7.24

ACTIVITY

In the following excerpt, political commentator Charles Krauthammer argues that the name of the Washington Redskins, a professional football team, should be changed because language “evolves” over time. How does the analogy he draws contribute to his argument?

Fifty years ago the preferred, most respectful term for African Americans was Negro. The word appears 15 times in Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech. Negro replaced a long list of insulting words in common use during decades of public and legal discrimination.

And then, for complicated historical reasons (having to do with the black power and “black is beautiful” movements), usage changed. The preferred term is now black or African American. With a rare few legacy exceptions, Negro carries an unmistakably patronizing and demeaning tone.

If you were detailing the racial composition of Congress, you wouldn’t say: “Well, to start with, there are 44 Negroes.” If you’d been asleep for 50 years, you might. But upon being informed how the word had changed in nuance, you would stop using it and choose another.

And here’s the key point: You would stop not because of the language police. Not because you might incur a Bob Costas harangue. Not because the president would wag a finger. But simply because the word was tainted, freighted with negative connotations with which you would not want to be associated.

Proof? You wouldn’t even use the word in private, where being harassed for political incorrectness is not an issue.

Similarly, regarding the further racial breakdown of Congress, you wouldn’t say: “And by my count, there are two redskins.” It’s inconceivable, because no matter how the word was used 80 years ago, it carries invidious connotations today.

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Another way of thinking about the power of analogy is that it can shed light on inconsistencies. For instance, in “Why We Look the Other Way” (p. 492), Chuck Klosterman draws an analogy between musicians’ using drugs and athletes’ using drugs to explore why we react very differently to the two. Specifically, he writes about the legendary musical group, the Beatles:

It can be strongly argued that the most important date in the history of rock music was Aug. 28, 1964. This was the day Bob Dylan met the Beatles in New York City’s Hotel Delmonico and got them high.

Obviously, a lot of people might want to disagree with this assertion, but the artistic evidence is hard to ignore. The introduction of marijuana altered the trajectory of the Beatles’ songwriting, reconstructed their consciousness and prompted them to make the most influential rock albums of all time. After the summer of 1964, the Beatles started taking serious drugs, and those drugs altered their musical performance. Though it may not have been their overt intent, the Beatles took performance-enhancing drugs. And this is germane to sports for one reason: Absolutely no one holds it against them. No one views Rubber Soul and Revolver as “less authentic” albums, despite the fact that they would not (and probably could not) have been made by people who weren’t on drugs.

What does Klosterman gain from this analogy between the Beatles’ use of “performance-enhancing drugs” and athletes’ use of PEDs? For one, most of his readers are likely to be familiar with and admiring of the Beatles; he references album titles without explanation, so he must assume the audience knows them. In his lead-in to this section, Klosterman admits that “a lot of people might want to disagree” with his claim that “the most important date in the history of rock music” was when the Beatles were introduced to drugs; that acknowledgment softens his assertion. Then, he explicitly states the point of his analogy: no one devalues the music because the Beatles used drugs when they were creating it.

By using this analogy, Klosterman essentially poses a series of questions to his audience. First, is it wrong for musicians to use drugs to stimulate their creativity? He’s banking on most people agreeing that it is not. Is the music less impressive or admirable because it was written while the musicians were under the influence of drugs? Again, Klosterman hopes his audience will agree that it is not. Given these two points, then, he asks us to think about why such acceptance of performance-enhancing drugs in one area (in this case, music) is different from acceptance in the field of professional sports where the financial stakes are high and career horizons short.