Let’s be clear about our contemporary situation. We lack imagination. Unlike fantasy, which is self-centered, imagination implies dialogue – between what is and what could be. Indigenous people may have been illiterate, but they had imaginative language. It is we who have lost this capacity. I’ll argue in this essay that the curses of modernity – alienation, environmental collapse, fascism, consumerism, addiction and permanent war – are the results.
Consider that some languages lack the verb “to be.” Speakers communicate indirectly, appreciating ambiguity and metaphor. “The essence of metaphor” writes Linguist George Lukoff, “is understanding and experiencing one kind of thing in terms of another”. Metaphors serve as organizing frameworks that shape our thoughts about social reality. They are the language of poetry, leaping the chasm between thoughts and transmitting multiple levels of meaning. However, he writes, “because we reason in terms of metaphor, the metaphors we use determine a great deal about how we live our lives”.
Joseph Campbell taught that the life of mythology springs from the metaphoric vigor of its symbols, which bring together and reconcile two contraries. Cultures that think mythologically perceive meaning on several levels simultaneously, aware that the literal, psychological and symbolic dimensions of reality complement each other. But unimaginative language, said psychologist James Hillman, “displaces the metaphorical drive from its appropriate display in poetry and rhetoric into direct action. The body becomes the place for the soul’s metaphors.”
In other words, if we can’t make images in art, music or beautiful speech we get sick.
We live in what Campbell called a “de-mythologized world”. Unimaginative thinking began in patriarchy and blossomed in the monotheism’s victory over polytheism. This doesn’t mean that we no longer have myths. It means that the myths we do have no longer feed us. It means that most of us have lost the capacity to think symbolically or mythologically and only have their “toxic mimic” – literal thinking. The most obvious example is fundamentalist religion, which replaces metaphor (This is a mystery to struggle with) with parable (This means that – and only that – so stop thinking.)
Monotheism’s inevitable product was constant warfare. “Because a monotheistic psychology must be dedicated to unity,” wrote Hillman, “its psychopathology is intolerance of difference.” I offer more thoughts on this subject in Chapter Ten of my book, Madness at the Gates of the City: The Myth of American Innocence:
The zealots who wrested control of the early church believed that Christ had physically returned from the dead, and they condemned metaphoric interpretation of his life. Very soon, schisms developed, and rival sects attacked each other in furious jihads. In the second century, Clement of Alexandria declared that the gods of all other religions were demons. The holy text that emerged out of this period omitted the few metaphors of the sacred Earth that had been allowed into Hebrew scripture. As a result, wrote Paul Shepard, the New Testament is “one of the world’s most antiorganic and antisensuous masterpieces of abstract ideology…”
When this foundational text of our civilization uses metaphors, they are often military metaphors.
Paul: Christians are “fellow soldiers”.
Corinthians: “God’s warfare for the destruction of the enemy’s strongholds”.
Thessalonians: “The breastplate of faith and love...a helmet the hope of salvation”.
Ephesians: “The armor of God”.
Similar imagery appears in hymns (Soldiers of Christ, Arise; Onward, Christian Soldiers), songs (Battle Hymn of the Republic) and thousands of sermons.
Rome’s rulers, needing a mass ideology to link individual and state, recognized that Christianity could fill this role. The notion of One True God found its political equivalent in the totalitarian Roman state. By the fourth century, Christianity became the Empire’s official religion, the Catholic (universal) faith, essentially a branch of government, and it would justify imperial conquests, crusades and colonial genocide for 1,500 years.
While missionaries spoke of “taking prisoner every thought for Christ,” others turned that violence upon themselves. This was the first religion to make martyrdom a demand of faith. Leonard Shlain asserted,
Until the Christian martyrs, there does not occur anywhere in the recorded history of Mesopotamia, Egypt, Persia, Greece, India or China a single instance in which a substantial segment of the population accepted torture and death rather than forswear their belief in an ethereal concept.
But the ideal of dying as Christ evolved into dying for Christ, and eventually into killing for Christ.
The English language, steeped in Biblical imagery, became filled with martial metaphors. Later, science grew out of the same polarizing of spirit and matter and male over female as did Christianity. Betty Roszak wrote that both women and nature were objects of the male scientist’s curiosity, to be tamed and interrogated:
Men need not have any scruples in “entering and penetrating into these holes and corners” because the “inquisition of truth” is the scientist’s purpose. He must put nature “on the rack.”
