Word: metaphoritis
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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From local tour guides, from the owners of private stores, from everyone, it seemed, who spoke English, I heard the phrase "after the Cultural Revolution." The four most oft-repeated words of my stay in China became a metaphor for the vast changes the country is undergoing, for the experiences of suffering which bind the people together and for the limited extent to which I was capable of communicating with the Chinese people...
That is a rare, fancy metaphor that can be backed up by hard numbers. The Pentagon has indeed been on a long binge: in the eight years of the Reagan Administration, Congress will have handed it $2.2 trillion -- trillion! A good deal of that has been dribbled away in heedless, indiscriminate spending. Now the bills are coming due -- literally, in the case of a number of supersophisticated weapons systems nearing production. Meanwhile, the Defense Department has been forced by the overall federal budget squeeze to embrace a decidedly unfamiliar, and in its eyes hideous, new bride: austerity...
Higher education, they say, is the gateway to future opportunity in employment, and thus the federal government must increase expenditures on all forms of student aid to ensure equal access for all. "Education is a metaphor for a lot of the challenges facing the country," Shattuck says...
That innocent remark can serve as a metaphor for Jackson's ill-focused California primary campaign. Jackson's challenge to Michael Dukakis is at best a sideshow to the "real" campaign between the Massachusetts Governor and George Bush. As Jackson scurries around California, he gives the appearance of a candidate who has rhyme but not reason to keep going. He flits from issue to issue, earnestly discussing relations with the Soviet Union, denouncing crack- dealing youth gangs and even trumpeting plans for the exploration of Mars. The closest Jackson has come to finding a focus for his diffuse California campaign...
...high school bits are apparently meant to be spoofs, except for a bizarre dance about slaughtering a pig, which turns out, inadvertently, to be the funniest moment. As gross-out entertainment, Carrie fails to deliver. Early scenes offer literal stage blood and fire, but the gymnasium Gotterdammerung is all metaphor. It is just smoke and flashing lights and lasers asking to be transformed by the audience's imagination -- a quality lacking in the creators of this mismatched morass...