Media Have A Battle On Their Hands
The Age
Monday March 22, 2004
Peaceable solutions will be proffered in vain. The war on war will never be won so long as cliches, similes and the like present such a united front.
The war has won. Now you may suspect there's something amiss with that sentence. You may think that I've been sabotaged by sub-editors, or foiled by faulty layout, or that I've had a momentary lapse in concentration and left out a crucial word, such as ``been".
But you're wrong. The war has won. In the battlefield of the cliched metaphor, it is triumphant. No other simile has so thoroughly colonised the language of journalism, politics and popular culture.
Open any newspaper and you can read about the war on terrorism, the war on crime, the war on drugs, the war on poverty, the war on germs, the war on unemployment or the war on AIDS. According to Robert Manne, writing in The Age recently, the 1960s were most notable for ``the war that was waged against old authority".
Then there are fashion wars, retail wars and history wars. And when you get sick of being in the wars, you can always turn to the battles. There's the battle of the bulge and the battle against wrinkles, there are firemen battling fires, football teams battling for supremacy, residents battling against developers and patients battling against cancer. There are environmental battles, legal battles, pre-selection battles and electoral battles. And, after all, it's hardly surprising that there are so many battles being fought because, as the Prime Minister likes to remind us at every possible opportunity, we're a nation of battlers.
You could argue that when the story involves a competition between opposing interests, there is some justification for employing these tired old military metaphors. At least there will be a winner and a loser in a football match or a legal contest, as there usually is in a war. There is something faintly ridiculous, though, about the idea of women sending in elite armies of cosmetic products to wage war against those poor innocent wrinkles. And come to think of it, perhaps it's no longer true to say that wars usually involve winners and losers. A year after the United States declared war on Iraq, no one's looking particularly victorious in that country at the moment.
One of the strangest uses of this war metaphor that I've come across in recent times is an initiative called Weekend Warriors. No, it's not a publicity campaign aimed at recruiting people for the Army Reserve. It's a program to encourage lapsed musicians to blow the dust off their electric guitars, drag the moth-eaten blankets off their old drum kits and make like rock'n'roll heroes.
Even their mission statement has been infected by patriotic hyperbole. According to the publicity blurb, Weekend Warriors aims to build a musical nation! I have visions of a training camp full of baby-boomer blokes who are woken before dawn by a burly bouncer and instructed to don black leather pants and report for duty. After their uniforms have been inspected by an eagle-eyed booking agent, they are marched into a series of small garages, handed Fender Stratocasters or a pair of drumsticks each, and given four hours to learn every song on KISS's Destroyer album.
But this is no battle of the bands. It's a seven-week course of workshops run by friendly musical coaches, culminating in a final concert. Even when we're talking about something as cuddly as culture, though, we still love to use this aggressive language. In a recent Adelaide Review article referring to the food at the Adelaide Fringe Festival, a critic informed us that ``the stay-up-late Fringe army marches on its stomach!"
A scientist declared on Radio National last week that ``we have won the war against fish". I have forgiven him, though, because it was impossible to argue with his logic. As a result of over-fishing, fish stocks have plummeted to 10 per cent of their original numbers in the past few decades, and some species are down to 1 per cent. The fishing industry has apparently been using military-industrial technology such as the US Defense Department's Global Positioning System (a satellite navigation system) to locate the poor remaining Nemos and blitz them.
One justifiable military metaphor does not excuse an army of aggressive analogies. It's time for a detente in the discourse of war. Now, if we could just do something about the awful affliction of alliteration.
-- sianp@netlink.com.au
© 2004 The Age