Staking your future on a one liner

Some of my favorite movie moments are the one liners.  "I'll be back" from Terminator made a bad actor into a celebrity.  A good one liner is the five second moment that you will remember many years later.  They reach the core of a complex situation in a few words.

Remember when Han Solo was going to be frozen in carbonite by Jabba the Hut?

Princess Leia said: I love you, Han Solo said : I know. 

Yes, Han Solo was full of himself in a very lovable way.




It is in the American character to reach the core of an issue using colorful simplicity.  For me, this is the reason why Americans are action oriented, they quickly reach a conclusion and formulate a simple solution to the biggest issue.  Americans are less likely to get paralyzed into analytical inaction or try to pretend that there is no problem just to save face.  They are intellectually aggressive. I say this as a compliment.

One liners bite back, use them at your own risk.  When Bush the elder popularized "read my lips, no new taxes", it got him elected once.  In the aftermath of the savings and loan crisis, he increased taxes.  A common sense action collided against a one liner and the one liner won. No second term.

As a society, our attention span is shrinking and we love our one liner analysis more so than ever. This type of thinking is like sugar, lots of fast calories, but no nourishment.  The more we repeat each other's one liners, the less we know about the issue at hand and the more obsessed we become by it. The tax debate, once characterized as a "Fiscal Cliff" warps your perception into expecting an absolute disaster on January 1st.  Not so. You can display a timer at the bottom of the screen.  At that exact second we go down.  Good for ratings.

One liners and metaphors are great tools for analysis. The mistake is to solely rely on cliches for decision making.  They make our thinking single sided and inflexible. They move us away from common sense and create false expectations. Back in WWII, it was the other guys, the Nazis, that thought like that. 

Yesterday the NRA just went public with their "we need more good guys with guns", solution to the violence problem.  I think the NRA's dream is that school children are one day allowed to look at the bad guy in the eye and say "go ahead, make my day".  We need to rely on common sense, not cliches and one liners if we are going to deal effectively with complex issues like violence.