Indeed, Francis Bacon formulated the scientific method in the 17th century just at the height of the witch craze. Searching for empirical truth separate from the body, he was the intellectual ancestor to J.R. Oppenheimer just as the Inquisition was the seed of McCarthyism.
Now, few of us realize how our language, and hence our thinking, is deeply influenced by military metaphors. The fact that 24% of us – far more than in any European country – believe that “it is acceptable to use violence to get what we want” underlies our racist politics, our police brutality and the fact that the American Empire has bombed forty nations since 1945.
From literal to symbolic war, Lakoff teaches that the metaphor is not merely in the words we use – it is in our very concept of an argument:
Your claims are indefensible.
He attacked every weak point in my argument.
His criticisms were right on target.
I demolished his argument.
I’ve never won an argument with him.
You disagree? OK, shoot!
If you use that strategy, he’ll wipe you out.
He shot down all my arguments.
These metaphors also suffuse the language of love:
His many rapid conquests.
She fought for him, but his mistress won out.
He fled from her advances.
She pursued him relentlessly.
He is gaining ground with her.
He won her hand in marriage, overpowered her.
She’s besieged by suitors. He has to fend them off.
He enlisted the aid of her friends.
He made an ally of her mother. Theirs is a misalliance.
Richard David Hames laments that “everyone has absorbed the same grammar since childhood”:
...sport as war carried out by gentler means, in a vocabulary none of them invented and none of them can quite set down...language of this kind resists reform the way a keystone resists removal...A government that stopped naming enemies would lose the fear that manufactures obedience. A corporation that stopped speaking of domination would unsettle shareholders whose faith depends on hearing the vocabulary of conquest recited back to them each quarter...each is bound to a vocabulary that keeps regenerating the very conflict it claims only to be managing, and none can put it down first without appearing to concede – which is, of course, exactly the trap the vocabulary was built to set...the case against the language of war is being argued in a soldier’s vocabulary...
We need to become more conscious of how we use metaphors. They can bring insight, but they can also distort. They can create ways of seeing. But in this demythologized world they can also create ways of not seeing.
Part Two
Fighting for peace is like screwing for virginity. – George Carlin
The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House – Audre Lorde
Military metaphors are everywhere in the world of medicine. Intended to promote support for research, they also fuel our American obsession with perfect health, where doctors use the arsenal of science as weapons to battle disease in the war against cancer. A sick child becomes a little soldier, rallying to secure victory. My holistic doctor works on all fronts.
In Illness as a Metaphor,Susan Sontag observed that cancer is so embedded in the western psyche that the word is weighted with connotations:
...in the popular culture, cancer equals death...an evil, invincible predator, not just a disease... talk of siege and war to describe disease now has, with cancer, a striking literalness and authority...
The enemy is not bacteria or unhealthy lifestyles but “the fanatic…cells” of the patient whose body has become the battlefield. “The cancer takes over the body, perhaps physically, but also metaphorically.” Cancer is “invasive,” “colonizing” from the original tumor to elsewhere in the body. Rogue cells regroup and mount “new assaults”, requiring “bombardments” of radiotherapy.
Perhaps most significantly, cancer is “regarded…as a diminution of self.” Here we recognize American myth, where the tradition of blaming victims for their own bad fortuneis the shadow that lurks behind our Calvinist heritage of predestination, Social Darwinism and the Prosperity Gospel.
Military metaphors may inspire “victory” over the “invasion”, proving to some the validity of New Age positive thinking. Butthe same thinkingmakes patients feel responsible for the “wrong thinking” that caused their illness (while distracting them from the very real issues of corporate pollution and unaffordable health insurance). In our Puritan-based culture, if someone “loses their battle with cancer” they are seen as weak, as not having tried hard enough. A specific medical outcome – unlike most others, such as heart or kidney disease – is equated with moral strength, or the lack of it.
You killed that poem, we say. You’re a killer. You came to that novel with guns blazing. I am hammering this paragraph. I am banging them out...I owned that workshop. I shut it down. I crushed them. We smashed the competition. I’m wrestling with the muse...a target audience. “Good for you, man,” a man said to me at a party, “you’re making a killing with poetry. You’re knocking them dead.”
