Editor,
Are any readers of this paper old enough to remember the war on poverty?
It was a Johnson administration program in the '60s that got sidetracked by Vietnam. That's the "war" in Vietnam, which was a real war, unlike the "war" on poverty, which was a biggish social program supposed to do away with unemployment and homelessness and the like. No one in those days confused real wars, which involve soldiers and planes and bombs and so on, with metaphorical "wars" on social problems like poverty. (Though some comic at the time -- Mort Saul maybe -- did ask whether he could help fight the war on poverty by throwing hand grenades at poor people.)
Since then, except for Afghanistan and the Gulf War 12 years ago, we haven't had many real wars (involving the United States at least -- other countries haven't been quite so lucky) but there have been quite a few metaphorical "wars," some of which are still with us. There was the war on illiteracy, you will recall (we lost that one, I think) and the war on crime and, of course, the war on drugs, which has been going on through three or four presidents at least. And I am sure I am forgetting some.
But my question is this: which kind is the "war on terrorism?" I would have said it has got to be metaphorical. After all, you can't actually invade terrorism, or drop bombs on it, or surround it with your troops and demand that it surrender.
Terrorism is a particularly nasty sort of politically motivated crime of violence, something to "fight" of course, but more in the way we "fight" poverty or crime than the way we fight a country trying to take us over.
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But I guess I must be wrong about this. All sorts of officials in the current federal administration, from the president on down, are saying we should start spying on citizens and holding accused people indefinitely without charges and generally trashing the Bill of Rights, to say nothing of building up the military by mind-boggling increases in the defense budget. All this is because they say "we are at war now." And since we haven't attacked Iraq or North Korea (or France) yet, I guess they must be referring to the "war on terrorism."
It couldn't just be that George W. Bush slept through English 101 at Yale the day they explained "metaphor," could it?
G. F. Schueler
UNM faculty
