Metaphor Madness
SWAIM, BARTON
Metaphor Madness In which a line is drawn in the sand for political journalists. by Barton Swaim Browsing the children's books at Barnes & Noble the other day, I was exasperated to find so many...
...My four-year-old daughter was recently given a book based entirely on an extended metaphor...
...Readers of this magazine will remember the Supreme Court's decision in Hamdi v. Rumsfeld (2004) in which Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, writing for the majority, asserted that "a state of war is not a blank check for the President when it comes to the rights of the Nation's citizens...
...it's called The Room In My Heart and has to do with a mother's affection for her first daughter even after a second baby is born...
...But it's not my wife's job to render her observations with clarity and precision...
...The thought of James Baker, the drawling no-nonsense Texan and former secretary of state, intentionally devising just the right pomologi-cal simile to achieve this effect in his listeners' minds is so fantastic as to make one wonder whether David Shuster hasn't missed his calling as a postmodern literary critic...
...Maybe it was a pizza, or a steak, or maybe black bean soup...
...Why must we get things "straight from the horse's mouth" instead of from the original source, "jump ship" instead of abandoning a friend or institution, and "draw a line in the sand" or "lay down the gauntlet" instead of declaring a position on which we're not prepared to compromise...
...It's frightening, really, from her point of view...
...But many children's authors have adopted the mistaken supposition that because adults find metaphors useful in learning the lessons of life, children do as well...
...David Shuster of MSNBC even speculated that Baker's fruit salad simile had been intended as a furtive reference to the accusation that the president had "cherry-picked" prewar intelligence...
...That's the job, or I thought it was, of the nation's political journalists, most of whom can hardly get through a single explanation without recourse to some tired, clumsy metaphor...
...Somehow, though, the phrase "blank check" made everybody start talking as though the president had tried to dissolve Congress or suspend habeas corpus or have suspected terrorists shot in their homes in New Jersey...
...The words 'fruit salad,'" said a grave Shuster, "could be construed as a reference to cherry-picking and to questions about the Bush administration's cherry-picking of prewar intelligence...
...But he's not out of the woods yet...
...In any case, "cherry picking"— and on this I am confident—has to do with picking the best fruit from trees, not the least likeable bits from a fruit salad...
...Suddenly the world of punditry descends into another appalling brawl about the thing supposedly signified by the metaphor, and nobody is exactly sure what that thing is...
...Think of James Baker insisting that the recommendations of the Iraq Study Group be taken as a whole rather than piecemeal...
...He hoped "we don't treat this like a fruit salad, and say I like this but I don't like that, I like this but I don't like that...
...All I ever heard was that blasted metaphor, "cherry-picking...
...My daughter would agree...
...Everybody knows what a blank check is...
...It seems to me that if you're going to use a metaphor, you ought at some point to be prepared to say exactly what the literal activity looks like...
...They're digging up more dirt on the president because they say he hasn't tried to reach across the aisle...
...sions...
...Ill-conceived metaphors do far more damage than junkets and earmarks, whatever those are...
...who knew...
...I had been hoping Nancy Pelosi et al...
...My wife possesses a strange genius for combining these figurative expresBarton Swaim is writing a book on 19th-century Scottish literary critics...
...Maybe we needed a good knock-down debate about wartime presidential power...
...My daughter doesn't like it...
...Why must adults use metaphorical and otherwise figurative language so incessantly, and with so little regard to the demands of clarity...
...For months, it seemed, the talking heads and editorial pages couldn't stop talking about blank checks and whether the president had or wanted one...
...by Barton Swaim Browsing the children's books at Barnes & Noble the other day, I was exasperated to find so many books based on, or otherwise employing, metaphors...
...would put a metaphor reform initiative on the congressional agenda...
...This is not so...
...A cherry picker is a hydraulic lifting device used to pick fruit from the otherwise inaccessible parts of large trees...
...but I'm pretty sure that O'Connor's statement was factually identical to the statement that an American president can't legitimately assume the powers of an absolute monarch...
...Imagine using one of those to get at a fruit salad...
...About once a month some idiotic metaphor gets nationwide attention...
...I never heard anybody explain how a president, amidst his war cabinet and a sprawling array of undersecretaries and advisers, could plausibly pick only those bits of intelligence he likes and pass over those he doesn't...
...Its holder can cash it for as much money as he wishes, provided sufficient funds...
...Now I'm as far as one can be from a Rousseauean, but sometimes I think children are, in this respect at least, more intelligent than adults...
...He says they're just on a fishing expedition...
...I should point out that, as a mere litterateur, I haven't the slightest clue what all the legal hubbub was all about...
...We know from experience that children, especially young children, take everything literally...
...She seems to think it involves some car-diological cavity in which a variety of furniture is inserted for reasons having to do with her mom's love...
...What we got was an argument about a metaphor about a series of claims that hadn't been made...
...Picking cherries out of a fruit salad...
...That sound clip became headline news for about 36 hours, and suddenly everybody was arguing about whether the ISG Report was a fruit salad or something else...
...The president's response is that they haven't put anything on the table...
...I wouldn't have thought cherries were so widely objectionable as that, but my wife tells me that many people don't like them in their fruit salads...
...Don't throw the cat out with the bathwater," she once said, and occasionally I still think of that poor screeching cat sailing out the back door with a tubful of dirty bathwater...
...And what was "cherry-picking" supposed to signify, anyway...
...But suppose for a moment that Baker really did want to remind his listeners (as if they needed reminding) that George W. Bush had been repeatedly and energetically accused by his Democratic adversaries of misusing intelligence: a highly doubtful supposition in my mind, but just suppose that's what he would have liked to do...
...Sometimes these metaphors start to overlap, and confusion becomes comedy...
...They say he's thumbed his nose at the opposition, and turned his back on them...
Vol. 12 • July 2007 • No. 41