Anthropologist Robert Myers arguess that “gun speak” has permeated American culture so deeply that it’s used by everybody – men and women, Republicans and Democrats, gun owners and pacifists. He writes (tongue-in-cheek, I hope) that the “warspeak” permeating everyday language “puts us all in the trenches”. Everything has been “weaponized” – a word that increased in print by a factor of 10 between 1980 and 2008. This trend matters for three reasons:
First, it degrades our ability to engage with one another. Framing an issue as a “war” can communicate an urgency that requires instantaneous – and often thoughtless – action. Second, it evokes violent attitudes. Young adults exposed to political rhetoric charged with warspeak are more likely to endorse violence. Third, when everything is laden with violent imagery, our perceptions and emotions become needlessly distorted: “Political carnage and carnage in the classroom, weaponized songs and weapons of war, snipers on the hockey rink and mass shooters – all blur together across our cognitive maps.”
Part Three
You can’t wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club. – Jack London
No man has a right to raise a hand to a woman in anger...we have to change the culture. Period. And keep punching at it and punching at it and punching at it. – JoeBiden
Here is a list of martial metaphors that I’ve compiled. Its sheer size, more than any analysis, may help you realize how often you use some of them and why we all need to be conscious of our speech.
This is my rifle, this is my gun; one is for killing, one is for fun.
This means war!
Three-point bomb (basketball)
Throw down
Throw down the gauntlet
Throw everything we’ve got at this problem
Throwing firebombs
Ticking time bomb
Tip of the spear
To the hilt
Top gun
Top notch
Torpedo the conversation
Tour de force
Trench coat
Triggering; pulling the trigger; trigger warnings
Troops, trooper
Troubleshoot
Truce
Truth bomb
Tug of war
Turn the screws
Tweet bomb
Upshot
Under fire
Under the gun, the wire
Up against the wall
Up and at’em!
Up in arms
Upshot
Vaccine shot
Waging peace
War on drugs; cancer; poverty; Christmas; Covid, etc
War chest
(Old) war horse
War of the sexes
War room
War zone
War (card game)
Warriors (spiritual)
Weaponize
Weekend Warriors
Whack
With flying colors
Within earshot
Within striking distance
Young guns
You don’t want to die on that hill
You hit that!
Sports nicknames:
(ASA College) Avengers
(Ohio Wesleyan) Battlin’ Bishops
(Thomas Moore College) Blue Rebels
(Atlanta) Braves
(Tampa Bay) Buccaneers
(Cleveland) Cavaliers
(Los Angeles) Chargers
(Kansas City) Chiefs
(Washington) Commanders (formerly Redskins)
(Lutheran Bible School) Conquerors
(Eastern Kentucky) Colonels and Lady Colonels
(Fla. Nat. Univ.) Conquistadors
(Holy Cross) Crusaders
(Dordt College) Defenders
(St. Ambrose) Fighting Bees
(N. Dakota) Fighting Hawks
(Kalamazoo) Fighting Hornets
(Illinois) Fighting Illini
(W. Illinois) Fighting Leathernecks
(Muskingum) Fighting Muskies
(N.C. Arts) Fighting Pickles
(Wilmington Col.) Fighting Quakers
(Carrol College) Fighting Saints
(Ohio Valley) Fighting Scots
(Mary Baldwin College) Fighting Squirrels
(Wash. & Lee) Generals
(McDaniel College) Green Terror
(CA Maritime) Keel haulers
(Arcadia) Knights; (Army) Black Knights
(Massachusetts) Minutemen
(New England) Patriots
(U. Hawaii) Rainbow Warriors
(Oakland / Las Vegas) Raiders
(Texas) Rangers
(Texas Tech) Red Raiders
(Mississippi) Rebels
(Saskatchewan) Roughriders
(UNLV) Runnin’ Rebels
(Buffalo) Sabres
(San Jose St.) Spartans
(USC) Trojans
(Minnesota) Vikings
(Auburn) Warhawks
(Golden State) Warriors
Dualistic, oppositional headlines (gleaned from one week in Alternet in 2025):
-- Nancy Mace blasted after new bombshell revelation
-- GOP Rep blasted for insulting House prayer leader
-- Reagan official blasts Congress
-- Maga goes ballistic
-- Former Republican bashes Trump
-- Trump official ripped for whining Fox interview
-- MTG ripped for failing to read bill
-- Dem hammers Trump for hypocrisy
-- George Conway torches Trump’s hypocrisy
-- MSNBC slams Trump’s ally
-- Trump education official slammed
-- Congressman vows to deliver “knockout punch” to Trump
-- Social media is dive-bombing MAGA rep
-- MAGA “knife-fighting” is about to get a lot uglier
-- GOP governor torpedoes 6 MAGA bills
-- “Knife in the back”: GOP strategist says Trump “tearing MAGA apart”
Part Four
Problems cannot be solved at the same level of awareness that created them. – Albert Einstein
Better to create prophecy than to live prediction. – Caroline Casey
Give evil nothing to oppose and it will disappear by itself. – Lao Tzu
If we can dream it up, we can dream it down. – Reverand Ike
I am not a crook. – Richard Nixon
Lately we hear of de-colonizing our minds – interrogating ourselves about the unconscious biases, racist opinions, classist or ableist ideas and patronizing language (and, I would add, outmoded mythologies) that we unreflectively take for granted. To add de-militarizing our minds requires learning to reframe our metaphors, especially around health and illness.
