Metaphors are tricky

Dear editor:

“One thing that literature would be greatly the better for would be a more restricted employment by the authors of simile and metaphor” — Ogden Nash.

A retired cancer specialist recently suggested in these pages the metaphor of a technically competent oncologist lacking bedside manner as fitting the current chief executive and his team, and the results delivered thereby.

Now, metaphors are tricky; they have very soft boundaries. I wonder how many oncologists would agree that members of the “current team” are prepared with anything approaching the same years and depth of training as they are for their jobs (well maybe Jim Mattis). And as to metaphors for results, what might an oncologist in his or her parlance call a massive transfer of wealth from the rest of us to the people who need it least (a metastasis? enlargement of the principal mass?). Or for biological peculiarities of certain persons, viz., a U.S. senator who finds it possible to declare from the floor of the chamber that the poorest and neediest among us are also the most dangerous (a pedunculated polyp?). Or who, when noticing that a colleague has mistaken the disease for the host, will fail to give apt advice?

Don’t get me wrong. This is only about oncologists/oncology insofar as they make — and break down — as handy metaphors. The oncologist presently treating my sister is a saint — well actually quite close to one, having begun his career with Mother Teresa. He is board certified also in palliative/hospice, so he is going to stick with you, if need be, to the very end. Now you be the judge: Which oncologist is more like the “current team,” the foregoing or the one treating one of my family members who, when it became clear that all therapy had failed, communicated same by making us wait for two hours in his palatial office without ever showing up?

“Just a bunch of ‘billies, throw ‘em under the bus.” A metaphor (if we must have one) perhaps more apt to current “governance” than “lacking bedside manner.” Thomas Heckmann Hot Springs