A Fresh Start on Metaphors

In his Meet the Press interview last week, President Elect Obama expressed the desire that the various reform, financial rescue and economic stimulus plans would result in a "leaner, meaner and more competitive" America. It has long been popular to apply sports and war metaphors to describe the workings of the world of business, and in the last thirty years, to apply them also to the sphere of government. In an extension of the principle "what's good for General Motors is good for America," citizens have become stakeholders who invest via taxation; agencies make war on poverty or drugs. Party campaigns have partisan playbooks; we endeavor to level the playing field, and so forth.

Later on in the same interview, Obama says that "we are all in this together," and that "we will rise or fall as one nation." This is the rhetoric of cooperation, of communal effort and shared destiny. It is, one could say, at "war" with the tone of the preceding paragraph.

If forced to choose sides, I'd have to opt for the tone of the latter. If I was making a poem, I'd prefer to be on my own, duking it out with other poets for pocket change and bragging rights. But in making or remaking a nation--well--it takes a world to make a nation. Our interdependency has never been more clear than during the current financial crisis. This being the case, it might be a winning gambit for the new administration to lose the playbook of Social Darwinism. When times are tough, we are less a nation of players looking to triumph, and more a bunch of people just looking to get by. That calls for a fairer, kinder and more cooperative America, instead.

Today we learn a new word in German

English has more words than just about any other language, but when we find a needful one missing, we cheerfully borrow from our neighbors. An example is schadenfreude, borrowed from German, and defined by dictionary.com as "pleasure felt at someone else's misfortune." Aside from rage, this seems to be the dominant emotion experienced by voters in this election cycle. Commentator Jack Cafferty said that he would crawl naked through barbed wire in order to get to a television set to watch tonight's VP debate. A truly disturbing mental image, and you can bet he wasn't talking about his overwhelming intellectual curiosity. The aficionados (another good word on loan) of schadenfreude line up on each side, one hoping Gov. Palin mistakes "ayatollah" for a town on Florida's Gulf Coast, and the other hoping to hear Sen. Biden reminisce at length about listening to FDR on his iPod.

Shadenfreude was busily at work in the financial meltdown, too, as Masters of the Universe got their comeuppance (a tasty bit of slang, too.) While the loss of untold billions provoked a schadenfreudic chuckle, one imagines that arbitrageurs in handcuffs and day traders dining on pet food would provide a belly laugh. It's just plain mean out there. I'm not immune myself, but I'm trying to take the cure. Here's hoping that tonight's debate is a civil conversation where both candidates are able to present their positions with honesty and clarity. And here's hoping that we can actually get our financial house in order while we still have houses. But maybe it's all just some kind of uberschadenfreude on my part, hoping to take pleasure in the misfortune of those who are anticipating disaster with glee.