Day vs. Gately: why clichés work

Gately's own defense — and note its own plainness, a numbered list that can't even keep its enumeration straight ("(a)… (b)… (c)… and (4)"), the anti-Day in form as well as content. He never claims the clichés are profound or original; he claims they work — they soothe, they route you back to common sense, and above all they "license the universal assent that drowns out silence." That's the functional case sincerity makes against irony: irony leaves you sealed alone inside your own head with the Disease, and the head's silence is where it feeds. The clichés are a shared liturgy whose whole job is to keep a person out of the solipsism the ironist mistakes for sophistication. (Routes to communication-solipsism (NOT built): silence-as-Spider-food as the failure-to-connect mechanism — logged.)