Word: metaphors
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...sight of the over-burdened earth moves these "crisis environmentalists" to advocate tough policies: positive and negative monetary incentives, rationing of children, sterilizing materials in the water supplies and compulsory abortion. Acknowledging that coercion diminishes freedom and is especially hard on the poor, these crisis environmentalists admit that the metaphor of an overcrowded lifeboat is a harsh one, requiring harsh ethics, but that it is "the basic metaphor within which we must work out our solutions," in the words of Mr. Garrett Hardin, author of "Lifeboat Ethics: The Case Against Helping the Poor." Mr. Hardin's argument is that humanity...
...portentous statement, "Election Day: November 1968," such a gem of grafitti would have reflected the end of Shampoo's analysis of human behavior. It would have prepared us for what follows, a farce in which the wanton insatiable cocks and cunts of Los Angeles suburbanites become an overextended, tiresome metaphor for the political machinations of the pricks in Washington. It seems that every time two beautiful people are in close enough proximity to become aroused, Nixon's face appears on the screen, either on a wall poster, beaming with that entreating, deceitful smile, or on a television, unctuously articulating...
...matter that the story is perhaps spurious and that scholars have proved that the actual author of the letters was the Vicomte de Guillereagues, a Parisian man-about-town who dabbled in the study and analysis of passion. The metaphor still holds. "What woman is not a nun, sacrificed, self-sacrificing, without a life of her own, sequestered from the world?" the three Marias...
...Middle of the World, steady and bright and acted with well-modulated intensity by Carlisi and Leotard, is on less certain ground as political metaphor. The movie begins with some narration about political flux and the process of "normalization" that gives the plot a somewhat schematic cast. Tanner takes trouble to establish the class differences between the two lovers, but he is better at dealing with sexual politics than theoretical ones. The Middle of the World is truer as object lesson than tract, better on the realities of love than the stalled struggle of the classes...
John Murray Cuddihy calls this jag ged meditation a "midrash." The metaphor is apt, for like a Talmudic exegesis, the book is a learned commentary on "sacred" texts, in this case those of the giants of the Jewish Diaspora. As with a midrash, the argument unfolds from a single overriding principle: in this case the bold if cranky notion that from Marx to Freud to Abbie Hoffman, the Jewish intellectual vanguard has been obsessed by embarrassment at its own Jewishness...