Epic Simile (Fail): Political Rhetoric and the Health Care Blanket

I am both a literary and a political junkie, forever trolling the internets for rhetorical gems from both genres. When political rhetoric bares its ugly head, especially when this past weekend's health care "debate" reached its highest pitch, this dual citizenship of the word can provoke something akin to an itch or rough patch that flares on the skin. I hope I've mixed enough metaphors in that sentence to vaccinate you, fair reader, against the rhetorical ills that are to come in this post. I don't know that poetry can kill a man, as Stevens claimed, but a bad metaphor can surely sicken you, even as the good metaphor can boost one's immune system. So first let me share some of the healthy stuff from the internet, a "Sample: Epic Simile" that comes off the teaching page of a Dr. L. Kip Wheeler at Carson-Newman College in Tennessee. The professor asks students to "note the clever inversions between land-creatures and sea-creatures" in this simile from Homer's The Odyssey, as translated in 1963 by Robert Fitzgerald:

"During his meditation, a heavy surge was taking him, in fact, straight on the rocks. He [would have] been flayed there, and his bones broken, had not grey-eyed Athena instructed him: he gripped a rock-ledge with both hands in passing and held on, groaning as the surge went by, to keep clear of its breaking. Then the backwash hit him, ripping him under and far out. An octopus, when you drag one from his chamber, comes up with suckers full of tiny stones: Odysseus left the skin of his great hands torn on the rock-ledge as the wave submerged him. And now at last Odysseus would have perished, battered inhumanly, but he had the gift of self-possession from grey-eyed Athena."

There were very few uses of figurative language in Sunday's debate on the House floor. Mostly there were references to "this flawed bill" on the part of Republicans and many allusions to fear: constituents, we were told, are "deeply afraid" of this bill, therefore it must be voted down. John Boehner's speech was possessed of a kind of counter-poetry, replete with repetitions of "no," up to "No you can't" after he asked if members had read the bill. But its counter-poetics was one of plain speech, lacking figure.

Ironically, its repetitions more resembled those of President Obama's speech to the Democratic caucus on March 20th than they did the figurative blanket that soon follows, though Obama's rhetoric of fear tropes the Republicans': "Do it for them. Do it for people who are really scared right now through no fault of their own, who've played by the rules, who've done all the right things, and have suddenly found out that because of an accident, because of an ailment, they're about to lose their house . . ." His repetitions of "this is a tough vote" are pragmatic, while his call to Lincoln's language is poetic (both in Lincoln's wording and in the way Obama weaves it through his speech): "I am not bound to win, but I'm bound to be true. I'm not bound to succeed, but I'm bound to live up to what light I have." The legislation is less scary, according to this argument, than would be the failure to pass it.

It was left to Rep. Shelley Moore Capito of West Virginia to add the figurative fireworks during Sunday's debate. You can see her speech here:



Capito's epic simile starts with a blanket. She knows that her listeners will think of blankets as a comfort. But her blanket is not benign because it covers us all (like insurance, come to think of it). If health care legislation is a blanket, then it has been woven by strong arms that make deals; if the blanket was meant to comfort, it is in places too short and in others too long; if its meant to cover the huddled masses, then they discover that it is actually a "wall" between them and their doctor (the government as a smothering mother, in other words); if the blanket is made of fabric, it is a fabric with holes in it; the promised patches made of the flowery fabric of promises (those that will not be fulfilled). She then moves out to the children who are playing outside, little knowing that they will pay for this legislation when they are older. The drapery of legislation ends up mixed with the deaf ear of the government, which refuses to listen to the heartbeat of America.

At this point, I want out from under the blanket of her rhetoric. When, inspired by Rep. Capito's speech, I google "rhetoric as blanket," I am rewarded with a blog post from this weekend about Barack Obama's alleged need to use a teleprompter (something he did not do on Saturday before the Democrats). The simile here is "Barack Obama is like Linus," needing a security blanket. Of course the blanket is blue:

"President Barack Obama is a lot like Linus Van Pelt. The President is a perplexing contradiction in terms. Obama, like Linus, is said to be exceedingly intelligent and full of potential. A Linus-type philosopher/theologian Obama preaches the gospel of social hope and change. Linus quoted Scripture, while Obama tends to reference statements similar to those spoken by theorist Karl Marx.

