With the debt ceiling thing done, the scribes are now straining for the illuminating metaphor and “terrorism,” it seems, is the preferred choice. One New York Times columnist writes that “the Tea Party Republicans have waged jihad on the American people,” and you had to wonder if he would have accused even Osama bin Laden of that. Another Times columnist describes the Tea Party as “the Hezbollah faction” of the Republican Party. Maureen Dowd, the Times’s diva columnist went with a different, idiosyncratic metaphor. The whole thing, she writes, was like a horror movie, a “gory, Gothic melodrama on the Potomac … without the catharsis.”
One wonders, though, if this were not a case where an older metaphor—hackneyed but dependable—might have served. Maybe this was that old standby—“the first battle in a long war.” Der Spiegel‘s headline about the “Civil War Atmosphere” in Washington seems not only apt but to resonate with historical chords. One hundred and fifty years ago, the country was in the early throes of a real Civil War. The first major battle of that war, fought in late July 1861, resembled in many (metaphorical) ways the one, just fought, over the debt ceiling.
