Metaphors

Well, after moving on from one experiment in failed metaphors, I've settled on another. This time, the metaphors aren't mine, but they instead belong to Emily Yoffe, who has written an op-ed that exhibits George Will-levels of contempt for people concerned about climate change and Maureen Dowd-levels of superficiality and hair tossing. Which--for lacking Will's disingenuous analysis and rigorous-sounding tone--is an easier kind of op-ed to write angry-sounding blog posts about!

On the one hand, Yoffe fails to understand a good metaphor. She writes, "Gore explicitly compares warming to the Nazis of the last century and terrorists of this one." Oh really? Explicitly? Well I'll happily admit it if I'm wrong here, but I can't remember a single instance--in a speech, a video, an op-ed, anything--wherein Gore has compared warming to Nazis and terrorists. I can remember Gore telling Congressmen that their challenge rises to the same level of import and nobility as the causes of defeating Nazism and terrorism. And, of course, he's perfectly correct. Yoffe has decided, though, that Gore hasn't stopped short at the claim that forestalling global warming will be both difficult and necessary, but that he's actually gone much further, calling "warming"--a unit of temperature, maybe? or a carbon particle?--a Nazi and other mean names. Fascinating interpretation!

On the other hand, as Kevin Drum points out, her own attempt at symbolic language is, unlike Al Gore's, an epic disaster:

In his new book, "The Assault on Reason," Gore denounces what he sees as today's politics of fear. Yet his own campaign of mass persuasion -- any such campaign -- is not amenable to contradiction and uncertainty. It's about fright and absolutes. But just because something can be plotted on an X and Y axis does not make it the whole truth.

I think we can all agree that reading throught that paragraph is a brutal and excruciating process. And in the end I can't even say I know exactly what she means. That though global warming is a scientific fact, it might not be such a bad thing? Patio lunches in the winter! Or is it an inane reflex, written in reaction to not having a clue what she's talking about? I'm not sure. But either way, as a response, here's a shot at symbolic language of my own: This op-ed--and particularly its last sentence--is as bad as Nazis, terrorism, and global warming combined!