How to Become a Cliche

Last updated on: June 21, 2016 at 3:42 pm by Marc

How to Become a Cliche 2016-06-21T15:42:07-04:00 Marc

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Peace can show itself in a trillion ways, like beekeeping or re-reading Tintin comics without distraction. Anger, infinitely easier, shows itself in cliches — the threatening voice, the clenched fist, the malicious gaze. Wisdom is manifested according to unique situation that it confronts — now it penetrates this mystery, now that; now it offers counsel, now it keeps silence. Folly, by which we are unable to see past the immediate pressures and pleasures of the environment, makes an obvious fool of its subject. Watch him as he bumbles into conversations beyond his grasp, ridicules every topic of spiritual worth, and all the while considers himself a man of extraordinary practicality — he is a type.

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We become more particular in our virtues and more general in our vices; unique in our good dispositions and crowd-like in our evil ones. The adulterer moves with a predictability ready-made for cheap comedy: Now he cheats, now he feels a shallow penitence, now he buys guilt-presents, now he professes his love, now he retracts it, now he hides in a closet, now he erases his texts…and so it goes. Everyone “gets” jokes about adultery because everyone “gets” the adulterous man at a glance — there he is, under the bed with no clothes and a bad excuse. We do not “get” the faithful man at glance — and so there are no easy jokes about fidelity. Adultery is as repeatable as a bad pun. Fidelity is as unrepeatable as a wedding vow.

Love knows no color. Envy blossoms in predictable shades of green. Love — by which we desire the good of the other — is unique as the people it loves. Envy — by which we hate the good of the other and whine when he attains it — type-casts its subject into a sour-sneering, lemon-sucking, side-glancing, all-belittling ball of resentment forever downplaying the successes of its neighbors. Love can be stern, gentle, comic, and tragic; now buying one man’s beer, now smashing another’s Bud Light on the kitchen tile with a righteous shout: “Friends don’t let friends drink water flavored with the sweat of wage-slavery!” Love has no type, but envy does — the slavish, self-centered egoist incapable of rejoicing in any greatness besides his own.

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Evil recommends the lowest common denominator, but the problem with the lowest common denominator is that it really does make one common, just as the problem with the path of least resistance is that every one takes it in the same manner — by not resisting. Chesterton famously said “a dead thing can go with the stream, but only a living thing can go against it.” To this I would only add that dead things rot, and as they rot, become more and more like the next rotting thing — mushy, indistinguishable lumps. All evil is a kind of laziness, a choice for something less than a due good — something easier than the acts of love, patience, magnanimity, and humility that are demanded of us. It is the tool of the tired, the weapon of the weak, and the gospel of the impotent. And though there are as many ways of striving to attain a good as there are goods and men to attain them, there is no uniqueness is the moral laziness of not trying to attain a good — one need only cease trying, to acquiesce to temptation, and become the repeatable type that evil would have him be.

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