Two more quick observations from last night's Wesley Clark event. Or, rather, one from the event, and one from dinner beforehand. Both strike me as fairly general principles about political discourse:
1) Your current political opinions are interesting in inverse proportion to the number of times you use the word "fascist" or variants thereof. Likewise "communist" and variants thereof.
2) A colleague observed at dinner that a really remarkable number of problems are, at their base, due to people failing to understand irony or metaphor. Or, in his more colorful phrasing, "People who can't handle the metaphorical use of language are completely fucked."
Of course, an interesting question would be whether these two principles are in conflict...
- Log in to post comments
More like this
As previously mentioned, Wesley Clark spoke on campus last night. The speech was pretty much what you'd expect from a once and future (?) Presidential aspirant with his background: he mostly talked about military matters, stressing that George Bush bad, Americ good, puppies and apple pie, yay! OK,…
Last week's article on the Aymara language and metaphorical depictions of time generated a lot of discussion. I think part of the confusion there had to do less with the specific example and more with basic questions about metaphorical representations of time, so today I'm going to cover some of…
I'm sick and tired of this debate of "do you believe in evolution?" Who cares? Who freakin' cares?
You see to me belief is cheap. Any person can claim to believe in any old idea. So what if Obama and Hillary believe in evolution and Huckabee believes in creationism? What I want ...what I expect…
Dear Readers, here's your chance to weigh in:
Over at the Atlantic, David Shenk, a sharp writer who keeps a blog there called "The Genius in Us All," has posted a gentlemanly smackdown ("Metaphor fight! Shenk and Dobbs square off") that he and I had via email last week regarding the "orchid-…
Both of those are wonderful quotes. I think the two principles actually work in conjunction.
Of course, those described so aptly by point (2), who cannot handle the metaphorical use of language may be quite happy. If they happen to be dying for sex, then the notion that they are "completely fucked" (while in reality metaphorical) has suddenly become a blissful. This is proof that "ignorance is bliss" (though I'm not quite sure what the latter phrase itself would mean to someone who is metaphorically challenged).
Oops. "become a blissful" is supposed to be "become blissful", or something similar...
A, that's not a metaphor, that's a pun.