CHAPTER SEVEN
Metaphors Are like Warp Drive: The Viral Power of Proto-Stories
The greatest thing by far is to be a master of metaphor….
—Aristotle, Poetics
Our ordinary conceptual system, in terms of which we both think and act, is fundamentally metaphorical in nature.
—George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By , 1980
The human species thinks in metaphors and learns through stories.
—Mary Catherine Bateson, Peripheral Visions , 1994
Good metaphors are the Starship Enterprise of figures—they take you from where you are to a completely different place at light speed. But, metaphors can be more like the Millennium Falcon, since as powerful as they are, sometimes they are rickety and don’t work. Metaphors are also like a tornado that takes you from Kansas to Oz, a place at once utterly different and yet filled with familiar-looking faces.
At the heart of every story that touches us is a metaphor, something that connects us to the story deeply. We aren’t living “a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away” or in a Star Trek future centuries from now or in Oz or Hogwarts or Wakanda or Gotham. But we still can identify with and imagine ourselves as Luke or Leia or Han, Kirk or Spock or McCoy, Harry or Hermione or Ron—or Black Panther. We aren’t literally superheroes, but we can figuratively aspire to have a hero’s journey. As the viral internet meme says, “Always be yourself, unless you can be Batman. Then always be Batman.”
Metaphors are so powerful and so universal because they are the most essential of the mental shortcuts that allow us to make sense of the world and quickly figure out the best action in different situations, especially ones we haven’t seen before. Because human brains are small and our lifespan was especially short when we were evolving, our brains were “forced to rely on tricks to enlarge memory and speed computation,” as E. O. Wilson explained in Biophilia . That’s why our mind “specializes on analogy and metaphor” for pattern matching.
Pattern matching is most useful when it helps answer this question: How does my current problem or situation resemble another one that I have seen or heard about before? But that’s precisely the job of a metaphor. It connects a known situation to an unknown or novel one. How do we make sense of a concept like God? “The Lord is my shepherd” begins Psalm 23. Who is Alexander Hamilton? “I’m just like my country, I’m young, scrappy and hungry. And I’m not throwing away my shot,” as his character repeats again and again in his signature song in Lin-Manuel Miranda’s viral musical. How can we make sense of Marilyn Monroe’s and Princess Diana’s tragic deaths? Each was like a “Candle in the Wind,” as Elton John sings in his eulogy to Diana (a revision of his eulogy to Monroe), which became one of the best-selling singles in history.
But the true power of a great metaphor is, that like a powerful warp drive, it doesn’ t just take us on a single trip, but can keep the journey going where no one has gone before. A metaphor can be extended into an allegory or parable, which is really a proto-story. As we’ve seen, Lincoln used an extended metaphor of birth, death, and resurrection in the Gettysburg Address to turn the story of the country and those who sacrificed their lives to preserve it, into a hero’s journey—and, for those familiar with the Bible—specifically Christ’s journey. One textbook from Lincoln’s day, Murray’s English Exercises , noted, “An Allegory may be regarded as a metaphor continued.”
Extended metaphors run throughout the Bible. The Psalms are an extended metaphor menagerie, as are Jesus’ parables. For instance, Jesus takes perhaps the Bible’s most well-known extended metaphor, Psalm 23’s description of God as a shepherd, and extends it further into one of his most famous parables, “I am the good shepherd; I know my sheep and my sheep know me—just as the Father knows me and I know the Father—and I lay down my life for the sheep.”
Extended metaphors and similar proto-stories are still powerful. Sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild makes that clear in her 2016 book, Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right , which she wrote after spending five years getting to know Tea Party activists and Trump supporters in Louisiana. She was trying to understand why so many people in such a poor and highly polluted state voted for politicians who oppose federal government support for poor states and who oppose government rules to clean the environment.
After dozens of interviews she came up with an explanation, a “deep story” underlying their views, “an account of life as it feels to them.” As she explained in a Mother Jones article, their account goes like this :
You are patiently standing in the middle of a long line stretching toward the horizon, where the American Dream awaits. But as you wait, you see people cutting in line ahead of you.
