couple of questions
Subject: couple of questions
From: Rachel Trusheim <rachel@sterlingandross.com>
Date: 3/17/10, 12:08
To: Barrett Brown <barriticus@gmail.com>

Hey BB,

During proofing this came up: What's a down-paragraph metaphor? It is an error or missing a word, perhaps? Thanks!

Okay, so Bennett doesn’t seem to know what the term “magic bullet” means. That’s understandable; I myself used to have trouble with the term “ruled out.” When it was said that police have ruled out the possibility of foul play, I wasn’t sure if that meant that the police had spread the possibility out on the table to get a better look at it, or rather that they’d thrown it out so that it wasn’t really something they were still considering as a possibility. But that was when I was, like, 12.
Luckily, Bennett does a slightly better job of explaining the “moral clarity” of his position in a down-paragraph metaphor. “Of course we want to teach children not to play with matches. But if a house is burning, we’ve got to put out the fire—and we’ve got to grab matches out of some hands before they start any more fires.” Actually, this is a terrible metaphor, unless, of course, he meant to add, “and then we’ve got to throw the little bastards out on the street.” He is, after all, talking about a mandatory expulsion policy, not a “taking drugs out of some hands before they use any more drugs” policy, which is what the schools have always had.

Rachel Trusheim
Executive Editor
212.244.2084 ext. 111

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