I Never Metaphor

....I didn't like.

One of the people who occasionally comments here told me about a book she'd read, Metaphors We Live By, that sounded pretty interesting. I haven't looked at it yet -- got it on order from the librarium -- but as I understand it, the idea is that when we think about things -- complex ideas, not 'do we need more milk, should I bring clothes to the cleaners', but 'is the bailout a basically good idea that's well executed, or something less than that' -- we tend to aggregate concepts in our minds, clustering thoughts based on our associations with them. If the idea of a bailout is associated in our minds with 'return to financial health', 'someone's looking out for us', ' they've got it under control', we're more likely to support the concept than if we associate it with 'gamblers lost their money and now someone in Washington is taking mine to give to them', 'lavish lifestyles of bankers when the ordinary guy finds it hard to make ends meet'. In one of the lesser Star Trek episodes, the ever-thoughtful Captain Picard meets an alien who communicates in roughly the same way -- instead of simply saying something, it refers to an event from his history, evoking the attitudes and emotions of that event. We might say 'when Nixon resigned', ' when man walked on the moon', '9/11'. It's the concept that evokes and incorporates a number of linking images and attitudes.

I thought of that this morning while reading an article about the President's upcoming 'town hall', where he will answer questions that have been submitted by people, and voted on for 'best question'. I expect that Obama will cherry-pick from those top questions, answering them in a lecture-style, talking at length in a calm, discursive style. It should be interesting, even if he doesn't come out and say what some of us would like to hear him say. One person in the article said that this would be part campaign-style politics and part American Idol. I'm guessing that image resonated with a fair number of people. When Obama said that everyone gets to be the critical judge from American Idol, the other night, I bet that did, too. Oh, yeah, we know what he's talking about, now.

Relative to that town hall --I used to wonder what I'd say if I ever got the chance to ask a well-known person a question. This was before I realized that the chances of getting a truthful answer from a well-known person was vanishingly slim. I suppose this will be as close as I get.