The ALL NEW Don't Think of an Elephant!: Know Your Values and Frame the Debate (14 page)

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Metaphors of Terror

—September 16, 2001, edited July 2014—

Our Brains Had to Change

Everything we know is physically instantiated in the neural systems of our brains.

What we knew before September 11 about America, Manhattan, the World Trade Center, air travel, and the Pentagon were intimately tied up with our identities and with a vast amount of what we took for granted about everyday life. It was all there physically in our neural synapses. Manhattan: the gateway to America for generations of immigrants—the chance to live free of war, pogroms, religious and political oppression!

The Manhattan skyline had meaning in my life, even more than I knew. When I thought of it, I thought of my mother. Born in Poland, she arrived as an infant; grew up in Manhattan; worked in factories for twenty-five years; and had family, friends, a life, a child. She didn’t die in concentration camps. She didn’t fear for her life. For her, America was not all that she might have wanted it to be, but it was plenty.

I grew up in Bayonne, New Jersey, across the bay from that skyline. The World Trade Center wasn’t there then, but over the years, as the major feature of the skyline, it became for me, as for others, the symbol of New York—not only the business center of America but also the cultural center and the communications center. As such, it became a symbol for America itself, a symbol for what it meant to be able to go about your everyday life free of oppression, and just able to live and do your job, whether as a secretary or an artist, a manager or a fireman, a salesman or a teacher or a TV star. I wasn’t consciously aware of it, but those images were intimately tied to my identity, both as an individual and as an American. And all that and so much more were there physically as part of my brain on the morning of September 11, 2001.

The devastation that hit those towers that morning hit me. Buildings are metaphorically people. We see features—eyes, nose, and mouth—in their windows. I now realize that the image of the plane going into South Tower was for me an image of a bullet going through someone’s head, the flames pouring from the other side like blood spurting out. It was an assassination. The tower falling was a body falling. The bodies falling were me, relatives, friends. Strangers who had smiled as they had passed me on the street screamed as they fell past me. The image afterward was hell: ashes, smoke and steam rising, the building skeleton, darkness, suffering, death.

The people who attacked the towers got into my brain, even three thousand miles away. All those symbols were connected to more of my identity than I could have realized. To make sense of this, my very brain had to change. And change it did, painfully. Day and night. By day the consequences flooded my mind; by night the images had me breathing heavily, nightmares keeping me awake. Those symbols lived in the emotional centers of my brain. As their meanings changed, I felt emotional pain.

It was not just me. It was everyone in this country, and many in other countries. The assassins managed not only to kill thousands of people but also to reach in and change the brains of people all over America.

It is remarkable to know that two hundred million of my countrymen feel as wrenched as I do.

The Power of the Images

As a metaphor analyst, I want to begin with the power of the images and where that power comes from.

There are a number of metaphors for buildings. A common visual metaphor is that buildings are heads, with windows as eyes. The metaphor is dormant, there in our brains, waiting to be awakened. The image of the plane going into South Tower of the World Trade Center activated it. The tower became a head, with windows as eyes, the edge of the tower the temple. The plane going through it became a bullet going through someone’s head, the flames pouring from the other side the blood spurting out.

Metaphorically, tall buildings are people standing erect. As each tower fell, it became a body falling. We are not consciously aware of the metaphorical images, but they are part of the power and the horror we experience when we see them.

Each of us, in the premotor cortex of our brains, has what are called mirror neurons connected to visual areas. Such neurons fire either when we perform an action or when we see the same action performed by someone else. There are connections from that part of the brain to the emotional centers. Such neural circuits are believed to be the basis of empathy.

This works literally: When we see a plane coming toward the building and imagine people in the building, we feel the plane coming toward us; when we see the building toppling toward others, we feel the building toppling toward us. It also works metaphorically: If we see the plane going through the building, and unconsciously we evoke the metaphor of the building as a head with the plane going through its temple, then we sense—unconsciously but powerfully—being shot through the temple. If we evoke the metaphor of the building as a person and see the building fall to the ground in pieces, then we sense—again unconsciously but powerfully—that we are falling to the ground in pieces. Our systems of metaphorical thought, interacting with our mirror neuron systems, turn external literal horrors into felt metaphorical horrors.

Here are some other metaphorical and symbolic effects:

•
Control is up.
You have control over the situation; you’re on top of things. This has always been an important basis of towers as symbols of power. In this case, the toppling of the towers meant loss of control, loss of power.

•
Phallic imagery.
Towers are symbols of phallic power, and their collapse reinforces the idea of loss of power. Another kind of phallic imagery was more central here: the planes penetrating the towers with a plume of heat, and the Pentagon, a vaginal image from the air, penetrated by the plane as missile. These phallic interpretations came from women who felt violated both by the attack and the images on TV.

•
A society is a building.
A society can have a “foundation,” which may or may not be solid, and it can “crumble” and “fall.” The World Trade Center was symbolic of American society. When it crumbled and fell, the threat was to more than a building.

•
Standing.
We think metaphorically of things that perpetuate over time as “standing.” During the Gulf War, George H. W. Bush kept saying, “This will not stand,” meaning that the situation would not be perpetuated over time. The World Trade Center was built to last ten thousand years. When it crumbled, it metaphorically raised the question of whether American power and American society would last. And that was why it was attacked.

•
Building as temple.
Here we had the destruction of the temple of capitalist commerce, which lies at the heart of our society.

