skippy the bush kangaroo

Saturday, September 22, 2007

even a stupid clock is right twice a day

certainly, the press is making much of awol's assertion that saddam killed nelson mandela.

but james taranto of the wsj opinion journal makes the assertion that awol was speaking metaphorically, and that, given the context of his entire speech, it was actually quite an astute thing to say.

so, what did president bush actually say? here's the quote in context, from the white house transcript:

part of the reason why there is not this instant democracy in iraq is because people are still recovering from saddam hussein's brutal rule. i thought an interesting comment was made when somebody said to me, i heard somebody say, where's mandela? well, mandela is dead, because saddam hussein killed all the mandelas. he was a brutal tyrant that divided people up and split families, and people are recovering from this. so there's a psychological recovery that is taking place. and it's hard work for them. and i understand it's hard work for them. having said that, i'm not going the give them a pass when it comes to the central government's reconciliation efforts.
in this context, it is clear that the literal meaning of "where's mandela?" is "where is the iraqi who will play the role in his country that mandela played in postapartheid south africa?" this was a pithy metaphor, not an "embarrassing gaffe."
taranto goes on to insist that the story making the rounds of the press is either the result of stupidity, laziness, or dishonesty.

the problem taranto has to overcome is that, for anybody else in the world, this might be a viable argument. and we are not being snarky here. but awol has proven himself, over and over again, to not be deep enough to comprehend even what a metaphor is, let alone how to make one.

make the pie higher? is our children learning? fool me once, you won't get fooled again? awol has a limited grasp of not how words themselves work, but how the images words are used to create, work.

plus, on more than one occasion the white house transcripts have cleaned up awol's gaffes. so even if this lofty mandela metaphor is what the original speech writer intended, we are quite sure that awol managed to mangle it into the twainistic greatly exaggerated death report of a world leader.

let's suppose awol did say what he meant, and he meant to create a poetic, if sad, image. that still makes him about 1 for 732 in terms of successful metaphor batting average.

so, unfortunately for taranto's argument, even if the blind pig did for once stumble onto a truffle, the table has been set awol by himself to let the world feast on his dinner of malapropisms, which has been 7 years in the making.

yes, we mixed our metaphors terribly in the last paragraph. but, at least, we know what a metaphor is.

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posted by skippy at 12:44 AM |

1 Comments:

Yeah, this only works if your willing suspension of disbelief button is working...
commented by Anonymous Anonymous, 10:07 AM PDT  

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