Samhain Thanksgiving Moon
Last night Dick said, “I’m a pacifist, so I refer to my cancer as the dark guest. I’m not fighting it; I’m inviting it to leave.”
Third time I’ve encountered this idea of abandoning the war metaphor for cancer or serious illness, third time among folks I know, that is. I heard on the radio last night the current Drug Czar (an oxymoronic type title for a democracy) make a similar point. He wanted us to stop using the phrases War on Drugs and War on Cancer. As if these were situations where we could win and something else lose.
(Nótt-rides-her-horse-in-this-19th-century-painting-by-Peter-Nicolai-Arbo)
Metaphors matter. Think how much different our world would be today if George the Bush had chosen to describe 9/11 as a criminal conspiracy that needs dedicated police and law enforcement action rather than as an act of war. When he put us on a war footing, he wrong footed us in this whole matter from the very beginning. A metaphorical mistake that has cost literally trillions of dollars and thousands of lives.
I can see terrorism as a dark guest; a violation, say, of the old Bedouin laws of hospitality or the Greek xenia. I see it as a violent criminal enterprise, not much different than a heavily armed Mafia, one with a code of sharia and jihad rather than silence. By not much different I do not mean benign or insignificant.
No, terrorism is a true dark guest, just like cancer cells lurking after radical surgery. And we need to invite it to leave with urgency and active intervention. Just skip the F-16’s, the warthogs, the marine recon teams, the infantry. Send in the CIA, the FBI, the ATF and other counter terrorism specialists, even special forces.