Word: metaphor
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...What am I talking about? Here's a metaphor: to the Japanese, the highly-dangerous Fugu fish is a great delicacy. Handled and prepared carefully, it can be relished without concern. But the fish contains a fatal poison in its skin known as tetrodotoxin, which can kill in minutes. So it is with our relationship to the past: if we approach it thoughtfully, it can provide a kind of nourishment for our lives in the present. The great danger of history is cheap nostalgia, seducing us into loving the past simply because...
...penalty: "I learn to think of it in terms of capital punishment where expulsion is the death penalty and dismissal is life imprisonment and I hope that you'll come to see it that way," she wrote. In a Crimson article last Friday, Dean Lewis picked up the same metaphor: "I think the Board does think about dismissal versus expulsion the way others think about capital punishment," he wrote in an e-mail message. "As unlikely as it is that new information could come to light years later that would change the way a case is viewed, the Board...
Three years ago, President Clinton promised to build us a "Bridge to the 21st Century." I still don't understand the metaphor, even as we enter the downward slope of the bridge, speeding toward the toll plaza. (Thank god for EZ-Pass.) What are we crossing over? Bridges usually get you somewhere you can't get without one, like across a river. Time will take us to the 21st century, like...
...that the Lewinsky matter is over (sort of), the bridge metaphor may take on a new meaning: The bridge Clinton built for us was the sex-and-perjury-and-obstruction-and-mendacity scandal itself. It was one big distraction, an all-consuming diversion with its own engine. Under the bridge lay everything real--all the issues the government could have been spending time and money on instead. But for all the complaints about how the bridge was a waste, a regular government boondoggle, many millions of people escaped the reality below by coming along for the ride...
...pretty metaphor, but isn't that appropriate...