Year: 2001
Type: article
Abstract: In These Times September 17, 2001 Metaphors of Terror by George Lakoff 1: Our Brains Had to Change Everything we know is physically instantiated in the neural system of our brains. What we knew before September 11 about America, Manhattan, the World Trade Center, air travel, and the Pentagon was intimately tied up with our identities and with a vast amount of what we took for granted about everyday life. It was all there physically in our neural synapses. Manhattan: the gateway to America for generations of immigrants—the chance to live free of war, pogroms, religious and political oppression! The Manhattan skyline had meaning in my life, even more than I knew. When I thought of it, I thought of my mother. Born in Poland, she arrived as an infant, grew up in Manhattan, worked in factories for twenty-five years, and had family, friends, a life, a child. She didn't die in concentration camps. She didn't fear for her life. America was not all that she might have wanted it to be, but it was plenty. I grew up in Bayonne, N.J., across the bay from that skyline. The World Trade Center wasn't there then, but over the years, as the major feature of the skyline, it became for me as for others the symbol of New York—not only of the business center of America, but also the cultural center and the communications center. As such, it became a symbol for America itself—a symbol for what it meant to be able go about your everyday life free of oppression and just do your job and live your life, whether as a secretary or an artist, a manager or a fireman, a salesman or a teacher or a TV star. I wasn't consciously aware of it, but those images were intimately tied to my identity, both as me and as an American. And all that and so much more was there physically as part of my brain on the morning of September 11. The devastation that hit those towers that morning hit me. Buildings are metaphorically people. We see features—eyes, nose, and mouth—in their windows. I now realize that the image of the plane going into South Tower was for me an image of a bullet going through someone's head, the flame pouring from the other side blood spurting out. It was an assassination. The tower falling was a body falling. The bodies falling were me, relatives, friends. Strangers who had smiled as they had passed me on the street screamed as they fell past me. The image afterward was hell: ash, smoke, and steam rising, the building skeleton, darkness, suffering, death.
Author: George Lakoff
Language: Swedish
Subfield: Linguistics and Language
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2519380501