Many of these line-cutters are black—beneficiaries of affirmative action or welfare. Some are career-driven women pushing into jobs they never had before. Then you see immigrants, Mexicans, Somalis, the Syrian refugees yet to come.
As you wait in this unmoving line, you’re being asked to feel sorry for them all. You have a good heart. But who is deciding who you should feel compassion for?
Then you see President Barack Hussein Obama waving the line-cutters forward. He’s on their side. In fact, isn’t he a line-cutter too? How did this fatherless black guy pay for Harvard?
As you wait your turn, Obama is using the money in your pocket to help the line-cutters. He and his liberal backers have removed the shame from taking. The government has become an instrument for redistributing your money to the undeserving. It’s not your government anymore; it’s theirs.
Hochschild explains she ran the account past her interviewees, and while some made tweaks “all of them agreed it was their story. One man said, ‘I live your analogy.’ Another said, ‘You read my mind.’”
This story, the powerful extended metaphor of the line-cutters, reads like a twisted parable, but my purpose here is not to debunk it. If you listened regularly to the right-wing media for years and years—Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, Breitbart, and other major sources of fake news—you might embrace something like it too. And if this were your extended metaphor, if this were your frame of mind, then you would be receptive to someone who mirrored your anger with his hyperbolic statements, who shared your sense of grievance for the loss of your American Dream with his artfully vague slogan, “Make America Great Again.” Indeed, the power of Trump’s slogan was that it allowed voters to fill in the details of making America great again with the line-cutter they most resent—without explicitly naming one.
“One of the fundamental findings of cognitive science is that people think in terms of frames and metaphors,” wrote linguist George Lakoff in his 2004 best-seller Don’t Think of an Elephant! “The frames are in the synapses of our brains, physically present in the form of neural circuitry.” In recent decades, linguists, cognitive scientists, and others have shown how frames and extended metaphors are at the heart of our thinking about “our most important abstract philosophical concepts, including time, causation, morality, and the mind.” Countless books and articles underscore that metaphors and extended metaphors are at the core of human thinking.
WHY METAPHORS MOVE US
So how and why do metaphors move us? Why does one minute of typical speech contain four to six metaphors?
University of Arizona students were asked one of two questions: “How many murders were there last year in Detroit?” or “How many murders were there last year in Michigan?” The median answer the students gave for the city of Detroit was two hundred murders and, for the whole state of Michigan, one hundred. In fact, the rest of Michigan has almost as many murders every year as its most deadly city. But Detroit is a much more dangerous sounding place than Michigan. Detroit has become a metaphor for violence and urban decay, and that metaphor framed the answer students gave.
Literal statements are harder to remember than metaphors with the same meaning—even archaic metaphors from Shakespeare. A 1979 study on “Memory for Literary Metaphors,” found that lines such as “Your bait of falsehood takes this carp of truth” (by Polonius in Hamlet ) were better recognized on a later memory test than lines with the same meaning but modern phrasing, such as “Your offering of falsehood takes this gift of truth.”
Metaphors make it easier to understand and remember prose. In the 1983 study, “Relation of metaphoric processing to comprehension and memory,” people were asked to read short passages on a subject such as how Hitler “committed his people to a course of war.” The passages either ended with a literal summary line, “The German people blindly accepted Hitler’s dangerous ideas,” or a metaphorical one, “The sheep followed the leader over the cliff.” Then subjects were tested for their recall of the material. You might expect that the picture was sticky to the brain—but the metaphor was more like a weld. The researchers concluded, “Not only were the concluding metaphors themselves better recalled” than the literal paraphrases, “but there was also an increase in memory for the preceding context.”
Metaphors enhance our memories in at least two ways. First, they create another place in the brain for a word or phrase to reside. People remember words better when they have multiple ways to remember them. In particular, metaphors create a visual aid to memory. Take a look at the pictures painted by a few of Shakespeare’s most memorable metaphors:
Good talkers far outnumber great speechmakers in part because good talkers tend to be highly verbal people with a strong ability to make remarks that please the ear. They are not necessarily as talented at persuading those who learn better through other senses. To be an effective viral communicator you must be able to persuade all types, not just the highly verbal, but also the highly visual, who make up a large portion of the population. Metaphor is one of the best ways to verbally connect to visual people, and those with high language intelligence are good at painting pictures with words.
