Back to School

Oh, dear.

Once again we're going to have to remind the editors of the Amarillo Globe-News of some of the lessons they have forgotten from the English classes they skipped in their misspent youths.

In this mornings "Monday Briefing," the editors are shocked that Jadakiss, a rapper, has included a line on his latest CD that asks "Why did Bush knock down the towers?" The AGN editors expose Jadakiss's horrible, horrible hypocrisy by pointing out that he

admits he doesn't really think the president is responsible for 9/11, but rather the lyrics are "a metaphor."

Makes sense to me, but then I'm an English teacher. It's kinda like when T.S. Eliot admitted that the yellow fog didn't really "lick it's tongue into the corners of the evening," or when Homer admitted that Dawn didn't really have "rosy fingers" or when the Beatles admitted that they didn't really live in a yellow submarine.

A metaphor, according to Holman & Harmon's invaluable Handbook to Literature is "an implied analogy imaginatively identifying one object with another." Bush is being imaginatively identified with a King Kong-like creature who can simply knock down buildings. By so identifying, Jadakiss invests Bush with monstrous qualities and evokes the true horror of this administration: the fact that, in Jadakiss's view and ours, Bush did not sufficiently protect this country from the nightmare of 9/11. See how that works?

But the editors say that the line is "a metaphor for money."

Um, no. It's not. That doesn't even make sense. Re-read the Holman and Harmon definition again.

SPACEDARK