Stupid Writing Cliches, the revenge: Political cliches

I seem to be going after a lot of cliches lately. First there was the Christian cliches from a few weeks ago, now this.

ILLEGALS.

Want to give this alien a work permit?

This pisses me off because I'm a New Yorker, and I know how the world works on this. At least in New York City.

The usual cliche is "Oh, illegals can't come forward on crimes because they might be deported!"

WRONG! When pigs fly. When this is pulled on tv, you know it's crap.

For the past 15 years, New York has been an "asylum" state for any and all undocumented / illegal immigrants. Deportation doesn't happen. Period.

If you want to make the argument "They don't trust cops in their countries, because it's all corrupt where they're from,"  fine. You can make that argument. It's even a valid argument.

But to suggest that anyone is sending any illegal back anywhere? That's just a joke in most of the country, since the federal government has to ship them back home, and they haven't even thought about it in six years.

But this especially rings false in New York -- which is where you usually see the cliche anyway.  Hell, we can't even ship back criminals who enter the country illegally. Some of them make Al Pacino's Scarface look like a documentary. (I prefer Paul Muni, myself)

Also, the good, pure and virtuous illegal? Don't believe it. In the last year, tens of thousands of the undocumented immigrants are members of gangs, like MS-13, who traffic in drugs and people. These are not nice people.

Now, if you want to give me a story of the men and women who come to America, put in the time, energy and effort to become legal citizens? That's a story I will happily read, and happily wallow in. Because that's a story worth reading. And one that's far, far more believable.

A Writing Rant: Cliches you may have never noticed.

I suspect that this, at the end of the day, qualifies as a rant. But it's a rant about writing, so I think this makes for an acceptable blog post. Comment if you think it doesn't.

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I live in a family of readers. We tend to write TV episodes as we watch them on television. Obviously, we record everything, otherwise we'd never hear a word. Sometimes, the writers out-think us, sometimes we like our endings better than the ones on the screen. And then, sometimes, we catch only an image, and we sigh, and we know exactly where everything starts to go downhill...

Have you ever wandered into a TV show, and without knowing anything of the story thus far, a mere thirty seconds can tell you more than you wanted to know? In fact, you know so much from that brief glance, you can, without any hesitation, write the entire episode?

This is pretty much how it goes in our house whenever we see almost any Christian clergyman on television. If it's some sort of religious figure, he's the murderer / pederast / psycho / bad guy. In fact, if there's a guest star who shows up as a priest, the only way my family is surprised is if the priest is not guilty of something. Also, if there's a choice between an old-fashioned, grouchy priest, and a hip, young good-looking priest filled with charisma, we know whodunit—the old guy, because killers are never charismatic, are they?

Now, unless someone can correct me, this rule only applies to some variety of Christian group, but, more often than not, it's a Catholic priest. Even on the television show 24, where Muslims terrorists were involved (literally) every other season for the first six years, no Imams were involved. I have never seen a Rabbi involved in a crime anywhere on television.

Under the heading of “these and other stupid things,” there are some interesting facts.