Astrologer Caroline Casey, teaches that military metaphors subtly determine and undermine the metaphysics of our relationships and our work in the world. We’d see both our childhood traumas and our medical crises in very different lights if we viewed them instead as “our beautiful, dangerous assignments.” Indeed, in discussing her own cancer diagnosis, she speaks of having “inappropriately exuberant cells” that have “no respect for boundaries” and “can’t stop growing.” The patient must “out-enthuse” them, not to “battle” cancer – but to dance with it. She visualized “wrathful dakinis” swooshing these cells into the cauldron of oblivion.
Reframing involves developing a poetic mind to prevent us from feeding the problem. Barbara Ehrenreich wrote that separating her cancer – “an evil predator” – and the body in which it resided seemed to stand at odds with the nature of the disease. She decided to call the cancer cells in her body “the fanatics of Barbaraness, the rebel cells that…carry the genetic essence of me.” The cancer then became less an enemy and more a part of her, that which was the most fanatic, not a predator but an overzealous fan.
Again, metaphors are the language of poetry, but they don’t have to be so serious. As Jack London said, “You can’t wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club.” Another reframing master, Rob Brezsny, comments:
That sounds too violent, though I agree in principle that aggressiveness is the best policy in one’s relationship with inspiration. Try this: Don’t wait for inspiration. Go after it with a butterfly net, lasso, sweet treats, fishing rod, court orders, beguiling smells and sincere flattery.
Whatever we fight against grows stronger if we give it more energy than it originally had. For twelve years, Trumpus (Trump = us) has personified ignorance, misogyny and racism for the imaginations of millions. However, writes Lakoff:
In the 2024 election, Harris and her allies were amplifying and boosting every deranged word out of his mouth...But politics isn’t rational. Trump’s outrageous words became the center of attention – and took attention away from Harris’ views…focusing attention on Trump’s power – even his power to harm – helps Trump.
The liberal media just can’t look away. Here is one day’s headlines from Alternet (8/23/26):
Trump whispers spark fears of ‘unprecedented’ midterm power grab
Trump just made the world a far more dangerous place
Trump has a wild new prediction
Army veteran reveals Trump’s failure to grasp ‘common sense’ basics
Ex-White House staffer exposes the real scandal behind Trump’s close aide
Trump’s military disrespect hits new low
MAGA voters serve Trump a reckoning as red state turns purple
Trump’s sick new delusion is suddenly ‘national security’
Body language expert exposes signs Trump is ‘breaking down’
Lakoff confirms the science:
All words are defined relative to conceptual frames...When you repeat a false argument, even for the purpose of saying it’s “not true,” you help make the argument stronger in the minds of your readers. Because of the way your brain’s neurocircuitry works, you activate the frames you are trying to negate...Eliminating the word “not” from your writing forces you to make the proactive case instead of just (lazily) negating your opponent’s argument.
Asian “martial” arts understand this. Ideally, Aikido practitioners divert their opponent’s aggressive energy to guide them into higher states of awareness. They perceive failure if they succumb to the temptation of literal violence. Sumo referees wait to signal the start of a match until he sees that both wrestlers are conspiring (breathing in unison.) We go back to etymology. Diabolic (to throw across) comes from the same root as ballet. The root of “compete” is “petitioning the gods together.” We see this when athletes hug after fiercely “engaging” (double meaning intended) with each other.
