POLITICS AND METAPHORS

Why do people keep calling Elena Kagan, Barack Obama's nominee to America's Supreme Court, a "blank slate"? The term, combined with her name, gets 70,300 hits on Google. Glenn Greenwald, Paul Campos and Andrew Sullivan have all used it prominently, and AOL news gives it the number-one billing of their "top 5 metaphors for Elena Kagan." The thing about a metaphor, though, is that it's supposed to help us to understand something. The blank slate itself is meant to have no opinions or proclivities, and can be written on by others at will. It is a theory held by some about children, for example.

This is very hard to square with the reports, many supported by actual evidence, that Kagan is pro-gay, comfortable with executive power, a closet conservative, the intended Democratic counterweight to John Roberts, a liberal academic who boldly hired conservatives at Harvard, a Mets fan and, hell, let's throw in the alleged fondness for cigars. As a child she also dressed up in judge's robes. Some of these tidbits are at odds with one another, and I'm not sure they're all true, but they're all things that describe a real person with quite real proclivities. "Blank slate"? Hardly.

Messrs Sullivan and Greenwald: if you mean "handmaiden to the powerful", say so, and if you mean "torture-loving Cheneyite", say that. Bill Kristol, kudos to you for at least saying what you mean and calling her "anti-military". Regardless, one thing is obvious: with all the passions she has aroused, Kagan, 50 years old with a mind near-universally described as highly impressive, a beloved teacher but perhaps too cosy with her bosses in politics, is no blank slate.

Sullivan, a devotee of George Orwell, has surely committed most of that writer’s “Politics and the English Language” to heart. (Our style-book editor is a fan, too.) The most memorable lesson of that essay is on metaphors:

A newly invented metaphor assists thought by evoking a visual image, while on the other hand a metaphor which is technically "dead" (e.g. iron resolution) has in effect reverted to being an ordinary word and can generally be used without loss of vividness. But in between these two classes there is a huge dump of worn-out metaphors which have lost all evocative power and are merely used because they save people the trouble of inventing phrases for themselves.

It’s those not-yet-dead metaphors that are the problem. They still call up the image of … well, something. The pressure of getting a column filed or a blog post up may tempt a writer to grab one off the shelf, good fit or not.

There, I just used “off the shelf” and “good fit.” Dead? Dying? The distinction isn’t always obvious, and if I scoured everything I’d written over the last year I’d probably embarrass myself with what I’d find. But if you really consciously choose a metaphor, pick it up off that shelf and swing it a few times saying “yes, this one,” and then use it over and over, it had better be a good one. If it’s good, you won’t write a post with the surreal headline “Harvard’s Blank Slate to Rule Over Us.” Rule by a blank slate should actually be pretty enjoyable for libertarians, but somehow I don’t think this is what Andrew Sullivan meant.

Writing is hard; blogging is fast. As much as Sullivan might fancy that Orwell would be a fearless blogger, I think he would still be what he was: an ornery essayist, the kind of person who disdained the easy thoughts that rush from lizard-brain through dying-metaphor-retrieval cortex to the keyboard to the internet. His kind is rare enough today; on the internet, I’m not even sure Orwell is possible.

~ ROBERT LANE GREENE

Picture credit: alkruse24 (via Flickr)