You can put lipstick on a pig. It's still a pig. You can wrap an old fish in a piece of paper called change. It's still going to stink after eight years.
Barack Obama has, with these words, raised the symbolic stakes in the already noisome rhetorical contest that is the 2008 presidential election. These are words of enormous power.
Some will say (have already said) that they are personal insults. Some see them for that reason as “a big mistake.” Certainly the McCain campaign will howl (has already howled). And just as certainly, the media will seize upon these words and the reactions they produce in the public and make something of them. That is testimony to their particular and peculiar power.
On the flip, I’ll present a way to understand that power, and perhaps the ultimate effect, of candidate Obama’s bold move.
First, do I think these phrases were a slip of the tongue, or an unintended excursion on Barack’s part? No, I do not. Nothing in Obama’s record to this point would suggest to me that he uttered these words with anything but specific intent to produce effects in his audience.
What effects might he be looking for?
I think the key to parsing that turn of Barack’s mind is to see them as metaphors of a particular sort – metaphors that, my studies have found, appeal in a very specific way in social-political discourse.
First, what is a metaphor?
According to the Merriam-Webster on-line dictionary, “metaphor” is
“a figure of speech in which a word or phrase literally denoting one kind of object or idea is used in place of another to suggest a likeness or analogy between them (as in drowning in money).”
According to the SIL International, there are two basic senses in which metaphors have meaning:
- A metaphor is the expression of an understanding of one concept in terms of another concept, where there is some similarity or correlation between the two.
- A metaphor is the understanding itself of one concept in terms of another.
As a term of art in writing, The Online Writing Lab at Purdue University adduces these functional uses of metaphor:
The term metaphor meant in Greek "carry something across" or "transfer," which suggests many of the more elaborate definitions below:
• a comparison between two things, based on resemblance or similarity, without using "like" or "as" (typical dictionary definition)
• the act of giving a thing a name that belongs to something else (ala Aristotle)
• the transferring of things and words from their proper signification to an improper similitude for the sake of beauty, necessity, polish, or emphasis (via Diomedes)
• a simile contracted to its smallest dimensions (Joseph Priestly)
• a device for seeing something in terms of something else (Kenneth Burke)
• understanding and experiencing one thing in terms of another (John Searle)
This last array shows something of how wide and yet fundamental are the uses of metaphor.
Hannah Arendt, in her opus, The Life of the Mind, said of metaphor:
The metaphor, bridging the abyss between inward mental activities and the world of appearances, was certainly the greatest gift language could bestow on philosophy. . . . If the language of thinking is essentially metaphorical, it follows that the world of appearances inserts itself into thought quite apart from the needs of our body and the claims of our fellow men, which will draw us back into it in any case. No matter how close we are while thinking to what is far away and how absent we are from what is close at hand, the thinking ego never leaves the world of appearances altogether. . . . Language, by lending itself to metaphorical usage, enables us to think, that is, to have traffic with non-sensory matters, because it permits a carrying-over, metapherein, of our sense experiences.
So, metaphors are words and phrases that relate some thing or condition in the world with some other thing or condition, so as to allow the mind to grasp the meaning of some aspect of the world in a new way.
So, Barack Obama used some metaphors. And it seems that metaphor is a powerful tool – perhaps the most fundamental means that humans command in language – to make sense of the relationship between the world out there and our thoughts about it here in our heads.
“If pigs could fly . . .” as they say, or, “If wishes were horse then beggars would ride.”
Metaphors are more or less a dime a dozen.
So what is it about the particular metaphors that Obama used here that are worthy of extended note?
On the surface - where most Republicans, some squeamish Democrats, and a large part of the news media will focus - the referent of putting “lipstick on a pig” will be quickly and unequivocally identified as “Sarah Palin.” After all, she blazed this trail herself by referring to herself as a “pitbull in lipstick.”
The Obama campaign will have to live with the consequences of that connection. The consequences he anticipated did not deter Barack Obama from this turn of phrase. It's a legitimate interpretation - metaphorically speaking - as it relates in the minds of the audience some painted lips somehow to Barack's opponents, in a quite unflattering way. Is this all he intended with it?
What does “putting lipstick on a pig” usually mean in political discourse? It means dressing up an ill-conceived or corrupt policy in language that would make it appear the opposite, or at least less odious. It’s what many, many Americans, across the ideological spectrum, believe that Washington politicians and their spin-meisters do, as a matter of course. Many, as well, look at Barack Obama and think the same thing about much of what comes from him.
So the phrase – “You can put lipstick on a pig. It's still a pig.” – doesn’t bite much in terms of general contrast between “us and them.” But what it does do is serve as an attention-demanding opening move in a very powerful piece of political-rhetorical jujutsu – as if to say, “Here’s something juicy to get your attention, now look at this.”
The other metaphorical usage here is wrapping “old fish in a piece of paper called change” and “still going to stink after eight years.”
The McCain campaign has already – within a matter of hours after Obama uttered these words – decried the “disgraceful comments comparing our vice presidential nominee Gov. Palin to a pig" and caviled about “calling people rotten old fish.” Link
Obama’s “fish” gambit is a multi-talented (to borrow a phrase) “barracuda.” First, who said McCain is “old”? Ahem. Second, there is the tie right back to Bush and the last “eight years.” Third, it’s a very old and familiar saw to say that “The Springfield News is not worth wrapping old fish in,” – so there’s a little smack for the “media” that traffic in the BS that McCain could represent “change.” Fourth, and I think most importantly, Barack Obama uses the word “stink.”
Now I imagine many of you heard your parents say that it’s not polite to say somebody “stinks” – even in a metaphorical sense. My father wouldn’t even allow me to use the word in front of him in any context. I used it elsewhere, and still use it – because it’s so damned useful as a term of description of certain things.
It’s a powerful admonition in society. When applied to an individual, it basically says, in a very gut-level way, “Thou Shalt Not Be Like That.”
It was not a word that Barack Obama used at random or by accident.
I have a theory as to the particular power of this “bad smell” metaphor, and about metaphors of smell and taste more generally.
To close this now already too-lengthy diary I’ll be concise:
In social and political discourse,
• Metaphors relating to sight often apply to questions about whether something exists or is true.
• Metaphors relating to hearing often apply to questions about whether we should or should not do something.
• Metaphors relating to smell and taste often apply to the acceptability or rejection of social relations and relationships.
. . . some hypotheses for your metaphorical pleasure . . .
So what? Obama will win this one – not in the media circus, but in the minds and hearts of Americans, as they consider what sorts of lives they want to lead over the next four years.