Metaphors aid in memory a second way. As evident with the use of irony and other more complex figures of speech, the more involved you are in decoding a message, the more it sticks. Ideally, a metaphor will make you think and at the same time create a visual image that connects to an existing memory. That’s why metaphors are so common in advertising and brand slogans: Budweiser is “the King of Beers,” Chevy Trucks are “Like a Rock,” Geico is “so easy a caveman could do it,” and “Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there.”
THE WEAPONS OF POLITICAL WAR
Given their power, metaphors have naturally become a weapon wielded by all great political speechmakers. Indeed, argument-is-war is an extended metaphor that pervades our language and thinking, one that extends back centuries. The best-selling Elizabethan handbook, The Garden of Eloquence , describes the figures of speech as “martial instruments both of defence & invasion.” Lincoln explained that the figures of speech used in political warfare “are weapons which hit you, but miss us.” Winston Churchill labeled analogy and metaphor “among the most formidable weapons of the rhetorician.” For masters of rhetoric, like Lincoln and Churchill, their verbal battles were a kind of warfare because the stakes were so high. As President John F. Kennedy said of Churchill (borrowing from journalist Edward R. Murrow), “He mobilized the English language and sent it into battle” during World War II.
Churchill loved metaphors, and at seventy-one, he gave us his most memorable one, in a March 1946 speech in Fulton, Missouri, that displays his signature “rhymeless, meterless verse”:
A shadow has fallen upon the scene
so lately lighted by the Allied victory….
From Stettin in the Baltic
to Trieste in the Adriatic,
an iron curtain has descended across the Continent.
A single, well-crafted metaphor, like a well-crafted building, endures.
Kennedy was famous for his mastery of rhetoric. His first inaugural address, written with the help of Ted Sorensen, one of America’s best-known speechwriters, is widely considered one of the greatest speeches in the English language. The most viral line is probably the chiasmus, “Ask not what your country can do for you—ask what you can do for your country.” But almost as famous is his powerful metaphor, “Let the word go forth from this time and place, to friend and foe alike, that the torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans….”
A 2005 study on “Presidential Leadership and Charisma,” led by psychologist Jeffrey Mio, examined the use of metaphors in the first-term inaugural addresses of three dozen presidents who had been independently rated for charisma. The conclusion: “Charismatic presidents used nearly twice as many metaphors (adjusted for speech length) than non-charismatic presidents.” Additionally, when students were asked to read a random group of inaugural addresses and highlight the passages they viewed as most inspiring, “even those presidents who did not appear to be charismatic were still perceived to be more inspiring when they used metaphors.”
Extended metaphors are essential to politics for several reasons. First, as we’ve seen, they are a key to inspiring speeches. Second, since we think with extended metaphors, the best politicians naturally present themselves to fit our metaphors, linking those metaphors to their personal story. When a politician does that, their messages are said to “resonate with the public,” touching them personally and emotionally.
Musical resonance is another good metaphor for going viral. The word resonate comes from resonare : to sound again, to reverberate, to echo. But it carries the further meaning of amplify and project—like a musical instrument or a concert hall or any cavity designed to amplify and project certain tones. So Trump’s racist, anti-immigrant, and misogynist speeches were in tune with the line-cutter parable embraced by much of his target audience. They resonated.
Third, the best way to attack your opponent’s positive extended metaphor is to hit back with a negative extended metaphor. Put another way, going viral with voters is the art of creating a persuasive story using figurative language, the art of making—and unmaking—an emotional connection with voters.
The best, most successful political campaigns create two extended metaphors: They paint themselves with a positive one and smear their opponent with a negative one. Losing campaigns either have no extended metaphor or they make one or more gaffes—verbal blunders that allow their opponent to use their words against them to create a fatal negative metaphor.
