An Interesting bit of writing

[TxRad]

A friend of mine posted this on another site and gave me permission to post it here

I think it's a very good example of getting a point across with humor and metaphor...


Just so much Horsepoop
By Soba Losa


I have occasionally read a post that suggested that the war in the middle east is about oil. That we are fighting it to keep the price of oil low.

If that were the case, the price of oil would be low.

But there is obviously more to it than that.

Suppose for a moment that there was a convenient, cheap and clean way to produce fuel from cow and horse manure. (There is a way, but I don’t know how cheap, convenient and clean it is.)

Now, suppose I had a large supply of such raw material.

And suppose I were selling it regularly to companies that turned it into fuel for suburban SUVs.

Suppose, for the sake of discussion, I was getting, say, five dollars a bushel for it. And there was so much of it that I was easily able to maintain a strong and safe workforce with that five dollars a bushel, plus make a really good profit. I put my kids through the best colleges. I built hospitals. I made the trains run on time. I built a beautiful home and I did not want for anything, and neither did those who worked for me.

Then one of my sons comes along and says “I know I have everything I could possibly want, I have a good life, I have a good education, I have all the best that civilization can offer. But I want to kill the people with the suburban SUVs that buy the fuel from which our manure is made. I have no good reason for feeling this way other than they are probably buying a disproportional amount of the fuel. And besides, God says I should kill them.”

Being a doting father I tell him “I have given you everything. You have not had to work for anything in your life. You have riches beyond anyone’s imagination. So if it amuses you to kill SUV people and that’s what you want to do with your money, go ahead.”

So my son goes out on a killing spree. And everytime he kills someone he tells the world “This person brought his death on himself by buying our manure and making us rich enough to kill him because God told us to.”

And this killing rampage gets so out of hand that even I, as the son’s father, cannot stop him and I stand back and wring my hands and say “Oh what am I to do?” And his mother babies him and spoils him and eggs him on and says how proud she is of him and he continues his now expanding slaughterfest.

And the neighbors are getting a little nervous about all of this and are saying “Y’know, we’re getting a little nervous about this”.

And the people with the SUVs are getting really pissed about it.
And then one day he kills thousands of SUV owners at once and some people dance in the streets because that’ll teach the SUVs to buy all the fuel made from the manure and by god they deserved it.

And it turns out that the SUV owners have stealth bombers and smart bombs and Bradley fighting vehicles full of some really pissed off soldiers. And this latest atrocity is the straw that quite literally broke the camel’s back.

And they know where my son lives. And who helped him. And who else is planning such a thing. And they’re pissed. And they don’t give a shit about the manure or the cost of it because enough is enough.

And so to punish the SUV owners for hitting my son back, I double the price of my manure to ten dollars a bushel.

And I secretly fund hit men to go out and kill as many SUV owners as they can. And I send other hit men to go out and kill the neighbors in the neighborhood, too, just because well, why not?

And maybe if I do this enough maybe I or my son or my grandson will someday rule the entire world. Daughters and grandaughters?
Hell, they’re just women. They get out of hand and we’ll shove an AK47 or SKS up their ass and fire it off. And I finance schools that tell all of the local children that they alone are chosen by God and they should hate the SUV owners and anybody else that doesn’t believe the way we do and kill them. In fact, I tell them that killing is a holy occupation, and if they die in the process they will become famous martyrs and live forever in plush circumstances with 72 female virgins. (Ignoring, of course, the fact that I’ve done my best to teach my sons that women are of no significant consequence, so 72 virgins are, in real fact, not likely to be a big reward.)

That’s what this war is about. Just so much horsepoop.

An interesting style... what do you think....

 

[Quiet_Cool]

Interesting. I wonder how long it will be left alone...



Q_C

 

[gauchecritic]

Rather biased don't you think?

 

[Quiet_Cool]

Rather biased don't you think?

24 minutes by my count, but I had to use four fingers three times, hence there might have been some confusion in my math.

Q_C

 

[TxRad]

Interesting. I wonder how long it will be left alone...



Q_C

I'm not asking about the political content... just the writing and diferrent ways of making a point....

Politics are not welcome.... is that policically incorrect enough.....

 

[Quiet_Cool]

I'm not asking about the political content... just the writing and diferrent ways of making a point....

