Two more quick observations from last night's Wesley Clark event. Or, rather, one from the event, and one from dinner beforehand. Both strike me as fairly general principles about political discourse:
1) Your current political opinions are interesting in inverse proportion to the number of times you use the word "fascist" or variants thereof. Likewise "communist" and variants thereof.
2) A colleague observed at dinner that a really remarkable number of problems are, at their base, due to people failing to understand irony or metaphor. Or, in his more colorful phrasing, "People who can't handle the metaphorical use of language are completely fucked."
Of course, an interesting question would be whether these two principles are in conflict...
Both of those are wonderful quotes. I think the two principles actually work in conjunction.
Of course, those described so aptly by point (2), who cannot handle the metaphorical use of language may be quite happy. If they happen to be dying for sex, then the notion that they are "completely fucked" (while in reality metaphorical) has suddenly become a blissful. This is proof that "ignorance is bliss" (though I'm not quite sure what the latter phrase itself would mean to someone who is metaphorically challenged).
Oops. "become a blissful" is supposed to be "become blissful", or something similar...
A, that's not a metaphor, that's a pun.