As noted, military metaphors are everywhere in the New Testament. The Book of Revelation is its most popular section among evangelicals and etymology is helpful here as well. Apocalypse doesn’t mean “end times,” but rather “to lift the veil.” It was composed at the end of the Pagan age, and now the age of monotheism is falling into such literalistic thinking that we can imagine its own conclusion approaching. At the end of this age, we can see truths that have been veiled behind outdated myths.
We need to use sacred language, in the subjunctive mode: pretend, perhaps, suppose, maybe,make believe, may it be so, what if – and play. This “willing suspension of disbelief” is what Coleridge called “poetic faith.” Then, says Lorca, the artist stops dreaming and begins to desire. Love moves from imagination to inspiration, which invents the “poetic fact,” where new life comes not from us but through us.
Jung said that myth offers two gifts: a story to live by, and the opportunity to dis-identify from outmoded patterns and thus re-engage differently with the archetypal energies from which our stories arise. In the tribal world, art and ritual balance the worlds of the living and the unseen. Healing comes through memory, both in purging grief and guilt and in creatively re-framing one’s story – what Hillman called “healing fictions.” Malidoma Somé taught that in his West African Dagara language, the word for initiation translates as “remembering”.
It was Memory herself, Mnemosyne, who mated with Zeus and birthed the Muses. Reconnection to memory through art counters Time’s (Kronos) linear progress with her cyclic imagination. Ultimately, we heal by re-membering what we came here to do. It is said that the Muses collected the scattered limbs of dismembered bodies; it was they – art – who reassemble what our military metaphors rip apart. Poet Dianne Di Prima reminds us: “The only war that matters is the war against the imagination.”
How do we reframe “conflict?” Some tribal people believed that conflict existed not to eliminate alternative voices, but to bring people together. In Gaelic, one cannot say, “I am angry at you,” but only, “There is anger between us.” Animosity, with its connections to animal, animate, animation and anima, derives from the Latin for “breath of life.” If we follow animosity to its archetypal source, we may find the one breath we all share.
Greek myth reminds us that Athena’s wisdom converted the vengeful Furies into the Eumenides, the kindly helpers of justice. And it provides a surprising image in the war god, Ares. Zeus calls him “most hateful to me...” But beyond the Iliad, he appears in few fully elaborated myths. Instead, wrote Hillman in A Terrible Love of War, “He presents himself in action rather than in telling…The god does not stand above or behind the scene directing what happens. He is what happens.”
Like all the other gods, Ares is first of all an image of the divine, and thus of the psyche. Greek culture understood that martial values are fundamentally human and need to be channelled. Second, he was taught to dance before he was taught the arts of war. Third, he was Aphrodite’s lover. This most masculine god and this most feminine goddess birthed a daughter, Harmonia. Love and war begat harmony, as Psyche and Eros begat Voluptos, or voluptuousness.
Soldiers entering battle invoked Ares, asking for strength and courage. But they also called upon him to prevent conflict from degenerating into uncontrollable violence, as in this ancient hymn:
Hear me, helper of mankind, dispenser of youth’s sweet courage, beam down your gentle light on our lives…diminish that deceptive rush of my spirit, and restrain that shrill voice in my heart that provokes me to enter the chilling din of battle…let me linger in the safe laws of peace...
This poetry invites us to perceive conflict as a form of relationshipthatseeks restoration of harmony rather than domination. “Who would have imagined,” wrote Hillman, “that restraint is what Ares offers?” Aphrodite’s passionate aesthetic engagement can restrain his violence. Long-term discipline of an art tames hasty emotional expression but not its passion. Violence is beyond reason; what counters it must be equally unreasonable: “Imagine a civilization whose first line of defense is each citizen’s aesthetic investment in some cultural form.”
If the archetypal warrior is forced to fight, he will do so sadly. If he survives, he grieves for all the dead because his enemy was a part of himself. In serving the Divine King of the psyche, he is charged with protecting boundaries, with determining which outside elements to welcome and which are dangerous. Invoking him, we reframe “armoring” into “respect for proper boundaries.” In Irish myth the Fianna warriors guarded the borders of the realm. Meade says that they asked all strangers, “Would you like a poem or a sword?” Imagine shifting the role of the police from controlling and punishing Black and Brown people to – artfully – protecting the borders of the realm. Imagine the military’s role as being limited to that of the Coast Guard.