Politics are not welcome.... is that policically incorrect enough.....

I caught what you meant, but once politics is introduced, even on a distant sidenote with the request that said sidenote be ignored...

Q_C

 

[gauchecritic]

right, I see. You want non-political comments on a political commentary. I was wholly unclear on the requirements.

THINKS Divorce your view of the entirety and apparent intent of the piece and confine remarks to style and effectiveness of 'pastiche' or 'satire'. [/i]/THINKS

Not very good.

Satire (for me) needs to be really funny to be effective. Funny enough to make me ignore the point and laugh at the humour.

More often than not a satire will fall into my own beliefs before I find it funny, which is probably the aim of satire. If I don't think farting or fat people are funny then it doesn't really matter how much others laugh.

Really good satire ignores almost any view of the subject and presents all in a ridiculous light.

This piece didn't do any of that and came across to me as simply an 'intellectual' redneck attempt at alternative proseletysing.

(edited to add) which is more or less the whole point, sans explanation, of my first comment.

 

[3113]

This piece didn't do any of that and came across to me as simply an 'intellectual' redneck attempt at alternative proseletysing.

Nicely put, actually. This is exactly what it seems to be--proselytizing. It's a highly bias, metaphoric tale--an attempt to get its view across without using real facts in order to support its claims. For example, in the story, Dad sells the manure and gives profits to son who does the killing. But is that accurate? What if we change the story to: Dad gets the manure, keeps the profits, and his son who lives in proverty kills the SUV owners who are making dad rich and keeping son poor? Suddenly, the son no longer seems like an irrational villian, does he?

I can write up this alternate story and post it--offering an entirely different view of the situation. But which of story is right? There are no facts offered to indicate that either story is correct in it's metaphor of what is truely going on. This makes it dangerous as a person might take the story, on faith, as offering true facts about this situation. About how these people are thinking.

It become particularly sticky if we consider that the country attacked for oil (Iraq), didn't have anything to do with thousands of SUV owners dying--and, under Saddam's dictatorship, didn't permit there to be any religious reasons to kill SUV owners. So now the story could read: "Dad, who kept strict control of his religious sons, was selling manure to SUV owners. A religious nut and his followers killed a bunch of SUV owners. Instead of going after the religious nut and his followers, the SUV owners decided to blame Dad and take his manure. They did, and now the sons, free of dad, are listening to the religious nuts that were never caught and hate the SUV owners."

In the end, the original, quoted story is niether humorous, nor witty, nor clever, or well written, and it's simplification of the situation can be re-written to suit anyone's point of view, as I just showed...unlike real facts. This makes it, IMHO, stupid and dangerous rather than informative and useful.

I presume, however, that it's preaching to the choir as I could see it being sent around by one person to all his/her e-mail buddies who all share the same pov.

 

[TxRad]

I knew I should have never broken my vow to never post anything even sightly political....

This just proves I was right the first time around...

Thank you and good night all.....

 

[BlackShanglan]

I think that the word usage has its strengths; by turning this into a discussion about "horse poop," the author interjects a little lightness into the topic and makes a fair effort to defuse the reader's potential resistance to the argument. The structure has its humor as well; I like the repeated "and" beginnings that give it a feel that straddles the humor of a run-on story told in person and the repetition and emphasis of a biblical passage. It begins lightly and amusingly, and I read along in good will for a while.

However, I think it a fair point on style to argue that a metaphor poorly related to its topic isn't a great metaphor. This one derailed me almost immediately, and so it didn't develop the force and power that a really good central metaphor can - by continually surprising and impressing us with the manifold ways in which it opens the topic up to us. A powerful central metaphor can do impressive things, but it has to start strong and continue to impress with its expanding applicability. In this piece, the metaphor started off with immediate problems that caused me to question it, and it got further from the topic with each new expansion.

Once the peice went awry, to me it continued to go further so; the more heavily slanted language and hyperbolic claims at the end undercut the nice work the author did at the beginning in lightening the approach, so that one is left with the feeling that the writer is losing control of the piece and slipping into an angry rant. Once you're there, it's hard to keep the audience.

My tuppence, and I hope reasonably apolitical tuppence at that -

Shanglan