It's ironic really ... I have a blog entitled "The everyday" and I can barely get a posting up once a month. It's not that I haven't observed something funny, ridiculous or ordinarily human. It's probably because I have.
For instance, walking down Bedford to Bloor St the other morning, on my way to work. A condo building is being wedged onto the north-east corner. A sign man is on Bedford holding a "stop" sign. A forklift is moving palettes of plywood from a truck parked on the west side of Bedford, across to the building site.
The cars turning north on Bedford from Bloor are stopped. They are also honking their horns. Can't they see the guy with the "stop" sign and the forklift in the middle of the street?
Another example, on Feb. 6 I watched Sarah Palin's keynote speech at the National Tea Party convention. (What's with the sexy hair?) Coincidentally, or not, I happened to be reading Hannah Arendt's "Eichmann in Jerusalem." I thought Palin's speech, like all of her speeches, was shrill and vacant of any sense or meaning. I wonder how can it be that this woman is so popular? Maybe it's the hair?
A day or so later, as I was reading Arendt, I came across something rather revealing in her observations about Eichmann. Arendt was describing the details of a police examination transcript (see pg 48-9, 1964 ed.). In the transcript, Eichmann tries to explain something to the presiding judge and uses "stock phrases or slogans" and the judge has difficulty understanding Eichmann's meaning. Finally, Eichmann apologizes, saying, "Officialese [Amtssprache] is my only language."
Arendt continues, "But the point here is that officialese became his language because he was genuinely incapable of uttering a single sentence that was not a cliché." She later added that "... his inability to speak was closely connected with an inability to think ..."
I realized when I read these words that they provided a fairly accurate description of what I experience whenever I listen to Palin speak.
Before continuing let me say that I am not calling Sarah Palin a Nazi, nor am I trying to draw comparisons to the political scene in the United States today with that of WWII Germany.
My point is about clichés and the inability to think. Clearly, Sarah Palin suffers from both, but what I'm curious about is, why we are so many eager to believe in these clichés? In fact, we all at some point fall prey to clichés - her's just seem to me to be so obvious that I ask in disbelief, "can't they see she's bullshitting?"
Is it a matter of convenience? The banter issuing forth sounds like what we ourselves believe, therefore we just agree? Is this easier or more more convenient than thinking for ourselves?