In 2008, the public wanted change after eight years of Bush. Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton each had a big advantage: They were both powerful visual metaphors for change since neither of them looked like any of the previous presidents. Obama understood this was a change election, and his entire message was built around change, including his simple slogan: “Change we can believe in.” In that sense, he had a fully consistent extended metaphor or narrative. In contrast, Hillary Clinton ran as an establishment candidate—the safer choice, the one who could handle a 3:00 a.m. phone call. This fundamental incoherence of message was one of many mistakes that cost her the nomination.
In the general election, Sen. John McCain’s campaign suffered from almost the exact same incoherent narrative. On the one hand, he tried to present himself as the steady hand, the war veteran who was more experienced than the young freshman senator from Illinois. But McCain also tried to paint himself as a maverick who would bring change to Washington. His bold gamble to pick Sarah Palin, an unknown governor from Alaska, was meant to highlight his maverick credentials.
You can run as a maverick change agent or you can run as an experienced, establishment, steady hand. But you can’t do both and tell a consistent story. Worse, media interviews made Palin appear as a risky choice to be a heartbeat away from the presidency. When McCain briefly suspended his campaign during the financial crisis, he reinforced the extended metaphor the Obama campaign created for him as being erratic. McCain/Palin became a risky choice.
Sometimes a candidate defines himself or herself in a negative fashion, as Mitt Romney did after winning the Republican presidential primary. Romney was one of the worst communicators in recent memory to win a presidential nomination, much as Hillary Clinton was four years later. Politico talked to “thirty different Republican leaders across the country” about Romney, and Executive Editor Jim VandeHei reported on MSNBC’s Morning Joe June 5, 2012 that “they are so nervous that he’ll improvise rhetorically, which got him into a lot of trouble in the primary.” They were right to be worried. In a series of off-the-cuff remarks, the former governor and businessman, who was worth a quarter-billion dollars, became the stereotypical out-of-touch rich guy:
Each one by itself is a modest gaffe. Together, they were a self-made, self-defeating narrative .
But what wrapped this story in a bow for Obama was when a video leaked on September 17, 2012 of Romney speaking to rich donors at an exclusive fundraiser. Romney said “47% of Americans pay no income tax…. And so my job is not to worry about those people . I’ll never convince them that they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives.”
The video went viral, becoming a defining gaffe. And the “47%” became a metaphor for Romney’s lack of concern for half the public. The Washington Post columnist Chris Cillizza explained, “Gaffes that matter are those that speak to a larger narrative about a candidate or a doubt/worry that voters already have about that particular candidate.” Columnist Michael Kinsley defined the term ironically, “a gaffe is when a politician tells the truth.”
Romney learned a painful political lesson: Probably no blunder is greater than one that fits into an elitist narrative that says to a typical voter, “the candidate is not one of us”—or one that dismisses or denigrates a large pool of voters. Hillary Clinton had to relearn the same lesson four years later.
TRUMP VS. CLINTON: HOW VOLDEMORT BEATS HERMIONE
Trump, as we’ve seen, is a master of figurative speech who connects to his voters emotionally. His use of hyperbole taps into his followers’ anger, while avoiding accountability for the vast number of lies that he tells. Nonetheless, his use of repetition, simple language, and key figures like hyperbole and metaphor made his words much more memorable and viral. Even now, you can remember a lot of words, phrases, and even promises from his speeches and tweets. He was going to build a wall and make Mexico pay for it—even if that turns out to be both a metaphor (for getting tough with immigrants) and an outright lie.
Clinton was a classic literal-minded, wonky Democratic candidate who failed to make an emotional connection. She was constantly rewriting her speeches to make them “more literal and less readable,” as Politico noted in 2016. Can you remember much of what she said during the campaign? Ironically, it was a gaffe in metaphor form that became one of her most memorable and defining moments. During a September 9, 2016 campaign fundraising speech, she said “You know, to just be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. Right? They’re racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic—Islamophobic—you name it.”
Trump, his supporters, Clinton’s opponents, and the media seized on that sweeping insult, repeating it endlessly. “There was one moment when I saw more undecided voters shift to Trump than any other, when it all changed, when voters began to speak differently about their choice,” explained Diane Hessan, who tracked undecided voters for Clinton’s campaign. “It wasn’t FBI Director James Comey, Part One or Part Two; it wasn’t Benghazi or the e-mails. No, the conversation shifted the most during the weekend of Sept. 9,” after Clinton’s “basket of deplorables” gaffe.
