Contemplating closure

If there is such a thing as a First Amendment fundamentalist, I’m it.

Like the religious fundamentalist who thinks every word of the Bible is to be taken literally, I think an American’s freedom of expression should be damn near absolute. When somebody explained to me why shouting “Fire!” in a crowded theater isn’t a legitimate exercise of First Amendment rights, I got it -- but I still had to think about it.

I’m such a purist on the subject that I even resented Tipper Gore’s attempt to child-proof dirty lyrics 20 years ago. If I got torqued by something that low key, you can only imagine my loathing for flag-burning amendments and other such patrio-fascist crap.

There is one glaring exception to my free-speech absolutism:

The word “closure” should be constitutionally banned from the language, and anybody who speaks or writes it should be hanged, drawn and quartered.

I passionately detest that word for more reasons than I have time or patience to go into here, but start with the fact that it has been journalism’s favorite cliché for years now, and we just by God won’t let go of it.

It meets all the qualifications for a media cliché, beginning with the most obvious: There are certain stories where you can see it coming from far enough away to take cover.

Just as any story that takes place away from an American coast or border demands that the word “Heartland” appear in a minimum of 12,342 headlines and screen crawls, any account of lingering grief or tragedy will invariably and inevitably steer us into a closure collision.


But beyond my own industry’s abuse of the word as a weapon to commit multiple journalistic felonies, I hate it because it’s psychobabble at its worst – a bogus concept that casually, and I think callously, implies that some event, gesture or ceremony can wrap up grief in a tidy little compartment and end painful chapters in our lives. Hurt doesn’t work that way.

So enough already. Let’s permanently consign that dismal, smarmy noun to the mass grave of clichés that newspapers finally figured out were clichés long after everybody else already had. That would truly bring me closure.