White Flag: how do trite things get to be trite?

The anthology's thesis-question, asked outright. It reframes triteness as a symptom of truth rather than its opposite: a thing becomes a cliché by being said so often, and it gets said that often because it keeps being true, so the wear on the phrase is the fossil-record of its accuracy. "Polyesterishly banal" is the exact register — cheap, synthetic, embarrassing — and the point is that the seminal epiphanies come dressed that way NECESSARILY, because the truth is "not just un- but anti- interesting," actively repellent to the part of the mind that prizes the interesting. Irony is precisely the appetite for the interesting; it is therefore constitutionally allergic to the banal truths that save, and that allergy is the disease. This is 066's lobster-waters claim raised to a general law.