful citizens while empowering political hacks and opportunists. I'll feature ten dumb commonplaces, five this month and five next.  

*Commonplace #1: "Literally." Pre-pandemic, a student approached me in the hall one day and said, "that article you assigned us was so hard to read that I literally pulled my hair out." My response was, "wow, that's a freakin' amazing toupee you have on because it looks exactly like your real hair!" Of course my student did not mean that he actually pulled his hair out. He was merely trying to emphasize the frustration that comes on when confronted with difficult reading. Lots of English language purists out there react violently (usually not in a literal sense) to the way my student used "literally," though Merriam-Webster claims that using literally just for emphasis is correct too. My student could have legitimately said to me, "Don't like the way I used literally? Go look it up in the literal dictionary, asshole." (He literally looked like he might be thinking that.). 

Recognizing my obsession with the overuse of literally, my sister-in-law Jen got me this shirt! 

My problem with the overuse of "literally" is not that usage of it to show emphasis is "incorrect." Who am I to argue with the word gods and goddesses at Merriam-Webster? My problem is that the overuse has made "literally" into a mindless cliche'. When words or phrases become cliches, they lose whatever communicative power they may have once had. "Literally" has become equivalent to "selling like hotcakes," "avoid like the plague," or "the rest is history;" word choices that peg the user as devoid of original thoughts. As a teacher, I think it's my obligation to encourage students to generate fresh images--to make a literal impression on the brains of their listeners and readers (;-). 

*Commonplace #2: "It is what it is." Dictionary.com traces this mother-of-all defeatist expressions to a 1949 news article trying to describe life in frontier-era Nebraska. Every time I hear someone say the expression I want to say back, "what the fuck is it, really?" 

Politicians use "it is what it is" in what I perceive as a passive-aggressive manner. City councilors will often say something like this: "We can't really do anything about wages at the local level. The state has our hands tied. It is what it is."  Translation: "Working people are getting screwed by the system, but I am not going to do shit about it unless you force me to." 

*Commonplace #3: "Both Sides Do It."  This is a particularly intoxicating commonplace for mainstream journalists. So fearful of being accused of bias, mainstream journalists will go out of their way to show that no matter what horrible thing the Republicans are doing, the Democrats are somehow doing it too. "Both sides" reporting has always been part of what NYU journalism professor Jay Rosen calls the "savvy" style of reporting in which the journalist gets to position him or herself as somehow "detached" and without viewpoint, a positioning that is both disingenuous and literally (ha ha) impossible for any person with a pulse to hold. 

Though disingenuous and impossible, the "both sides do it" mantra could make some sense in an era when both major parties believe in representative democracy and argue over legitimate policy differences. In such an era, the journalists can see themselves as a kind of "referee" standing in between both sides. But it's not clear that such an era ever really existed anywhere other than in TV soap operas like The West Wing. More troubling, today's Republican party has openly renounced representative democracy, from suspending their responsibility to construct a party platform in 2020 and replacing it with a blind endorsement of Trump to doing everything in their power across all 50 states to make voting more difficult for constituencies not already in the GOP corner. The Democratic Party is awful and is the place where, as Green Party activist David Cobb once said, "progressive ideas go to die," but they at least do not try to win elections by preventing their opponents from voting. 

*Commonplace #4: "Russian Asset." Here's an example of establishment MSNBC Democratic Party awfulness. In 2016 the Dems could not admit that they lost fair and square to a crass doofus like Mr. Trump, so the narrative for the next four years was a never ending lurid tale of foreign interference and intrigue. Some went as far as to claim that the Orange Man had been a "Russian Asset" since the 1980s. Meanwhile Jill Stein, Susan Sarandon, Tulsi Gabbard, popular podcasters like Joe Rogan, and really ANYONE who somehow failed to sufficiently defer to Hillary was also a Russian Asset. As noted by Matt Taibbi (an independent journalist so frequently accused of being a Putin Puppet that he and his co-host Katie Halper sarcastically named their podcast "Useful Idiots"): 

"Rather than confront the devastating absurdity of defeat before an ad-libbing game show host who was seemingly trying to lose – a black comedy that is 100% in America’s rich stupidity tradition – Democrats have gone all-in on this theory of foreign infiltration. House speaker Nancy Pelosi even said as much in a White House meeting, pointing at Trump and proclaiming: 'All roads lead to Putin.'"

Openly calling dissenters "Russian Assets" has become a norm in US discourse. Shameful. 

To be clear: Vladimir Putin is a thug, but his ascendance to power had much to do with awful policy decisions made by NATO and bipartisan majorities in the United States after the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991. We failed to support genuine democrat movements in Russia (as we have failed to do all over the world), and as a consequence made the "strong man" more appealing to the Russian people. But instead of examining and reforming our now almost 30 years of crapola policy toward post-Soviet Union Russia, the Democrats would rather revive a kind of Cold War redbaiting, casually and maliciously maligning even sincere critics as "Russian Assets." Trump and Republicans in general have nothing positive to contribute toward Russia policy, but being unimaginative, ignorant trolls does not make them "Russian Assets." 

*Commonplace #5: "Concerns Mount." We need a definitive glossary of all the bullshit terms and phrases that are a result of our politics being held hostage by military-industrial-complex interests for all these years. Take a look at this lead paragraph from a CNN story on Joe Biden's announcement that the US will finally leave Afghanistan: 

"Concerns are mounting from bipartisan US lawmakers and Afghan women's rights activists that the hard-won gains for women and civil society in Afghanistan could be lost if the United States makes a precipitous withdrawal from the country."

So apparently we are supposed to stay in Afghanistan forever. Hey, why not? The US has as many as 800 military bases in around 80 countries and territories around the world, and "concerns mount" any time an effort is made to close any of them. 

It's interesting that we rarely see "concerns mount" when it comes to domestic policy. For example, it's hard to find a story about the pandemic that says something like, "concerns mount that lack of universal healthcare during a time of massive unemployment will enhance the misery inflicted by the pandemic." 

Next Month:  Five More Dumb Contemporary Commonplaces!