A War on Metaphor

Can we please end war in our time? This is not a rhetorical question, but a plea for sanity and proportion. War as a metaphor for any conflict, great or trivial, diminishes the great issues and inflates the smaller ones.

I think we can probably blame LBJ for starting this with his War on Poverty. This was followed by the War on Drugs, the War on Illiteracy and the War on Teen Pregnancy. I do not believe that we can say that we won any of these wars.

The War on Christmas, the name of which we can most likely stick on Bill O’Reilly, has been going on for some years. It is doing about as well as all those other “wars.” It is a war that, were it actually happening, I’d be happy to lose.

As a Jew I am not offended by Christmas, Christmas trees, crèches and most Christmas songs—Grand Ma Got Run Over by a Reindeer being the exception, but that is based on esthetics not theology. Chris is right that there is nothing intrinsically offensive in people celebrating the holidays and holy days of their own traditions. It is even richer and better when we include each other—not in order to convert the other but simply to share our traditions and festivals.

Now apparently that arbiter elaganta, Pamela Anderson, doyen of all things tasteful, is trying to move us from those our traditional Thanksgiving bird to tofu. Has she no compassion for how the tofus suffer? Can she not hear the plaintive cries of the soy as it is harvested? I do think that I understand her strange and protective reaction to our domestic turkeys with their artificially enhanced and unnaturally large breasts. Well, it is kind of self-explanatory.

Once we get rid of war, can we please eliminate the over-used suffix of “Gate” for any error or scandal? Okay, that is rhetorical. But at this season of hope and Thanksgiving, I’m entitled to dream.