Cocksure analogies

July 21, 2009 at 2:10 pm | Posted in Uncategorized | 2 Comments
Tags: Bear Stearns, Cocksure, Gallipolli, Iraq, Jimmy Cayne, Malcolm Gladwell, WW1

Reflecting on Gladwell’s piece in the New Yorker now, wondering why Gladwell chose to use the failed British-led invasion of Gallipoli in WWI as an analogy to the downfall of Bear Stearns. As I was reading it, I couldn’t help but imagine using the search and replace tool to swap all references to Gallipoli with Iraq. The similarities are so striking, I wondered why Gladwell didn’t just use Iraq to make his case? In some cases, Iraq and Bush proved an even closer analogy to Bear, for instance, “of the twenty-one workdays” in one month, Bear Stearns CEO, Jimmy Cayne “was out of the office for nearly half of them.” (Cue mental images of Bush golfing, Bush in a golf cart, Bush clearing brush.) Perhaps the choice to use Gallipoli was an effort to avoid the obvious? Maybe, but as you read on, it seems Gladwell is almost urging the reader to see Iraq in Gallipoli, the real, but unspoken analogy to Bear–the analogy behind the analogy if you will. It’s actually a quite brilliant, literary move by Gladwell if that was his intention. Quite a good read, so give it a look!

2 Comments »

RSS feed for comments on this post. TrackBack URI

Tell the liberated Iraqi people that the U.S. failed them. You liberals always have compassion for your own bogus ideology and all of your artificial victims, but never for actual human beings.

Comment by The Conservative Soldier— July 22, 2009 #

Reply
Conservative Soldier (*rolls eyes*) is making an argument that having true compassion for all oppressed peoples means toppling the oppressive regimes — all of them. If not all of them, then, to use his logic, the United States has employed selective compassion, which is pretty much what he’s accusing Meredith of. So, Conservative Soldier, which country is next on the list? In fact, give us the entire list. Thanks in advance.

Comment by Jeff— August 2, 2009 #

Reply