An example from biology is the immune system. The skin and lining of the small intestine are intelligent, semi-permeable membranes that know what to admit (air and nutrients) and what to keep out (microbes and toxins). In an infection, certain white blood cells sound the alarm, others neutralize the invaders and others curtail the immune response when the danger is over. Then antibodies awake to remember the event and protect against future ones.
So why, in the most competitive society in history, do “proper,” middle-class people usually avoid confrontation, limiting it to watching sports? Perhaps we intuitively know that normal social interactions cannot always prevent conflict from turning into literal violence; it simply isn’t safe. Our foundational myth of redemption through violence polarizes us into one of the two most easily assumed stances: the path of retreat or the path of extermination, of fight or flight.
Ritual provides a third alternative: staying in relationship without being violent. Traditional Dagara married couples engaged in conflict rituals every week. First agreeing on no physical violence, each person vented all accumulated emotions – simultaneously – sometimes with the entire village witnessing them. Experience had shown that conflict causes damage to the entire community only if it is removed from its ritual context and exposed to the profane openness of daily life.
African American culture evolved the ritualized conversion of aggression into creativity. Examples include break dancing, poetry slams and “the dozens,” verbal jousting in which the antagonists poetically insult each other’s mothers. Mythologist Lewis Hyde writes that the loser is “the player who breaks the form and starts a physical fight…who chooses a single side of the contradiction”. To win, one must artfully hold the tension of the opposites. Brezsny suggests that even this ritual can be reframed:
Try a new game, “Paying the Tributes.” Choose worthy targets and ransack your imagination to come up with smart, true, and amusing praise about them: “You’re so far-seeing, you can probably catch a glimpse of the back of your own head.” “You’re so ingenious, you could use your nightmares to get rich and famous.” “Your mastery of pronoia is so artful, you could convince me to love my worst enemy.”
Let’s go deeper into the challenges and rewards of reframing. Perhaps we can open a “reframing shop.”
Part Five
You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete. – Buckminster Fuller
If you want to change the world, change the metaphor. – Joseph Campbell
An enemy who gets in, risks the danger of becoming a friend. – Joy Harjo
Turn this wall on its side and it becomes a bridge. – Graffiti on the Mexican side of the border wall
At men’s conferences Robert Bly, Hillman and Meade evolved effective conflict rituals that encouraged men to engage with each other on difficult subjects – race, power and sex – without either leaving or becoming violent. In this context, safety meant feeling secure enough to take risks. Remaining within the ritual container long enough, men may get past anger to share the underlying grief and to cleanse their souls.
Joshua Chamberlain was a general in the Union Army who recorded the awesome spectacle of Robert E. Lee’s surrender on April 9th, 1865:
Before us in proud humiliation stood…men whom neither toils and sufferings, nor the fact of death, nor disaster, nor hopelessness could bend from their resolve…thin, worn, and famished, but erect, and with eyes looking level into ours, waking memories that bound us together as no other bond…On our part not a sound of trumpet more, nor roll of drum; not a cheer…but an awed stillness rather, and breath-holding, as if it were the passing of the dead! …How could we help falling on our knees, all of us together, and praying God to pity and forgive us all!
The two armies, ground down by years of carnage, had suffered together. Despite the hatred – or perhaps because of it – they had erased some of that sense of otherness that drives men to violence. The surrender, of course, didn’t heal the nation’s wounds, but Chamberlain’s vision invites us into the imagination of reconciliation.
Again, competition means “petitioning the gods together.” Agon (root of agony) was the Greek term for a contest in athletics, music or literature. It also referred to a challenge held in Tragic Drama, in which the two main characters were the protagonist and the antagonist.
But the Greeks were constantly at war with each other. However, almost every four years between 776 BC and 393 AD they observed sacred truces for the Olympics. Contest means “testing together,” originally “to bear witness together,” from the Latin testis (plural: testes). “Testimony” may have meant holding a hand over one’s testes as a gesture of truth-telling.
Our task is to do more than simply deconstruct outmoded belief systems. They hold us not merely because of generations of indoctrination, but because of their mythic content. They grab us, as all myths do, because they refer to profound truths, even if those truths have been corrupted to serve the culture of death.
