IN SEARCH OF A METAPHOR
I stopped blogging to go search for a metaphor.
I needed one to comprehend what was going on in the Trump administration. I couldn’t seem to find a metaphor anywhere in the modern world for such hate-filled vulgarity. For a while I thought by analyzing him as a demagogue, not as a populist, I might make some progress. That seemed to help, so I wrote a piece that should appear before too long in The American Scholar.
Then came trump’s comments on Haiti and African nations. No ancient demagogue was quite that bad. I needed a better metaphor, not just for him, but for those who defended him, or made milk-toast criticisms, or just looked the other way. This is not restricted t Republican politicians. Consider, for example, the reported comment of the Rev. Robert Jeffress, the evangelical pastor of First Baptist Church of Dallas: “Apart from the vocabulary attributed to him, President Trump is right on target in his sentiment. As individual Christians, we have a biblical responsibility to place the needs of others above our own, but as commander in chief, President Trump has the constitutional responsibility to place the interests of our nation above the needs of other countries.”
Perhaps without knowing it such defenders of the president are demeaned, diminished, soiled, sullied by contact with this man. No, -- none of these terms is quite right; none provides the metaphor we need. Finally, I came across this passage in Polybius:
The festival of the Antigoneia was being held at Sicyon,—the baths being all supplied with large public bathing tubs, and smaller ones placed by them used by bathers of the better sort,—if Adronidas or Callicrates entered one of these, not a single one of the bystanders would get into it any more, until the bathman had let every drop of water run out and filled it with fresh. They did this from the idea that they would be polluted by entering the same water as these men.” (Polybius 30.23, tr. Shuckburgh. )
These Sicyonians got it right. They feared that any contact, however slight, with these politicians, might “pollute,” them. Until Trump came along, I thought such fears were superstitious holdovers from a pre-civilized stage of human existence. Now I understand their fear that they might be infected, and perhaps thereby become infectious themselves, a contagion that might spread through the whole body politic.
That’s the metaphor I was looking for.
January 12, 2018
I stopped blogging to go search for a metaphor.
I needed one to comprehend what was going on in the Trump administration. I couldn’t seem to find a metaphor anywhere in the modern world for such hate-filled vulgarity. For a while I thought by analyzing him as a demagogue, not as a populist, I might make some progress. That seemed to help, so I wrote a piece that should appear before too long in The American Scholar.
Then came trump’s comments on Haiti and African nations. No ancient demagogue was quite that bad. I needed a better metaphor, not just for him, but for those who defended him, or made milk-toast criticisms, or just looked the other way. This is not restricted t Republican politicians. Consider, for example, the reported comment of the Rev. Robert Jeffress, the evangelical pastor of First Baptist Church of Dallas: “Apart from the vocabulary attributed to him, President Trump is right on target in his sentiment. As individual Christians, we have a biblical responsibility to place the needs of others above our own, but as commander in chief, President Trump has the constitutional responsibility to place the interests of our nation above the needs of other countries.”
Perhaps without knowing it such defenders of the president are demeaned, diminished, soiled, sullied by contact with this man. No, -- none of these terms is quite right; none provides the metaphor we need. Finally, I came across this passage in Polybius:
The festival of the Antigoneia was being held at Sicyon,—the baths being all supplied with large public bathing tubs, and smaller ones placed by them used by bathers of the better sort,—if Adronidas or Callicrates entered one of these, not a single one of the bystanders would get into it any more, until the bathman had let every drop of water run out and filled it with fresh. They did this from the idea that they would be polluted by entering the same water as these men.” (Polybius 30.23, tr. Shuckburgh. )
These Sicyonians got it right. They feared that any contact, however slight, with these politicians, might “pollute,” them. Until Trump came along, I thought such fears were superstitious holdovers from a pre-civilized stage of human existence. Now I understand their fear that they might be infected, and perhaps thereby become infectious themselves, a contagion that might spread through the whole body politic.
That’s the metaphor I was looking for.
January 12, 2018
RSS Feed
