kikipeepers asked
In the latter half of the 20th century, Americans were called to meet abstractions with metaphors in a series of gaudy figurations popularly called “The War On...” Intended to be wholly symbolic, rhetorical frameworks that loosely invoked the legendary national unity that accompanied America’s good wars, whichever those were, our Wars On various and sundry Things that Are Bad proved the power of language to mold behavior, for often the martial tone spilled into martial practice, and so we find heavily armed SWAT units kicking down doors like soldiers in Baghdad. More recently, Wars On have spilled into the private sector, where you’ll principally find inexplicably aggrieved majorities crying that they and their dearly held beliefs are under siege from the ravenous forces of queers or atheists or $3-an-hour day laborers from Chavezistan. For this new year, we look back...
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