As much as I love a good, badly overwrought metaphor, I think it’s a mistake, both strategically and tactically, to join Barack Hussein Obama in this particular verbal stew pot. We’d be wishing into a dry well, hoping for a genie to emerge and free us from the social fascist octopus could get its fangs into our throats.
(How d’ya like that for a mixed figure of speech? George Orwell, call your office!)
This “mop” business has more assumptions built into it than it’s wise to tackle at one time:
– That there’s a “mess” — a state of undesirable and roughly delimitable disorder that could, in theory, be put right by planned, purposive action;
– That it was brought about by the actions of “others” who deserve to be blamed for it as if it were purposefully done;
– That there’s an approach to righting the “mess” that can be imposed on us all through a command-and-control technique;
– That that approach would have no undesirable side effects of great enough magnitude to make us wish we hadn’t consented to it;
– That “picking up a mop and helping” has any semantically defensible relation to what Obama really wants — the cessation of criticism and resistance to his agenda;
…and no doubt I could find others, if it weren’t so early in the morning and I’d had more coffee.
Every one of those assumptions is false, but challenging all of them simultaneously through the agency of our adversary’s preferred metaphor is next to impossible. A more productive approach is to deny the applicability of the metaphor — to point out that it’s not a proper analogy to what’s an entirely government-caused phenomenon — and insist on dealing with factual descriptions of the state of affairs, the perverse incentives that brought it about, the lunacy of thinking command-and-control would have no undesirable side effects, the success of unfettered markets at correcting such spikes in the past, and so forth.
It’s not “clever.” It won’t win us any plaudits from the Main Stream Media. But if we’re direct and sober, other direct, sober persons will grasp our point, whereas the use of our adversary’s terms will almost certainly muddy the waters further, until there’s no seeing through the accumulated silt to the prize at the bottom of the box, which would only give our adversaries a better shot at the brass ring.
(Forgive me, I had to throw that last one in, or I would have died of mock-literary frustration.)