The Russian internet trolls also played a big role in repeating and amplifying the “deplorables” line, as we’ll see in Chapter Eleven. Hessan compared the gaffe to “Romney’s 47 percent”—“proof that, like Romney, Clinton was an out-of-touch rich person who didn’t really get it.” Her mistake became so potent a metaphor, many of Trump’s supporters ultimately took the term “deplorables” as a badge of honor and a brand, wearing T-shirts and hats emblazoned with the word “deplorable. ”
Why was this gaffe so important to undecideds? Why did it matter so much to people who couldn’t decide which candidate they disliked more? Hessan explains what she heard “from scores of undecided voters in swing states”:
They didn’t like either candidate. They just wanted to be understood. At the end of the day, they cared less about Trump’s temperament and more about whether he “got” them. They were smart…. Trump gave them a voice, and he certainly didn’t think they were deplorable.
For voters, nothing trumps emotional connection. As I discussed in Chapter One, the swing voters and undecided voters who aren’t hard-core partisans aren’t going to devote a lot of mental energy to figuring out which candidate’s policies are superior for various complex social problems, like health care. And even if they did, they’d still have to determine if the candidate was committed enough and capable enough to actually deliver their promises.
The simplest shortcut is to bypass all of that analysis and just figure out which candidate was most like them and liked them the most, which candidate was the closest to being in their tribe, which candidate shared their stories and metaphors. By the end of the campaign, that was clearly Trump, and indeed, Trump won the vote among those who disliked both candidates. That was the vital difference in the swing states that decided the election. Whatever those voters disliked about Trump was overcome by the old belief, “the enemy of my enemy is my friend.” However strongly people could not stomach Trump, he intensely disliked the same “line-cutters” they did, starting with non-Caucasian immigrants.
The hyperbole “I’m going to build a wall and make Mexico pay for it” matched these voters’ anger at immigrants, and “the wall” worked as a metaphorical truth far more potent than a literal one. Trump even had his own powerful and popular extended metaphor he liked to tell about immigrants, one he started telling early on in his campaign and kept repeating, even as President.
“Did anyone ever hear me do ‘The Snake’ during the campaign?” asked Trump near the end of his February 23, 2018 speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) after a long rant against immigrants. “Because I had five people outside say, ‘could you do The Snake?’ I said, well, people have heard it. Who hasn’t heard ‘The Snake’? You should read it anyway. Let’s do it anyway. I’ll do it. Okay. Should we do it?” This is Trump’s standard “phony reluctance” shtick, where he pretends he has to be pushed by his supporters into doing something he always planned. At this point he took out a sheet of paper with the lyrics and continued, “Now, this was a rock ‘n’ roll song … but every time I do it, people—and you have to think of this in terms of immigration…. And think of it in terms of immigration and you may love it or you may say, isn’t that terrible? Okay. If you say isn’t that terrible, who cares?”
Trump then proceeded to read the entire lyrics of this song, which is nearly as long as the Gettysburg Address, albeit less presidential. The song, written and sung in the 1960s by Oscar Brown, Jr., tells the story of “A tenderhearted woman [who] saw a poor half-frozen snake.” She takes pity on the snake and takes him in to her home to save him. The chorus is the snake repeating “Take me in, oh tender woman. Take me in, for heaven’s sake.” After the snake revives, the woman strokes and kisses it, but rather than saying “thank you” to her, “that snake gave her a vicious bite.” The song ends :
“I saved you,” cried that woman.
“ And you’ve bit me even, why?
You know your bite is poisonous and now I’m going to die.”
“Oh shut up, silly woman,” said the reptile with a grin.
“You knew damn well I was a snake before you took me in.”
This emotionally potent parable has multiple meanings, like many parables. Tender, for instance, means to show gentleness, concern or sympathy. But it’s other well-known meaning, when referring to food, is easy to chew. The talking, lying snake who tricks a woman is a not very subtle allusion to that most famous talking lying snake who tricks a woman—in the Garden of Eden. The metaphorical connection between a snake and the male sexual organ is as ancient as the Bible.
