Friends,
When I was kid, I watched lots of Power Rangers. It had it all: intergalactic monsters, mech-robots and foot soldiers, and a clear story told over and over: the good guys band together and fight off the bad guys to save the world.
One day on a walk home from elementary school, my friend Eric was making fun of me. Whatever he said hurt my feelings so much I became furious and tearful and decided to do something about it. I picked up an acorn, loaded it into my slingshot, and let it fly—BLAMO!—right into his eye. He ran off crying, and I went home triumphant…until my parents grounded me and said I couldn’t watch Power Rangers for a very long time.
Did this 90s action show cause me to be violent? Well, that would be hard to prove. But it certainly visualized how fighting could resolve my own issues. Campy as it was, underneath Zordon’s cosmic wisdom and Rita Repulsa’s minions, the show solved its problems through violence, and that influenced my imagination and which, in turn, influenced my actions. There’s a social logic rehearsed here over and over: to solve a world in crisis, we have to band together against a common enemy and fight them into submission. Sound familiar?
That logic of intractable conflict is certainly still alive and kicking, often in places it doesn’t belong. Marilyn McEntyre put it this way in her book Caring for Words in a Culture of Lies:
We use war language to describe healing. We 'battle' depression. We 'bombard' infections with antibiotics. We want oncologists who take ‘aggressive measures.’ We use war language to describe sports and, more consequentially, use the language of sports, in turn, to describe war. We use it to describe work. We use it to describe our efforts to solve social problems (war on a virus, for instance), appropriating it even for enterprises inimical to war-making (surely poverty requires gentler forms of compassionate attention than what a 'war on poverty' suggests and a ‘war on drugs’ all too easily turns into a war on people who use drugs for reasons that need to be followed upstream)…
Reading these words over a decade ago was a bit of an epiphany. I had no idea how common this language was, so I set out to document when and where war metaphors cropped up in daily life. I started a list on my phone and wrote them down anywhere I head them. The first ones were easy to spot: battle of the bands and killing time. But the more I looked, the longer the list grew.
After collecting over 200 distinct phrases for over a decade (shared below), I can tell you: war metaphors are the most common way we describe our public life. We drop f-bombs and yarn bombs and bombshell news. We take marching orders from managers and bury the hatchet with our friends. We praise frontline workers and rally the troops, we’re entrenched in habits and have goals in our crosshairs. It’s pervasive in medicine and entertainment and politics and education and work and even in dumb things like pizza wars and candy wars.
So what, you might be thinking, I’m no English major—why be a stickler about a literary device? Metaphors aren’t just a rhetorical flourish or interesting ideas. They structure our imagination. They’re not just thoughts—they’re the shape of thinking itself. Extend the metaphor and you’ll see what I mean:
Talking heads on a news show “fire back” at one another..…..as if they’re enemies shooting one another on a battlefield.
A “blockbuster” movie dominates during opening weekend..….reducing the competition to rubble.
I asked my co-workers for “rapid-fire” questions……as if words are bullets piercing the flesh of our problem.
The point of all of this isn’t to make a “gotcha” list where we trip up our friends every time they say the wrong thing. Instead it’s to reflect more carefully on the words we use and how they shape our imaginations. Let’s slow untangle this language and approach this with the curiosity of a scientist or a poet—where did these metaphors come from? Why do we use them so frequently? How do they perpetuate a sense of us-vs-them? When do I use these common phrases and why? Are there other metaphors we can use that are more generous and creative?
In their landmark book on how metaphor structures our lives, Lakoff and Johnson said that metaphors can create “new understandings and, therefore, new realities…metaphors are thus imaginative rationality.” Imaginative rationality. That’s what we’re after here: when we analyze and choose the metaphors we want to shape our own words and ideas, we take a step toward agency—we begin to think for ourselves.
And if we can uproot war metaphors where they don’t belong, then maybe the world becomes a bit more peaceful. In Guston’s painting above, everyone is stuck in the same blinding knot of conflict—how will they stop if at first they don’t pause and remove what blinds them?
