Blah, blah; blah, blah; Blair, Blair. I have decided that a change is as
good as a rest and it is time to commit ourselves to utterly platitudinous
clich�s. Away with this talk of bosses, wage slaves and unseemly class
struggles. What politics needs today is a good dose of empty rhetoric �
and by Jove, we're out to let you have it, bang between the eyes (as our
r�le models, the boxing commentators, say).
A political clich� in the hand is worth two in the bush, and a stupefying
slogan in time saves nine.
Perhaps there is some truth in the observation that most political
speeches these days read like the outpourings of a cheap word processor
which has been deprived of human contact, but let none be deceived that
clich�s are a recent invention. Even before the inane banalities of Major
Bush and Putin Blair, creative depths were reached by orators of old whose
capacity for saying nothing was in direct proportion to what they had to
say.
Take Hitler, for example. By most historical accounts this "evil genius"
had verbal powers which could hypnotise a crowd faster than Churchill
could down a litre of brandy. In fact, Hitler was a transparent nutter, a
loud-mouthed clich�-merchant who, without the musical build-up and the
theatrical setting would have been regarded merely as an out-of-work
painter with an irreparable groin injury. Watching newsreels of Hitler's
rants, as well as those of Mosely's pathetic echoes, is an invitation to a
clich�-spouting competition.
Take away the mass unemployment, hyper-inflation and defeat in a recent
world war and Hitler's platform at Nuremberg would be about as popular as
the Catholic Evidence (sic) League in Hyde Park on a drizzly Sunday. Or
take Blair. (Take Hitler, take Bush . . . take the bloody lot of them.)
another sufferer from chronic verbal diarrhoea. Take away the TV cameras,
the specially-invited audiences and the VIP label and put Tony on a
platform in any high street in Britain; he wouldn't last ten minutes.
Which is nine minutes longer than his successor would last and longer
still than Reagan who reportedly went through the entire 1984 presidential
election campaign without responding to a single spontaneous question.
Cruel commentators have labelled New Labour's new-look, brand-new,
extra-new-ingredients,
we'll-swap-four-of-your-old-claws-for-one-of-our-new-ones Object as being
a bit . . . er, wordy . . . and, well, empty. Hot air, to be precise. The
Blur leadership need not feel stung by such criticism, for in committing
themselves to such apple-pie platitudes they are merely following a
long-preserved record of clich�, going back to their party's founder.
Defining socialism in June 1896, Keir Hardie surely surpassed even the new
Clause Three-And-A-Quarter when he explained it to mean "brotherhood,
fraternity, love thy neighbour as thyself, goodwill towards men, and glory
to God in the highest". Now, that is what you call a relentless commitment
to unadulterated clich�.
So what if almost everything that every politician says sounds the same?
Has it not occurred to Generation X, whom the sociologists tell us are
characterised by a universal disdain for politicians, that they sound the
same because they stand for the same thing? Try selling Coke and Pepsi
without, after a while, descending to clich�s about fizz, bubbles and cold
soda on a hot day.
Nobody accuses Pepsi ads of dwelling on the obvious merits of ice-cold
drinks or Kellogg of talking too much about breakfast instead of lunch, or
Punch and Judy of pursuing the same boring quarrel when they could always
go to Relate and patch things up. So why expect defenders of a social
order which should by rights have been put on the scrapheap with the
Hillman Minx to have anything original to say?
It is high time that voters stop bleating about the clich�d vacuity of
those who seek to lead them and realise that second-hand tripe is quite
good enough for anyone seeking to be led. Or, to put it another way, "You
can lead a horse to water but you can't make it think."
jt
www.worldsocialism.org
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