Of course, in this parable, Trump is casting compassionate Americans in the role of the woman and immigrants in the role of the treacherous snake. But in many respects, Trump is much more like the snake. Trump is the one who denigrated women during the campaign, actually calling Clinton a “nasty woman” at one point. Also, Trump and his team repeatedly use the snake’s defense themselves: Voters knew who he was before they voted for him. “Prior to the election it was well known that I have interests in properties all over the world,” Trump tweeted on November 12, 2016, responding to questions about his many global conflicts of interest. “Only the crooked media makes this a big deal!” In 2017, when reporters raised the question about the multiple women who accused Trump of sexual abuse, press secretary Sarah Sanders said, “the American people knew this and voted for the president.”
Ultimately, the song could serve as a eulogy for the Republican Party or conservative movement, both of which have sustained deep, self-inflicted wounds from embracing Trump. After Trump’s CPAC speech, historian Kevin M. Kruse sent out a tweet that went viral: “Donald Trump is now reading ‘The Snake’ to a rapt gathering of the conservative movement that has taken him in. RIP, irony.”
METAPHORS AND EULOGIES
Eulogies are often metaphorical—not just because they are filled with emotional stories but also because it is hard to adequately express our feelings for a close friend or relative literally. So we use metaphor to describe our connection to the deceased. At the same time, we simply have no literal understanding of death and the hereafter.
Our general unwillingness to confront death is one reason we have so many metaphorical euphemisms for death. These are the very euphemisms that Graham Chapman and Monty Python’s Flying Circus mocked in the “Dead Parrot” sketch, which John Cleese repeated and amplified in his eulogy for Chapman, “He has ceased to be, bereft of life, he rests in peace, he has kicked the bucket, hopped the twig, bit the dust, snuffed it, breathed his last, and gone to meet the Great Head of Light Entertainment in the sky.”
Certainly the eulogies that have gone viral are stuffed with metaphors and similes. Shakespeare has Mark Anthony open his eulogy to his friend Julius Caesar with one of the most famous metaphors in literature, “Friends, Romans, Countrymen, lend me your ears.” Lincoln uses an extended metaphor of the hero’s journey and the crucifixion to eulogize the fallen at Gettysburg, showing that transcendence is possible even during the worst suffering, to rededicate the listeners to take up their cause—fighting not just for the Union but for the country’s founding proposition that all men are created equal. Oprah Winfrey turns Rosa Parks’ literal decision to “not be moved” from her seat on the bus into an inspirational extended metaphor for courage and conviction, saying, “We shall not be moved” and “I will not be moved.”
At my brother’s memorial, many of the eulogies were similarly built around metaphor. For me, as I’ve said, Dave was like Falstaff. One of Dave’s friends from Minneapolis compared him to a magical fountain:
When I was a child and young teenager, Dave was one of my most cherished adult friends. Some adults were humdrum and some could always find something confusing or intimidating to say, but Dave could somehow always find something funny to say. It was like he was a magical fount of funny factoids, silly sounds, puns and wit. It was a treat whenever I learned he’d be coming over.
Another friend turned the imaginary worlds Dave was always creating into a metaphor of unimaginable loss:
Dave had a head full of science fiction and strange speculations and wild what-ifs. When we were younger he would sometimes be very insistent on the possible validity of these wild thoughts, but later on he learned that people would be happier to enter into his speculations if he didn’t push so hard, and I had some lovely conversations with him about worlds that never existed and probably never could. The world won’t be the same without him, not this one and not all the imaginary ones.
Finally, we ended the memorial with that most famous of extended metaphors, one used to provide comfort to the suffering for hundreds and thousands of years :
The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want. He maketh me to lie down in green pastures:
He leadeth me beside the still waters. He restoreth my soul:
He leadeth me in the paths of righteousness for his name’s sake.
Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil:
For thou art with me; Thy rod and thy staff they comfort me.
Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies:
Thou anointest my head with oil; my cup runneth over.
Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life:
And I will dwell in the house of the LORD for ever.