The Last, Best Metaphor: Black Slime Covers All

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“Blue slime cover’s girl’s hand.” This headline is true. And this is what slime looks like. “Black slime covers Washington Monuments” is not a true headline. And that’s not what slime looks like. (Photo by Kelly Taylor/Flickr)

The headline was arresting. Or to be more contemporary about it, it was excellent clickbait. “Black Slime Creeps Over Washington DC’s Most Famous Monuments.” What a fabulous metaphor for everything that’s wrong with Washington, with the Empire, with the Industrial Age (no doubt the source of the slime), hell, with everything! I couldn’t click fast enough. (Anticipation made me forget, momentarily, a hard-won and oft-won lesson: anytime a quote is so perfect for your purposes that you can’t believe it’s real — it isn’t real. No exceptions.)

“A mysterious black slime has been steadily oozing over Washington DC’s most famous monuments,” said the Daily Mail version of the story, one of hundreds to appear worldwide. How perfect! Whether your pet peeve is gridlock, or the campaigns, or inaction, or transgender marriage, this is what happens to the source of the evil! It gets slimed! The stuff writes itself!

Next sentence in the Daily Mail story: The black slime is “not actually a slime, but more of a powder…” Wait, what? A powder? The dictionary definition of slime is “a moist, soft and slippery substance.” But what we have here is dry, hard and gritty. IT IS NOT SLIME.

But the headline was too good not to be true. In reviewing several pages of headlines in my Google search, I saw only one that eschewed the word “slime” for the correct term, “biofilm.” It was the National Park Service website. THE ONLY SOURCE THAT TOLD THE TRUTH WAS THE GOVERNMENT! WHAT KINDA METAPHOR IS THAT?

I’m channeling Lewis Black here, eyes bulging, hands flapping: YOU CAN’T DO THAT. YOU CAN’T JUST USE A WORD IN A HEADLINE BECAUSE YOU KNOW IT WILL TITILLATE PEOPLE WHEN YOU KNOW IT ISN’T TRUE. YOU CAN’T. (Well, maybe you can. The sentence the dictionary uses to illustrate the correct use of “titillate” is,  “these journalists are paid to titillate the public”.)

Anyway, the story’s usefulness — as a metaphor for everything that’s wrong with everything — is over, because it’s a lie, at least the headlines are.

Whoa, back up. Isn’t that exactly what’s wrong with everything? That everybody is lying about everything? Journalists are lying because they’re convinced we have the attention span of fruit flies and no interest in anything that is not loud, fast and spectacular, like a used car ad on TV. Politicians are lying because they have found out that a) they can, and b) it works. Corporations and their bankers are lying because if they told the truth — any of it — there would be an immediate and total collapse of the system.

So the story about the dry powder that’s giving a greyish cast to DC monuments, with the headline “Strange Black Slime has Covered the Monuments in Washington”, is not disqualified as a metaphor for our time because it’s a lie — that’s what qualifies it as the best metaphor. Especially for people who pretend to disseminate information for use in service to the Republic, while in fact they are dissimulating the truth in service to the greed of their industrial masters.

The previous week, the Voice of America reported that the deterioration of DC’s Memorial Bridge, which links Arlington Cemetery and the National Mall, has gone so far that without a total overhaul the bridge will have to be closed within five years. Hardly anybody picked up the story. So next time we’ll know how to write the headline: “Black Slime Covers Memorial Bridge”. Not true? Never mind, it’ll get clicks.