Word: metaphoritis
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...serious than exhaustion and a stomach-churning touch of gastroenteritis. Still, the brief fainting spell brought to the fore concerns about the President's health and reminded voters that Dan Quayle remains only a heartbeat away from the Oval Office. Far worse for Bush, the image was an obvious metaphor for the American economy: flat on its back, seeking succor from a resurgent Japan...
...Malcolm who provoked a storm of obloquy in the aftermath of the Dallas shooting when he said J.F.K.'s killing was "a case of the chickens coming home to roost." And it was L.B.J. who 10 years later gave a kind of gritty geopolitical substance to Malcolm's metaphor when he told an ex-aide that J.F.K. was "running a damned Murder Incorporated in the Caribbean" -- all those CIA assassination plots -- and that he believed one of these plots must have backfired, or doubled back on Kennedy, in Dealey Plaza...
...maybe not just any recession. General Motors, that synonym for American enterprise, sounds a massive retreat with unprecedented plant closings and layoffs. Is this a metaphor for the American economy, for American destiny? We are seized with a sudden fear: maybe the current recession is not just a cyclical downturn, which would make it tolerable, but the harbinger of long- term decline. Maybe the bill for the cold war (or the Decade of Greed or the wages of sin -- pick your poison) has come due, and we are now beginning our inexorable descent. Maybe this is not America...
...doom. It begins with Bessie's being tested for mysterious bruises that signal leukemia. It ends with her facing quick death, knowing she must abandon the father and aunt she has served so long and the nephews she has begun to help. The true tragedy, the most apt AIDS metaphor, is that the world needs more people like her and is about to have one less...
Those stories and their setting demonstrate neither the arbitrariness nor the happenstance of realism, but rather the symbolism and metaphor of poetic art. We are not just in a late autumn of crunchy leaves, but also the autumn of a relationship...