Democrats are employing all kinds of poorly developed figurative language to communicate the state of the union.
In her Wednesday acceptance speech, Kamala Harris offered this insight: “This virus has no eyes. And yet, it knows exactly how we see each other and how we treat each other. And let’s be clear. There is no vaccine for racism.”
That much is true, though as a rhetorical strategy, talking about inoculating against racism as the nation labors toward a vaccine for the coronavirus is less than clever. There is no vaccine for the coronavirus, either. It’s as if her speechwriter plugged all the current issues into an online metaphor generator and went with its first suggestion.
New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo employed a similar metaphor in his Monday speech, though his delivery was much more on the nose. “COVID is the symptom, not the illness,” Cuomo said. “Our nation is in crisis. And in many ways, COVID is just a metaphor. A virus attacks when the body is weak and when it cannot defend itself. Over these past few years, America’s body politic has been weakened. The divisions have been growing deeper.”
Cuomo’s attempt at figurative speech is ridiculous. It doesn’t work at all as a metaphor, because metaphors compare like things. There is no sense in which COVID-19 is figuratively a symptom of an ill nation. Symptoms are signs of illness, the effects of the body fighting a pathogen. COVID-19 is itself an illness. He could have compared fever to the arson of businesses. That would be a functional metaphorical jump from ill person to ill nation.
Still, Cuomo shouldn’t be conjuring metaphors about the virus. It reflects terribly on him, considering that he has a natural incentive to spin the virus into anything that makes it less concrete. If death is any measure of performance, his state has performed worse than any other at minimizing the virus’s deadly reach, by a lot.
In another performance, Kristin Urquiza, a convention guest who spoke on Monday, likened President Trump to diabetes and heart disease, which increase one’s disposal to death when illness strikes. Urquiza’s father, who she said was an avid supporter of Trump, died of COVID-19. “His only preexisting condition was trusting Donald Trump,” she said of her father, on national TV, at a political convention.
These are amateur and, in the final case, completely bad faith attempts at poetic speech. The Democrats need better writers.
