The old New Yorker used to have a contributor named “Mr. Arbuthnot the Cliché Expert”—actually writer Frank Sullivan (1892-1976)—who, between 1935 and 1952, specialized in identifying and analyzing the puerile thoughts and hackneyed phrases of American politics and journalism. The Scrapbook has always lamented the passing of Mr. Arbuthnot—-indeed, the very science of laughing at clichés—because, while the thoughts and phrases have evolved with the decades, the problem remains.
We were reminded of this the other week when President Obama flew down to Charleston, South Carolina, to deliver a eulogy at the funeral of the Rev. Clementa Pinckney, a state senator and the murdered pastor of the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church.
The circumstances were painfully sad, to say the least, and the president’s moving and sensible sentiments rose to the occasion. What caught The Scrapbook’s attention was not the eulogy itself but the near-universal, and astonishingly banal, tributes to the president’s oratory. Indeed, for the New York Times’s book reviewer Michiko Kakutani, in particular, it was 2008 and candidate Obama all over again.
Once the worshipful, elegiac tone was established, the clichés were fired from her keyboard like artillery. Not only did the president’s remarks draw “on all of Mr. Obama’s gifts of language and empathy and searching intellect,” but the current occupant of the White House talked about “the complexities of race and justice,” managed to “crystallize the meaning of the occasion,” confronted “the sin of slavery and the terrible scourge of war that was part of its price,” and, most important of all, “drew upon his own knowledge of Scripture and literature and history—much the way [Abraham] Lincoln and Dr. [Martin Luther] King did.”
And speaking of history, as only the president can, Kakutani reminded us of the “long view of history,” “the prism of history,” the “arc of history,” the “broad vistas of history,” and, in a smorgasbord of metaphors, Obama’s particular conviction—first expressed in his “deeply felt” memoir—that “history . . . is an odyssey, a crossing, a relay in which one generation’s achievements serve as the paving stones for the next generation’s journey.”
For Barack Obama, unlike his predecessors, has a “panoramic vision of America” in an “echoing continuum of time,” and (here come those metaphors again) “he spoke of how history ‘must be a manual’ to avoid ‘repeating the mistakes of the past’ while building ‘a roadway toward a better world.’ ”
And on and on.
Of course, The Scrapbook tends to be cynical about these things, and even Michiko Kakutani concedes that all the beautiful thoughts and phrases were the work not of Obama but of a speechwriter, Cody Keenan, who “spoke with the president . . . about the speech and hoped to emulate Lincoln’s tone of reconciliation and healing.” Did he succeed? Well, not without the healing touch of Barack Obama, who “spent some five hours revising it . . . not merely jotting notes on the margins, but whipping out the yellow legal pads he likes to write on”—shades of Richard Nixon!—“only the second time he’s done so for a speech in the last two years.”
Granted, it’s been a tough few years for the president’s admirers; and as anyone who has attended a Bernie Sanders rally can attest, the promise of the 2008 Barack Obama—and the attendant prose and poetry of those days in his honor—has been something of a disappointment. So we can understand Michiko Kakutani’s inability to stem the tide and resist the pressure of those gathering clichés. But we sure miss Mr. Arbuthnot.