Take care,
Michael
I’ve gathered the following war metaphors after over a decade of looking for them in daily life. All words and phrases are used outside of actual warfare to describe media, politics, entertainment, medicine, sports, religion, and more. Know of any I didn’t catch? Respond to this letter to let me know.
about face, alliance, ally, ambush, ammunition, armed, armor up, arms race, army, army of God, arsenal, at war, attack, avant-garde, backfire, backlash, backstab, badge of honor, base, batten down the hatches, battle, battle for the soul of the nation, battle of the bands, battle to belong, battleground map, battleground state, battling cancer, beachhead teams, beat back, behind enemy lines, bidding battle, blast, blitz, blockbuster, blood on your hands, bloodbath, bombard, bombshell, bombshell news, boot camp, boots on the ground, brainwashing, bring out the big guns, broke ranks, bunker, bury the hatchet, business weapons, call to action, call to arms, card-carrying, casualties, catapult, cease and desist, chink in the armor, chokepoint, class war, close ranks, coalition, collateral damage, combat, command, compatriots, counterattack, coup, crackdown, cracks in the armor, crosshairs, culture war, deploy, double-edged sword, deadline, death spiral, deploy, detonate, dueling, dueling pianos, diehard, dig in, drum up support, entrench, f-bomb, fall in line, fight, fire away, fire back, fire off, fire storm, firing line, flank, foot soldier, friendly fire, frontline, frontline worker, gallows humor, gang busters, gird for battle, go to war, ground zero, gut punch, head-to-head, hold the line, house hunting, in the crosshairs, in my sights, in the trenches, in your corner, infiltrate, join forces, killing it, killing off, killing time, knifing, lancing a wound, land a blow, land a punch, latest assault, latest front, lay down the gauntlet, lay down the law, leading the charge, line in the sand, line of attack, line of sight, lockstep, marching orders, massacre, mission accomplished, move move move, movement on this front, mount an attack, mission, mission creep, muster, nailed, narcing, no mans land, nuke, on my radar, onslaught, open season, operation, operative, optics, outflank, outgun, overkill, party line, pizza battle, pouring salt in the wound, powder keg, pulled the trigger, punch above your weight, purge, racial front, race war, rally the troops, rank and file, rap battle, redeploy, reload, regime, regroup, retreat, right hook, rubicon, rules of engagement, sales force, secret weapon, siege, shot across the bough, shotgun house, shotgun wedding, showdown, silver bullet, smackdown, smoking gun, soldier on, son of a gun, squad, stick a dagger in the heart of the economy, stick to my guns, strike back, striking distance, stronghold, stockpile, storm the beaches, straight shooter, straight shot, suicide pact, tactics, taking hits, target, target on my back, trade war, trigger words, triggered, trooper, under fire, united front, unload, up in arms, vanguard, victory, wage a campaign, wage peace, war chest, war of words, war on drugs, war on poverty, war path, war room, war zone, warning shot, warrior, weapon, weaponize, wield, won the battle but lost the war, yarn bomb
“Making Peace” by Denise Levertov
A voice from the dark called out,
‘The poets must give us
imagination of peace, to oust the intense, familiar
imagination of disaster. Peace, not only
the absence of war.’
But peace, like a poem,
is not there ahead of itself,
can’t be imagined before it is made,
can’t be known except
in the words of its making,
grammar of justice,
syntax of mutual aid.
A feeling towards it,
dimly sensing a rhythm, is all we have
until we begin to utter its metaphors,
learning them as we speak.
A line of peace might appear
if we restructured the sentence our lives are making,
revoked its reaffirmation of profit and power,
questioned our needs, allowed
long pauses . . .
A cadence of peace might balance its weight
on that different fulcrum; peace, a presence,
an energy field more intense than war,
might pulse then,
stanza by stanza into the world,
each act of living
one of its words, each word
a vibration of light—facets
of the forming crystal.
A database of practices for grateful living
How to gather your own poems for peace
The poet Jane Hirshfield explores the meaning and history of the word “justice”