•
Our minds play tricks on us.
The image of the Manhattan skyline became unbalanced. We were used to seeing it with the towers there. Our minds imposed our old image of the towers, and the sight of them gone gave one the illusion of imbalance, as if Manhattan were sinking. Given the symbolism of Manhattan as the promise of America, it appeared metaphorically as if that promise were sinking.

The Freedom Tower now stands at 1 World Trade Center. It’s not as distinctive and its meaning is not the same. It does not represent the stability of normal life in America.

•
Hell.
We had the persistent image, day after day, of the charred and smoking remains: hell.

The World Trade Center was a potent symbol, tied into our understanding of our country and ourselves in myriad ways. All of what we know is physically embodied in our brains. To incorporate the new knowledge requires a physical change in the synapses of our brains, a physical reshaping of our neural system.

The physical violence was not only in New York and Washington. Physical changes—violent ones—have been made to the brains of all Americans.

How the Administration Framed the Event

The Bush administration’s framings and reframings and its search for metaphors should be noted. The initial framing was as a crime with victims, and perpetrators to be “brought to justice” and “punished.” The crime frame entails law, courts, lawyers, trials, sentencing, appeals, and so on. It was hours before crime changed to war, with casualties, enemies, military action, war powers, and so on.

Donald Rumsfeld and other Bush administration officials pointed out that this situation did not fit our understanding of a war. There were enemies and casualties all right, but no enemy army, no regiments, no tanks, no ships, no air force, no battlefields, no strategic targets, and no clear victory. The war frame just didn’t fit. Colin Powell had always argued that no troops should be committed without specific objectives, a clear and achievable definition of victory, and a clear exit strategy, and that open-ended commitments should not be used. But he also pointed out that none of these was present in this “war.”

Because the concept of war didn’t fit, there was a frantic search for metaphors. First, Bush called the terrorists cowards—but this didn’t seem to work too well for martyrs who willingly sacrificed their lives for their moral and religious ideals. Then he spoke of “smoking them out of their holes,” as if they were rodents, and Rumsfeld spoke of “drying up the swamp they live in,” as if they were snakes or lowly swamp creatures. The conceptual metaphors here were moral is up, immoral is down (they are lowly), and immoral people are animals (that live close to, or in, the ground).

Bush speechwriter David Frum created the phrase
Axis of Evil
which was used in Bush’s 2002 State of the Union address to refer to Iran, Iraq, and North Korea and was used over and over by the Bush administration in justifying the war in Iraq.
Axis
was a reference to the enemy Axis powers of World War II—Germany, Italy, and Japan—which spanned the Western and Eastern hemispheres and represented the global distribution of America’s deadly enemies. Lumping Iraq with Iran and North Korea suggested that Iraq was developing nuclear weapons (the nonexistent “weapons of mass destruction”) and gave a pretext for invading Iraq.
Axis
, because it included Japan, evoked the “sneak attack” on Pearl Harbor, and symbolically equated the September 11 attack with Pearl Harbor, again as a justification for going to war. On the assumption that America contains the essence of morality and democracy—the shining city on the hill—anyone attacking America was evil. And what happened on September 11 certainly felt evil.

The use of the word
evil
in the Bush administration’s discourse worked in the following way. In conservative, strict father morality (see
Moral Politics
, chapter 5), evil is a palpable thing, a force in the world. To stand up to evil you have to be morally strong. If you’re weak, you let evil triumph, so that weakness in itself is a form of evil, as is promoting weakness. Evil is inherent, an essential trait, that determines how you will act in the world. Evil people do evil things. No further explanation is necessary. There can be no social causes of evil, no religious rationale for evil, no reasons or arguments for evil. The enemy of evil is good. If our enemy is evil, we are inherently good. Good is our essential nature, and what we do in the battle against evil is good. Good and evil are locked in a battle, which is conceptualized metaphorically as a physical fight in which the stronger wins. Only superior strength can defeat evil, and only a show of strength can keep evil at bay. Not to show overwhelming strength is immoral, since it will induce evildoers to perform more evil deeds, because they’ll think they can get away with it. To oppose a show of superior strength is therefore immoral. Nothing is more important in the battle of good against evil, and if some innocent noncombatants get in the way and get hurt, it is a shame, but it is to be expected and nothing can be done about it. Indeed, performing lesser evils in the name of good is justified—“lesser evils” like curtailing individual liberties, sanctioning political assassinations, overthrowing governments, torturing, hiring criminals, and creating “collateral damage.”

Then there is the basic security metaphor, security as containment—keeping the evildoers out. Secure our borders, keep them and their weapons out of our airports, have marshals on the planes. Most security experts say that there is no sure way to keep terrorists out or to deny them the use of some weapon or other; a determined, well-financed terrorist organization can penetrate any security system. Or they can choose other targets—say, oil tankers.

Yet the Security as Containment metaphor is powerful. It is what lies behind the missile shield proposal. Rationality might say that the September 11 attacks showed the missile shield is pointless. But it strengthened the use of the Security as Containment metaphor. As soon as you say “national security,” the Security as Containment metaphor will be activated, and with it a missile shield.

The Conservative Advantage

The reaction of the Bush administration was just what you would expect a conservative reaction would be: pure strict father morality. There is evil loose in the world. We must show our strength and wipe it out. Retribution and vengeance are called for. If there are casualties or collateral damage, so be it.

The reaction from liberals and progressives was far different:
Justice is called for, not vengeance
. Understanding and restraint are what is needed. The model for our actions should be the rescue workers and doctors—the healers—not the bombers.