Description
During the 2012 presidential election campaign in the United States ofAmerica, rock musician T. Nugent tried to rally support for the Republican candidate at a National Rifle Association meeting in St. Louis by announcing a vigorous campaign against the incumbent President B. Obama: ‘We need to ride into that battlefield and chop their heads off in November.’ If, however, Obama was re-elected, he himself would be ‘dead or in jail by this time next year’ (Huffington Post 2012). The remark earned Nugent a meeting with two US Secret Service agents who came to establish that he had not meant to ‘threaten anyone’s life or advocate violence’. After the meeting, the Secret Service spokesman B. Leary declared that the issue had been ‘resolved’; Nugent, on his part, defended his rhetoric by claiming that ‘metaphors needn’t be explained to educated people’ (Huffington Post 2012). Events appear to have proved him right: three years later, in 2015, Obama is still president and Nugent still lives and is at liberty. So, might we conclude that all ‘educated people’ understood that he did not really, literally want to kill Obama, even if some, like the Secret Service, needed further clarification? Are metaphors really that easy to understand rightly, that is, as mere ‘figurative talk’ that has no bearing on reality?
Maybe Nugent was just lucky to meet not only educated but also reasonable Secret agents and well-behaved audiences. Historically, some notorious figurative political appeals have turned into literal reality. In spring 1967, for instance, members of the ‘Kommune 1’ in West Berlin, who were part of the student protest movement, agitated against the Vietnam War by distributing a pamphlet in which they asked, ironically, when the Berlin shopping malls ‘would burn, to give their customers that sizzling Vietnam experience’.1 Two ‘Kommune 1’ members, R. Langhans and F. Teufel, were less lucky than Nugent and were charged with incitement to arson. In their trial in March 1968, however, they were acquitted on account of the ‘obvious’ figurativeness of their proposal (Musolff 1996: 153). The acquittal turned out to be timely, for a month later, an even more radical group did in fact firebomb a shopping mall in Frankfurt, as a ‘protest against the indifference with which people watch[ed] the genocide in Vietnam’ (1996: 154). Had the pamphlet trial still been in process when this arson attack took place, its defendants might well have been convicted. The arsonists, two of whom went on to found the terrorist ‘Red Army Faction’, had read the pamphlet and had taken its figurative appeal literally. Legally, of course, they were responsible for their own actions (and duly sentenced later), and the pamphlet could not be proven to have caused those actions, but a degree of moral responsibility on the part of its authors can hardly be denied.