Yet while verbally exuding confidence, both Obama and Linus are a paradox. Both flaunt self-perceived intellect while diametrically exhibiting a predilection to insecurity. Linus rarely appears without a blanket tossed over one shoulder, and Barack refuses to leave Pennsylvania Avenue without the teleprompter packed in the presidential U-Haul©."

Leave aside the teleprompter ad hominem swipe, and you find buried under this blanket the notion that "the gospel of social hope and change" is connected (somehow) to his "insecurity" in speaking. The security blanket he carries with him, either his gospel or his teleprompter, covers over a profound lack of security. So the security blanket reflects (if a blanket can be said to reflect) blanket assumptions on the part of Obama, blanket statements, the blanketing ideology of, say, Karl Marx. Communism is, after all, the biggest blanket of them all.

George Lakoff has famously described the opposing metaphorical fields of liberal and conservatives. Liberals use metaphors of typically feminine "nurturance," while conservatives those of the "strict father." Strict fathers do not hand out blankets; it's mothers who do. Their blankets aim to nurture but they either smother or fail altogether to cover the children we are, according to the conservative reading of the liberal metaphor.

Interestingly, there's a blanket hidden in Obama's speech of Saturday, which also has holes in it. "And now we've got middle class Americans, don't have Medicare, don't have Medicaid, watching the employer-based system fray along the edges or being caught in terrible situations. And the question is, are we going to be true to them?" Being true to our citizens is tantamount to mending a fraying cloth. It's women's work, like much of what Democrats (and Richard Nixon) have tried, and failed, to do over the past 60 years.

So, when the House of Representatives voted as a body yesterday, they all had in mind (conscious or un-) the figure of the blanket. They had to ask if they wanted to be under a blanket or outside it, if they wanted a protective or a smothering blanket. The word itself was not a blanket, for it meant so many things. For some, the blanket was oppressive, ill-sewn, smothering; for others, the blanket was fraying, but necessary. This time the menders won, by the barest of threads. But as the Republicans might say, a win is a win. The Democrats sewed it up.

Sarah Palin assails euphemisms & Ann Dunham details blacksmithing

In my undergraduate poetry workshop last week, I asked students to take a brief walk in the corridor of our building or, if they hurried, to go outside. Their assignment was to be surprised by something they noticed; on their return, they wrote haiku, the poetic form best equipped to relate and evoke surprise. One method in seeking out surprise is to look for odd juxtapositions of language or image; irony is surprise's best trope. That I attended a talk about Ann Dunham's book of anthropology about Indonesia and watched Sarah Palin's keynote to the Teabagger convention this week seems an apt launching pad, if not for a haiku then for this shortish form.




Sarah Palin's speech opened with her proclamation that she is proud to be an American, that the military keeps us free, and that Teabaggers are good people. So far, nothing unexpected. What drew me in, however, was the part of her speech where she criticized Democrats' (Obama's, in particular) misuse of language. Because the speech was closed to the press--even as it was shown on CNN, cspan, and Fox--there is no full transcript of the speech available on-line as I write this. So I'll use what scraps I've found, mostly in Sam Stein's blog on huffingtonpost.com and from my memory. Andrew Sullivan's live blog is here. Palin's first "catch" was to point out that Obama does not use the word "war" (no matter that he does, of course), but that the action in Afghanistan now has a fancy euphemistic title, namely "Overseas Contingency Operation." She then launched into Obama's handling of the Christmas (underwear) bomber, the fact that he was given his Miranda rights, an American lawyer, and "the right to remain silent." (No matter that reports have come out in recent days that he has been talking a lot, under the influence of his family, flown in by the U.S. government). Here's the gist of Palin's claim: "It scares me for my children, for your children, to treat this like a mere law enforcement matter . . . It puts our country at great risk . . . To win that war we need a commander-in-chief not a professor of law standing at the lectern."

