America's economy peers into the abyss, and dark metaphors gaze right back

As the economic crisis seizes the American imagination, we turn to horrific and grotesque language to grapple with it. 

There's the toilet metaphor, showing the economy as, well, a pile of crap:

The heavy use of the plumbing metaphor almost makes one picture Paulson with his pants riding down a couple inches, leaning over a financial toilet bowl. It is clogged with unwanted securities backed by mortgages, supposedly because the sellers cannot find any buyers.

That's a pretty limited version, though.  Although scatological, it's not at Rabelasian levels, suggesting some optimism remains.  The blogger is holding back instead of cutting loose, being rhetorically continent, clenching the... you get the idea.

John Robb offers a less sphincter-minded metaphor, but one drawing on a political vision familiar to Gothic readers.  It's the bad state - not a tyranny, but a doddering scam presiding over dangerous villains:

The hollow state has the trappings of a modern nation-state ("leaders", membership in international organizations, regulations, laws, and a bureaucracy) but it lacks any of the legitimacy, services, and control of its historical counter-part. It is merely a shell that has some influence over the spoils of the economy. The real power rests in the hands of corporations and criminal/guerrilla groups that vie with each other for control of sectors of wealth production. For the individual living within this state, life goes on, but it is debased in a myriad of ways.[emphases added]

Notice the language of simulation and emptiness suggested by the language of hollow shells.  it reminds me of this haunting, possibly accidental phrase from an economist's blog posting:

Taxpayers lose any chance of being made whole

Next, Jonathan Lethem finds echoes of our crisis in Gothic Gotham city, in an editorial titled "Art of Darkness" (thanks to Barbara Fister for the tip):

so many real things lie in ruins: a corporate paradigm displaying no shred of responsibility, but eager for rescue by taxpayers; a military leadership’s implicit promise to its recruits and their families; a public discourse commodified into channels that feed any given preacher’s resentments to a self-selecting chorus. In these déjà vu battles, the combatants forever escape one another’s final judgment, whirl off into the void, leaving us standing awed in the rubble, uncertain of what we’ve seen, only sure we’re primed for the sequel.

If everything is broken, perhaps it is because for the moment we like it better that way. Unlike some others, I have no theory who Batman is — but the Joker is us. [emphasis added]

We've already had other Gothic language: the economy as Frankenstein, and the Nigerian scam/Web 2.0 mix.

The sheer complexity of these problems might help explain why this rhetorical move is so compelling.  But it's also the fact that this crisis is, to pick up the first metaphor, some scary shit.

Comments

[Steve B]

Notice the language of simulation and emptiness suggested by the language of hollow shells.

When I hear shell metaphors, especially in a less than positive context, I always think of the Qliphoth.