As Casey says, “co-operators are standing by.” The other world is offering help, but indigenous protocol insists upon our full participation. We develop that capacity as we build our willingness to imagine and begin by reframing language.
Let’s reframe the military metaphor Give me your best shot into“Inspire meto show you what I can do,” or“Let’s make this game, dance, song or poetry competition into something beautiful!”
We reframe capitalism’s basic – and bizarre – superstition that if each person pursues his own narrow interests, then the common good is advanced. Instead, we imagine individuals who enhance both their own wellbeing and the greater good only when they give fully of themselves. Dominion can change to stewardship. Freedfrom our mad obsession with growth, we replace the GDP with a “Gross National Happiness” index. We replace development with liberation in both its Buddhist and political senses. In America, the shadow of growth (both economic and spiritual) is depression, and here is a clue: in previous depressions, we learned to stop buying things we didn’t need.
We replace “police force” with “police service”. We reframe scarcity and original sin into infinite fecundity and original blessing. We reframe Puritanical contempt for the body into an inclusive, protective, expressive, humorous eroticism.
We reframe our idea of the hero. The earth needs real heroes like never before, but we will prefer peace heroes. As we support ritual containers for the initiation of youth, we will no longer be attracted to people who risk their lives crushing the Other to restore the peace of denial. We will applaud those who commit to the hard work of relationship, men who don’t ride off into the sunset.
We drop the patronizing moral superiority that justifies interventions and invasions (both international and interpersonal), and encourage (give heart to) the best in people.
The world would still be a “vale of soul-making,” as Keats wrote, but it would no longer be a fallen world. Imagine millions no longer interpreting Biblical poetry as literal fact. Belief would return to its German roots where it is connected to love and cherish.
Sacrifice will revert to its original meaning: voluntary approach to the underworld for the renewal of self and community. What is “made sacred” will be anyone who endures the terrifying ego death that precedes the birth of the new. Jung writes, “What I sacrifice is my own selfish claim, and by doing this I give up myself.”
Those who can grieve together can laugh together. Re-acquainting ourselves with the old rituals of grief and closure, we reframe our characteristic denial of death. We perceive it as the final initiatory transition endured by people who have lived the lives they were intended to live. Death – as a necessary, periodic restructuring of identity – will become our friend, sitting (as Carlos Castaneda wrote) on our right shoulder, reminding us to pay attention to the fleeting beauty of the world. And we will reframe the old question of the generals – What are you willing to die for? – into the initiatory challenge, What are you willing to fully live for?
We will understand our addiction to violence and our use of military metaphors as a projection of that initiatory death (that we secretly desire) onto the world, and we will withdraw those projections. The poet William Stafford described his experience as a young child watching a military parade:
Learning
A piccolo played, then a drum. Feet began to come – a part of the music.
Here comes a horse, clippety clop, away.
My mother said, “Don’t run – the army is after someone other than us.
If you stay, you’ll learn our enemy.”
Then he came, the speaker.
He stood in the square. He told us who to hate.
I watched my mother’s face, its quiet.
“That’s him,” she said.
We will realize that an appropriate metaphor has already arisen out of this land: the spirit of Jazz improvisation. Wynton Marsalis explains:
… to play Jazz, you’ve got to listen (to each other). The music forces you at all times to address what other people are thinking, and for you to interact with them with empathy…it gives us a glimpse into what America is going to be when it becomes itself.
Reframing these metaphors will enable us to drop our fascination with evil. As in the Aramaic language of Jesus’ time, we will view destructive behavior as unripe, as a cry for help, and we will know compassion. Hames reminds us that,
...every language humans have ever spoken has changed without permission and without a schedule, shaped by the accumulated weight of ordinary refusals nobody thought worth recording at the time – a word quietly retired here, a metaphor left unrepeated there...
Finally, we will cook innocence itself down to its roots. Our own light will no longer blind us. Innocence, once again, will signify the most basic of all mythic ideas: the new start. Then America could offer the song that the world has always seen in us: not that of a consumer paradise, a destructive adolescent or a wrathful father, but of the ancient story about what makes us human, the rare and lucky opportunity to accomplish what we came here to do.
Free of the thinking that military metaphors produce, we’ll know, as John McCutcheon sings in “Christmas in the trenches”, that “on each end of the rifle we’re the same”.