I will ignore the plea to sentiment by way of her children and my children and head straight for her literary critical moment. Palin seems to be attacking a euphemism, namely the administration's use of the term "law enforcement" for the actual word "war." Hence, as she would have it, the administration uses the legal system instead of military courts, and the "commander in chief" is actually just "a professor of law." What fascinates me is the way in which Palin describes the law itself as a euphemism of sorts, even as the term "law professor" becomes synonymous with weakness. (Ah, academics, so easy to attack!) To follow the law is thus a problem; to cut to the chase--use the word "war" where it should be used!--means cutting away the euphemistic legal system and acting. To act is to go beyond the law. That will keep our children safe. And so the attack on euphemism itself becomes one, a dangerous stand-in for delegitimizing the Constitution itself.

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This past Thursday I attended the Biography Center Brownbag featuring Alice Dewey, Ann Dunham's dissertation director in the 1980s and early 1990s, who has co-edited (with Nancy Cooper) the 1000 page manuscript, based on 14 years of research, into a book just published by Duke University Press as Surviving Against the Odds: Village Industry in Indonesia. The book enters a context much larger than its declared purpose, that of analyzing a blacksmithing village in Indonesia, because Ann Dunham was Barack Obama's mother. And so, under the able marketing staff of Duke University Press, the book also includes fascimiles of Dunham's field notes and photographs (some in color) of her and the subjects of her work. Alice Dewey seemed torn between talking about her former student and about her former student's work. At one moment, she'd say, "study something you can buy or eat, because that's how you get to know people," and then she'd tell us that Dunham, when she stayed with Dewey, would get up at 3 a.m. to start work. On the one hand, she gave us a brief biography of Dunham, and on the other she explained Dunham's exquisite sense of the significance of detail. Dunham had worked on four villages in Indonesia--villages organized by their trades, blacksmithing, basket-weaving, puppet-making--and incorporated intimate detail of her subjects' lives with a grasp of statistics and sense of how the government worked, or failed to work. The session ended with a long discussion of the kris, or sword, which Dunham had gotten a local craftsman to make for her. Dewey described the process of making the swords, even as she told us how Dunham wrote ahead to people in Bali to say she was bringing a kris in from somewhere else, an act of diplomacy. (The kris is known for its supernatural powers, so dealing with it can be dicey.) While the event seemed a bit confusing to someone unfamiliar with Indonesia or Ann Dunham, I appreciated the way in which Dunham was remembered lovingly through her work.

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Sarah Palin came to meet the Teabaggers ostensibly not as an Orwellian figure, but as the George Orwell of "Politics and the English Language." That she could also trot out sentences like, "freedom is a God-given right and it is worth fighting for . . . and Americas' finest are men and women in uniform . . . a force for good throughout the world and that is nothing to apologize for" (from Sam Stein's blog), suggests a rhetoric that is more Orwellian than Orwell himself could have imagined. To use an old Harold Bloom phrase, she troped him. Let us hope that she has not also roped in more than the 20% of the American public who automatically believe what she says. We need not so much an Orwell as Hemingway's "shit-detector" on this one.

Her attack on Ann Dunham's son was, in ways I've not fully described here, an attack on detail: the law is composed of details, the language we use to talk about war involves details (and yes, I agree with her that "contingency operation" will not do). No accident that she used "law professor" as a term of opprobium against Ann Dunham's son. (I gather law professors are even fairer game than lawyers themselves.) Dunham was an academic, and it sounds like she was a good one, immersed in detail, taking notebook after notebook of field notes. Far be it from me to defend the academy against all comers (the university is full of cliques and fads, just like any group), but perhaps we can start defending what we do--and doing it better--by talking about detail. Detail describes our world in ways that resemble it. Details offer us those surprises that tell us this object does not belong with that one. In our laughter and in the momentary confusions we feel in noticing such things, we can come upon a closer reverence for the world as it might be. Euphemism that that phrase is, it becomes less so once you act on it. Start taking notes.


[the photo of Sarah Palin shows her reading notes off her hand during the Q&A after her keynote address to the Teabaggers]