For their final exam in the Language and Politics course I teach at George Washington University, my students were asked to death tax the subprime bailout plan. (The Death Tax, aka the Inheritance Tax - is among the finest examples of renaming an issue to redefine the debate around it.)
Whatever its merits as policy, the proposal has serious rhetorical challenges. Bailout is a bad metaphor. You bail your little brother out of trouble, bail water out of a leaky boat and bail out of a bad job. My students had to come up with a new term that made opposition to the proposal as difficult as supporting the taxing of the dead.
More interesting than what they spent time thinking about is what they wrote without thinking. A lot of my students used the phrase "freezing rates" to describe the action they wanted the metaphor to explain. For my students "freeze" was a benign term, a necessary word on the way to their proposed re-defining of the debate. But for me, "freeze" was among the most important words in their essays.
Metaphors that guide thought are very often un-noticed, that’s what gives them their power. Clever titles and acronyms have their place (the USA PATRIOT Act for example stands for Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism) but it's what we don't see that often guides our thinking.
By freezing interest rates, regulators and banks are stopping something that should be moving. A freeze frame stops a film, frozen rivers prevent travel, and when things are going badly at a company, there is a hiring freeze. Motion and progress define America. We are a nation that moves. Freezing interest rates means artificially stopping them, preventing the natural flow of events, keeping from happening what ought to be happening.
Instead of freezing rates, the President and lenders should be talking about maintaining interest rates and extending agreements. The action should not prevent natural progress or change – rather, it should keep what’s already working in place. The agreements should keep promises (something Americans believe in almost as much as they do moving on). Maintaining rates doesn’t stop time to reward the imprudent or punish the responsible – it makes people keep their word and allows what’s already working to keep working.
